InPlace Product Owner

The Product Chapter is a vertical team of Product Managers and Product Owners delivering value right across all horizontal value streams at King’s. Nested within IT Digital Solutions, we work closely with Product roles across King's for digital products as well as our partners in the Agile Centre of Excellence, Enterprise Architecture, Business Analysis, Delivery and Build. Together as a chapter, we mature our service and develop Product Management and a product mindset at King’s.

This role is focussed in the Student Value Stream specifically for InPlace. The Product Owner plays a key role in shaping and delivering value through PBIs (User Stories) ensuring Business Features are delivered to schedule per PI Planning. Reporting to the Product Manager, they ensure products and services are strategically aligned, technically robust, and user-focused in line with PM and BO priorities.

The Product Owner role is essential to translating strategic intent into deliverable outcomes for the InPlace platform. With a backlog of over 40 enhancements and projects, there is a critical need for dedicated ownership of prioritisation, requirements definition, and day-to-day backlog management to ensure delivery aligns with user needs and institutional priorities. This role will work closely with faculties and stakeholders to define, refine, and prioritise requirements, ensuring that delivery addresses real operational challenges and improves the student and staff experience. It enables effective sprint-level execution by providing clarity to delivery teams, reducing rework, and maintaining a continuous flow of value.

The Product Owner is key to reducing reliance on manual workarounds, improving data quality, and enabling scalable processes as InPlace expands across faculties. It ensures that delivery is responsive, user-centred, and aligned to the broader Product strategy and Strategy 2030 objectives.

The role is a Product Owner within an agile team. In the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), the Product Owner (PO) plays a crucial role in maximising the value delivered by the Agile team. The PO is responsible for defining user stories with the team and prioritising the team backlog to ensure alignment with customer and stakeholder needs. Being the content authority of Team Backlogs, they will prioritise work within Sprints and accept completion of PBIs. They will work with both business and IT stakeholders as well as being part of Dynamic agile teams and will be comfortable working on multiple workstreams.

The post holder will:

• Define and prioritise the Team backlog to ensure alignment with customer and stakeholder needs as defined within Features.
• Define PBIs to ensure they clearly define acceptance criteria to meet business value or enable the ability to deliver business value defined in the parent Features.
• Collaborate with the Product Management team to balance the needs of multiple stakeholders.
• Maintain clear communication between other Product Owners; the business and the development team, ensuring that complex information is conveyed clearly and precisely.
• Participate in key ceremonies such as PI Planning, Backlog Refinement, Sprint Planning, Daily Standups, Sprint Reviews and Retrospectives.
• Interpret and assess customer needs, identifying trends and generating original ideas.
• Expertise in working with others in a cross-functional, multi-team environment.
• Work with leadership to enhance and implement better processes and ways of working.
• Regularly network to create and sustain long-term relationships, both internally and externally, to influence events and deliver outcomes.
• Commit to ongoing professional development to stay current in product ownership best practices, data management trends, and Agile delivery methodologies.

The above list of responsibilities may not be exhaustive, and the post holder will be required to undertake such tasks and responsibilities as may reasonably be expected within the scope and grading of the post. This is a fixed term role to 31-July-2026 so internal applicants would be seconded to this post. It is Full Time at 35 hours per week based in Lavington Street with flexible working to suit the team.

To be successful in this role, we are looking for candidates to have the following skills and experience:

Essential criteria

• SAFe POPM (current)
• Ability to translate strategy into measurable outcomes for customers
• Minimum 3 years’ experience as a Product Owner or Business Analyst, with proven skills in requirements gathering, backlog refinement, and prioritisation in a data or integration environment
• Proven ability to define roadmaps and prioritise backlogs at scale
• Proficiency of management of competing stakeholder, technical and service priorities
• Experience with PI Planning and Agile delivery frameworks
• Delivery of show and tells and presentations to a varied stakeholder group. Ability to articulate ideas to both technical and non-technical audience
• Excellent stakeholder engagement, communication and relationship building, ability to self-organise and detail oriented

Desirable criteria

• Experience in higher education / complex public sector organisations
• Familiarity with Student Services and range of Products in Student value stream
• Experience of working with Azure DevOps
• Exposure to AI-enabled product capabilities
• Knowledge of working with multiple stakeholders and balancing needs

At King’s, we believe that the diversity of our community and a culture that is welcoming, open, inclusive and collaborative, are great strengths of the university. The Equality Act of 2010 protects the rights of our students and staff and provides a framework to fulfil our duties to eliminate unlawful discrimination, harassment and victimisation and in addition, to advance equality of opportunity and foster good relations between those who share a protected characteristic and those who do not.

We welcome your thoughts on how organisations can create an inclusive environment, including one which supports free speech and the exchange of a wide range of ideas. We are committed to free speech and to academic freedom, believing that our foundational purpose as a university, is to create spaces where a wide range of ideas, including ideas that are controversial, can be discussed and debated, and where members of our community can express lawful views without fear of intimidation, harassment or discrimination.

When engaging in the robust exchange of ideas, we ask that our community is mindful of our Dignity at King’s guidance.

We ask all candidates to submit a copy of their CV, and a supporting statement, detailing how they meet the essential criteria listed in the person specification section of the job description. If we receive a strong field of candidates, we may use the desirable criteria to choose our final shortlist, so please include your evidence against these where possible.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is evolving rapidly, and we recognise its growing role in professional work. Applicants may use AI tools to support preparation of their application, for example to research the role or structure written responses. However, applications must reflect the applicant’s own work and experience. AI tools should not be used during interviews or assessment activities unless this has been agreed in advance as a reasonable adjustment.

We reserve the right to close adverts early due to the volume of applications we receive. While the closing date may change, all adverts will close at 23:59 to allow sufficient time for applications to be submitted on that day. We encourage you to apply at the earliest opportunity to avoid disappointment as once we have closed a vacancy you will be unable to submit your application.

To find out how our managers will review your application, please take a look at our ‘How we Recruit’ pages.

Grade and Salary: £53,947 - £63,350 per annum inclusive of London Weighting Allowance

Job ID: 155465

Post Date: 14-Aug-2026

Close Date: 30-Aug-2026

Contact Person: Alkesh Shah

Contact Details: alkesh.shah@kcl.ac.uk