Product Owner

Our Product and Development teams at activpayroll continually strive to deliver the outcomes that matter most to our customers. The role of Product Owner at activpayroll is critical as it involves working with clients (both external and internal) to refine user outcomes, generate user stories, and capture measurable key results that confirm success. The Product Owner is responsible for confirming the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ for work committed to the development team, which includes gathering, prioritising, and setting activities to be delivered, accepting completed work, and ensuring successful delivery within the agile scrum methodology.

On a typical day, it looks like this:

• Being the voice of the customer and an expert in the product delivered and the value it provides to our clients.
• Taking all steps required to understand the end-to-end client and user experience of the solution, any integrations, and any dependencies impacting a great experience.
• Working with the Head of Product to refine the Product Roadmap over time against the Product Vision.
• Focusing and aligning prioritisation of Objectives, Key Results, and Deliverables around the targeted priorities set at a strategic level for the organisation.
• Working with internal/external customers to analyse needs and align delivery to the product roadmap.
• Developing scope and defining backlog items (e.g. epics, features, and user stories) to guide the development team.
• Developing and maintaining a prioritised backlog of user stories for the product.
• Meeting with clients directly (in-person or virtually) to understand and solve their challenges where appropriate and in line with the product vision.
• Making judgements on the value and cases for activity and recommendations on inclusions for each quarterly plan in partnership with the Head of Product Management to maximise value to clients and alignment with our product strategy and vision.
• Communicating proactively with stakeholders to ensure outcomes, activity, and delivery are clear.
• Working closely and successfully with a multi-disciplinary development team, stakeholders, and domain teams (including clients and partners) locally and internationally.
• Reporting on the status of product developments and initiatives as required (formally at least every 2 weeks).
• Ensuring any escalation requiring action in the product is assessed, prioritised, and actions clearly communicated and visible to stakeholders as required.
• Supporting and ensuring the success of both product (value) delivery and operational readiness to ensure clients maximise their value.
• Tracking the key result success measures for everything delivered to clients.
• Articulating and communicating the product roadmap to any stakeholder internally or externally, including clients, partners, and market analysts interested in our solutions.
• Demonstrating the product for clients, partners, and stakeholders where required.

What attributes typically make someone brilliant in this role:

• Ability to translate user and business needs into solutions that work for users and deliver outcomes for clients, with some understanding of the technical considerations that need to be made.
• Strong analytical and creative thinking skills.
• Brilliant interpersonal skills required to communicate and coordinate activities across a diverse set of cross-functional engineering, product management, UX, support, and customer-facing professional teams.
• A motivator of those around you and a driver of making positive change happen.
• Ideally, experience working with HCM/Payroll solutions.
• Experience with Azure Dev Ops (or similar) is desirable.
• Understanding of user experience and how to communicate experience and process improvement ideas to developers and UX teams.
• Experience of working and managing 3rd party partners and their roadmap requirements and relationships.
• Experience working in a high growth, highly successful business environment and the cultural and professional expectations that come with that.