Product Owner

• Product Owner

  Please note this position is a hybrid role, with 2 days a week on-site at our Belfast offices

  
  About Aflac

  While Aflac are a Fortune 500 U.S. company and one of the largest brands in the US and Japan, there is a very good chance you’ve not heard of us (yet). Here’s the deal: We help people cover medical expenses beyond their standard health insurance, and when they come to us they really need us. So, in Belfast, we’ve been building great technology since 2019 to support our customers in their time of need.

  
  Role Context

  We empower our product teams to solve hard problems – customer problems and business problems – in ways that our users love, work for our business & for our technology. At Aflac, our Product people are obsessed with understanding “How do we know we are building the right thing?" & doing everything they can to try to ensure we are doing that. This is not a Project Management role & goes beyond the traditional role of a Product Owner in creating user stories & managing a backlog – it’s about leading teams to deliver product(s) which deliver real value for Aflac.

  
  Responsibilities
  • Articulate a clear and compelling product strategy that aligns with organizational objectives and inspires the team
  • Influence your teammates, as well as colleagues, stakeholders, and key executives, through your use of research, analytics and collaboration
  • Create & maintain an outcome-based roadmap which illustrates all of the key activities; features, discovery & experimentation
  • Provide the necessary context & detail required at a feature level to empower the team to create user stories
  • Proactive, iterative & shareable qualitative research through frequent engagement with users
  • Provide solid knowledge of the various constraints of the business – constraints from marketing, sales, service, finance, legal, and privacy are typical examples.
  • Ensure product is instrumented with analytics to provide quantitative data inform decision making
  • Be transparent in keeping stakeholders informed about product progress, changes, key decisions & tracking against ROI (Return On Investment)
  • Work and collaborate horizontally across the org to identify and address cross-team dependencies and impacts
  • Collaboration across Product group & Architecture to identify opportunities to build of shared, reusable services
  • Proactively, contribute to the Product Community of Practice (COP) to work toward continuous improvement in the role & help others grow in the role
  • Mentoring & guidance of less experienced Product Owners
  • Track industry trends and the competitive landscape as they pertain to your product(s).

  
  Skills and experience

  Below is an overview of the skills and experience we are looking for, but remember, don’t rule yourself out if you don’t have everything on the list – it’s your intellect and your attitude we are really after.

  
  Essential
  • Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
  • Demonstrated understanding of the techniques and methods of modern product discovery and product delivery.
  • 3+ years working on technology-powered products as a Product Owner or Product Manager
  • Proven ability to write INVEST standard user stories and experience refining backlogs & creating roadmaps
  • Methodical approaches to validate assumptions and hypotheses through experimentation, testing, and research.
  • Demonstrated ability to learn multiple functional areas of business - engineering, design, finance, sales, marketing, legal/compliance.
  • Demonstrated ability to figure out solutions to hard problems with many constraints, using sound judgement to assess risks, and to lay out your argument in a well structured, data-informed, written narrative.

  
  Desirable
  • Demonstrated knowledge of product discovery practices including human-centered design, design thinking, brainstorming approaches, and advanced facilitation techniques
  • Ability to communicate in both financial & technical language to create business justification for decision making
  • Use of product analytics (Google Analytics, Pendo, Mixpanel, Heap, etc) to inform decision making & roadmaps
  • Excellent communication and facilitation skills to lead workshops

  
  So that’s us. Thanks for taking the time to read this far (pretty impressive in the era of the 280-character tweet). We look forward to hearing from you if you fancy joining an award-winning tech company.