Product Owner

Job Description – Product Owner – Underwriting

About Hiscox

At Hiscox we care about our people. We hire the best people for the work, and we’re committed to diversity and creating a truly inclusive culture, which we believe drives success. We embrace hybrid-working practices, balancing the ability to work remotely with the culture and energy we experience when we are face-to-face in our offices.

Our focus on collaboration and cross-functional working is supported with virtual tools that minimise physical travel, hot-desking neighbourhoods that create a physical sense of community and Team Charters that our teams co-create to set out how they’ll work together. This modern way of working has contributed to impressive employee engagement scores across Hiscox and means we’re delivering even better solutions for our Hiscox Colleagues.

The Role

The role spans the Underwriting Function Value Streams and sits as a direct report to the Head of Core Value Streams as a member of the Group Enterprise Systems (GES) team. The remit includes all business applications within the Underwriting Function, which includes our core PAS platform and internal analytics platform.

Building on a period of substantial technology investment in the finance systems, the GES team now needs to build out, and deliver, technology roadmaps for the remaining group functions, especially the Underwriting function. They also need to continue to deliver a first-class level of maintenance and support for the critical systems that they have responsibility for.

Key Responsibilities

• Resilience: ensure the provision of all Claims applications to meet the quality, resilience and usability of all user groups.
• Customer Liaison: collaborate with the Group Claims leadership team and BU Claims teams in setting and driving the strategic agenda for all applications within the Claims function to ensure they support the Group Technology goals to Simplify, Protect and Enable the wider business.
• Technical Consultant: nurture ideas and propose solutions to existing Claims function problems, determine roadmaps for the applications, and manage or liaise with support teams to achieve goals and objectives.
• Ensure all Claims function applications are robust, secure, scalable and comply with regulatory mandates and standards.
• Manage, inspire, and develop the team. Ensure they have necessary capabilities/training to perform their roles to the highest standards.
• Promote a commercially oriented culture where the support team recognize their importance to Hiscox’s commercial aims and work to enhance and enable them.
• Provide relevant strategic management information to stakeholders as required to help assess project progress, service levels, and key decisions.
• Adopt a value-focused approach to technology leadership, maximizing commercial return on investment, whilst effectively managing a finite budget.

Candidate Profile

Whilst a technical background in software delivery and digital platforms is valuable for this role, there are a number of key capabilities that the successful candidate needs to be able to demonstrate which are more important than a strong technical background:

• Strategic thinking: Our current application estate is set to go through a fairly significant transformation programme over the next few years to enable it to better respond to evolving business needs specifically in the Claims function. Strong analytical skills and complex problem-solving is paramount to the success of this role.
• Leadership: Having the ability to communicate a product vision, a set of objectives, as well as delivering change through teams (both internal and third party) is a key feature of the role.
• Communication & stakeholder management: The role requires a strong ability to communicate effectively and influence at different levels of the organisation, from the individual developer in the team through to the senior leadership.
• Programme management – lead across vendors and internal teams, comfortable working with both traditional methodologies and modern agile methodologies in a multi-faceted application estate with a wide range of different tools and technologies.
• Technical Capabilities: In-depth understanding of Marketing tools and technologies specifically externally facing digital platforms, strong knowledge of Agile principles and processes, experience working in Value Streams and/or a product development environment.