Business Analyst / Product Owner, Energy & Utilities Consulting

The Company Cognizant (NASDAQ:CTSH) is a leading provider of information technology, consulting, and business process outsourcing services, dedicated to helping the world's leading companies build stronger businesses. Headquartered in Teaneck, New Jersey (U.S.), Cognizant has over 350,000 employees as of January 2025.

Role Overview

We are looking for experienced business analysts and product owners to join a fast‑moving digital team who are passionate about making a difference for our clients in the energy and utilities sector. Our team is leading significant digital transformation across our client organisations, including transforming the mobile app experience, the underlying technology platforms, and our ways of working.

Energy and utilities organisations across the UK and Ireland are going through a fundamental transformation, with a strong focus on green energy transition (including electric vehicles and heat pumps), enhanced customer experience through digital and data enablement, digitalisation of ageing grid and metering infrastructure, and increasing disruption from innovative new market entrants. Cognizant has active engagements with multiple energy and utilities clients across the UK and Ireland, helping them become customer‑obsessed and lead transformation initiatives to build new offerings, solutions, and innovative business models aligned to market trends and regulatory commitments.

This role is based out of Belfast, Northern Ireland, placing you at the heart of a dynamic and growing technology and digital services community, while working on transformation programmes that have direct impact across the wider UK and Ireland energy market. This is an opportunity to be at the forefront of that transformation journey, working with some of the best domain and technology minds across the energy and utilities sector.

Key Responsibilities

• Work with product teams to create and maintain a backlog of user stories, draft acceptance criteria, and help manage prioritisation using Scrum or Kanban frameworks.
• Support the delivery of digital transformation programmes across customer‑facing digital channels including mobile, web, and chat, with a focus on improving customer experience and self‑serve capability.
• Act as the voice of the customer across digital channels including desktop, mobile web, and chat, continuously looking for opportunities to improve the product experience.
• Increase customer value through optimisation of digital products; find creative ways to break down larger product outcomes and features into MVPs, and champion product‑centric ways of working.
• Engage with business stakeholders and conduct workshops for requirement elicitation, translating findings into clear and actionable specifications.
• Provide business consulting across advisory services, process consulting, and business analysis disciplines.
• Conduct and lead requirement gathering workshops; produce Functional Specifications, BRDs, NFRs, RTMs, user stories, and test cases; support UAT, training, and go‑live activities through the full lifecycle of programmes and projects.
• Develop process maps at L1 through L4 levels, undertake gap analysis, and lead process benchmarking and reengineering activities.
• Drive business process standardisation and harmonisation across client environments.
• Prepare business cases and conduct business impact assessments to support investment decisions and change management.
• Participate in application assessments, tool evaluations, and vendor selection exercises.
• Ideate and conceptualise solutions to business pain points, translating them into well‑defined requirements and technical briefs for delivery teams.
• Create knowledge articles and thought leadership content, contributing to Cognizant's intellectual property, white papers, webinars, and social media engagement to support business development.
• Participate in RFP and RFI responses, proactive proposal building, and solutionising activities for existing and new client accounts.

Sector Experience:

• Energy and Utilities
• Customer platform and digital transformation, including self‑serve journeys, mobile applications, and omnichannel customer experience.
• Meter to Cash processes, including billing, payments, credit, and collections.
• Asset and work management, including field operations and network asset lifecycle.
• Customer experience transformation across regulated and competitive energy retail markets.
• Renewables, electric vehicle, and smart energy programmes.

Essential Skills

• Extensive experience working with product teams to create and manage backlogs of user stories, drafting acceptance criteria, and prioritising work using Scrum or Kanban.
• Strong experience delivering mobile application development across iOS and Android, with a clear focus on customer experience and digital payment methods.
• Ability to manage multiple stakeholders at different levels within a client organisation, building effective relationships across business, technology, and delivery functions.
• Ability to foresee risk, identify dependencies, and manage them proactively before they impact delivery.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate complex business requirements into clear documentation and stakeholder narratives.
• Strong team and interpersonal skills, with the ability to work collaboratively in agile, multi‑disciplinary delivery teams.
• Strong analytical and problem‑solving skills, with the ability to structure ambiguous problems and develop pragmatic, evidence‑based solutions.

Nice To Have Skills

• Holding a CSPO (Certified Scrum Product Owner) qualification would be a significant advantage.
• Knowledge of modern software delivery practices such as Continuous Integration, BDD (Behaviour Driven Development), and TDD (Test Driven Development).
• Experience in energy and utilities core business processes and systems, for example customer‑facing processes such as CRM and field service platforms, and familiarity with modern billing and revenue management solutions including cloud‑based, SaaS, or PaaS billing platforms.
• Experience working in or alongside large regulated energy network or distribution organisations, such as those operating in electricity or gas transmission and distribution infrastructure.
• Experienced and credible working in Agile frameworks including SAFe, Scrum, and DevOps delivery models.
• Experience working in onsite and offshore delivery models.
• Experience delivering complex mobile application projects on time and within budget.