Product Owner

Job Description

Purpose of the role

The purpose of a Product Owner is to maximize the value of the product by defining a clear product vision (are they setting the vision or would this align to ), managing authoring, refining and prioritizing the Product Backlog balancing trade-offs across desirability, viability and feasibility – making sure the right thing is being ‘built’, and prioritising work based on business goals. They act as the primary liaison between stakeholders and delivery teams, ensuring the product meets user/customer needs and delivers optimal value. Product Owners are responsible for developing a roadmap and driving execution of their product area/sub-journey, applying continuous improvement principles and techniques.

Accountabilities

• Ensure Product Alignment with Business Goals: Ensure that the product & its features are aligned with broader objectives, driving value and contributing to the organization’s overall strategy. Utilisation of market research, analysis of customer feedback and monitoring of industry trends to identify new products, features or enhancements.  

• Communicate Product Vision to Delivery Teams: Clearly articulate the product vision and goals to the delivery teams, ensuring they understand, align and are inspired to deliver the business value and purpose of each feature or user story.

• Create and Refine User Stories: Write clear, concise user stories with detailed acceptance criteria, refining them as needed to ensure the development team has all the necessary information to implement features successfully. 

• Agile Events: Participate in key Agile events such as sprint planning, daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, and retrospectives to keep the team aligned and focused on delivering the product backlog. 

• Managing the Product Backlog: Responsible for creating, maintaining, and prioritising the product backlog, ensuring the highest value features are delivered first, based on business needs, customer requirements and organisational impacts, balancing risk migration and future proofing against the product strategy. 

• Act as the Voice of the Customer: Continuously gather feedback from customers and end-users to understand their pain points and ensure that the product meets their needs and improves their overall experience. 

• Acceptance Criteria Definition & Management: Review and accept or reject work completed by the development team during sprints, ensuring that all delivered features meet the agreed-upon acceptance criteria and deliver business value. 

• Collaborate with Stakeholders:  Work closely with stakeholders (e.g., customers, business leaders, and marketing teams) to gather requirements, define product goals, and ensure that the product vision aligns with business objectives. 

• Monitor Product Performance and Iterate: Regularly assess product performance using KPIs and customer feedback, adjusting the product backlog and roadmap to improve functionality and meet evolving customer needs. Manage on-going readiness and 'run' activities of live products including monitoring, governance and approvals. 

• Risk and Control:  Managing risk, including identification of potential risks, development of strategies to resolve or mitigate and escalate as necessary those risks, and alignment between the product management and control functions.

Vice President Expectations

• To contribute or set strategy, drive requirements and make recommendations for change. Plan resources, budgets, and policies; manage and maintain policies/ processes; deliver continuous improvements and escalate breaches of policies/procedures..

• If managing a team, they define jobs and responsibilities, planning for the department’s future needs and operations, counselling employees on performance and contributing to employee pay decisions/changes. They may also lead a number of specialists to influence the operations of a department, in alignment with strategic as well as tactical priorities, while balancing short and long term goals and ensuring that budgets and schedules meet corporate requirements..

• If the position has leadership responsibilities, People Leaders are expected to demonstrate a clear set of leadership behaviours to create an environment for colleagues to thrive and deliver to a consistently excellent standard. The four LEAD behaviours are: L – Listen and be authentic, E – Energise and inspire, A – Align across the enterprise, D – Develop others..

• OR for an individual contributor, they will be a subject matter expert within own discipline and will guide technical direction. They will lead collaborative, multi-year assignments and guide team members through structured assignments, identify the need for the inclusion of other areas of specialisation to complete assignments. They will train, guide and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long term profits, organisational risks and strategic decisions..

• Advise key stakeholders, including functional leadership teams and senior management on functional and cross functional areas of impact and alignment.

• Manage and mitigate risks through assessment, in support of the control and governance agenda.

• Demonstrate leadership and accountability for managing risk and strengthening controls in relation to the work your team does.

• Demonstrate comprehensive understanding of the organisation functions to contribute to achieving the goals of the business.

• Collaborate with other areas of work, for business aligned support areas to keep up to speed with business activity and the business strategies.

• Create solutions based on sophisticated analytical thought comparing and selecting complex alternatives. In-depth analysis with interpretative thinking will be required to define problems and develop innovative solutions.

• Adopt and include the outcomes of extensive research in problem solving processes.

• Seek out, build and maintain trusting relationships and partnerships with internal and external stakeholders in order to accomplish key business objectives, using influencing and negotiating skills to achieve outcomes.

All colleagues will be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship – our moral compass, helping us do what we believe is right. They will also be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Mindset – to Empower, Challenge and Drive – the operating manual for how we behave.

Join Barclays as a Product Owner.

At Barclays, we're transforming the way we deliver products and experiences for our customers. As a Product Owner, you will play a critical role in maximising product value by defining a clear product vision and ensuring delivery teams focus on the work that matters most.

You will be responsible for authoring, refining and prioritising the product backlog, balancing customer desirability, business viability and technical feasibility to ensure the right solutions are built at the right time.

This is an exciting opportunity to shape innovative products that deliver lasting value for our customers and the organisation.

To be successful as a Product Owner, you should have experience with;

• Proven experience translating product strategy into end-to-end persona journeys and user-centric experiences, using customer insights to define, prioritise and optimise product capabilities that drive adoption, engagement and measurable business outcomes. Experience applying design thinking, service design and customer journey mapping techniques to uncover user needs, identify pain points and create differentiated persona-based experiences.
• Advanced AI literacy with demonstrated day-to-day application of AI tools and capabilities. Candidates must be able to evidence how they leverage generative AI, copilots, automation and AI-assisted workflows to improve productivity, accelerate delivery, enhance decision-making, generate customer insights and improve product outcomes.
• Strong product leadership and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence across business, data, technology and control functions, navigate ambiguity, align competing priorities, and drive consensus in a complex enterprise environment.
• Strong Agile product delivery experience, with a proven track record of leading and operating within Agile teams. Deep understanding of Agile principles, product discovery, backlog management, prioritisation, iterative delivery, experimentation and continuous improvement is essential.

Some other highly valued skills may include;

• Experience defining and measuring product adoption, customer experience and value realisation metrics, using data to continuously improve persona journeys and product outcomes.
• Deep expertise across modern data ecosystems, including metadata management, data lineage, data products, data modelling, data curation, APIs, analytics, event streaming, and data platforms operating across hybrid cloud and on-premise environments.
• Experience leading large-scale transformation initiatives, particularly the modernisation of legacy data platforms and the adoption of federated data products and self-service data capabilities.
• Agile certifications (e.g. SAFe, Scrum Product Owner, Scrum Master) and experience applying Agile practices at scale across cross-functional product and engineering teams.

You may be assessed on the key critical skills relevant for success in role, such as risk and controls, change and transformation, business acumen strategic thinking and digital and technology, as well as job-specific technical skills

This role will be based in Northampton