Job Summary

The Product Owner (PO) is a sole person (not a committee), who is responsible for owning the end-to-end customer journeys and product vision & lifecycle. They have a delegated authority and empowerment to prioritize the product backlog to maximize the value of our products or services for both our customers and our business. Their core ethos is to make informed decisions to ensure each investment decision results in the maximum (as measured by OKRs) outcome balancing both short-medium- and long-term horizons. 

Key Responsibilities

•    Collaborate with stakeholders to define and maintain a clear product vision and roadmap that aligns with the Hive’s and Bank’s objectives.
•    Own and prioritize the squad’s backlog, ensuring user stories are well-defined, refined and aligned to product roadmap, achieving Hive/Domain’s strategic outcome and scorecard priorities.
•    Align business stakeholders and technology partners to ensure a clear common objective.
•    Ensure the squad understand the why, the purpose and the mission.
•    Lead the squad to deliver relevant and impactful features balancing quality and speed.
•    Be an active participant in Agile ceremonies and foster a culture of continuous improvement together.
•    Own the overall product quality and outcomes by adoption key agile processes (e.g. DOR & DOD)
•    Have awareness and understanding of the regulatory framework in which the Group operates, and the regulatory requirements and expectations relevant to the role.
•    Proactively and courageously identify, analyse, and steer solutions on organizational impediments and constraints to productivity, quality, early risk mitigation, and continuous delivery of value.
•    Display exemplary conduct and live by the Group’s Values and Code of Conduct.

Product Leadership, Engagement & Strategy

•    Champion the voice of the customer
•    Build and maintain close rapport with key stakeholders ie Hive Lead, Domain Tech Lead, Engineering Lead, UI/UX Designers, Business stakeholders to influence outcomes.
•    Works closely with stakeholders to ensure that backlog are aligned to business’s values and OKR.
•    Manage and facilitate prioritization discussion with relevant stakeholders on Sprint backlog and Quarterly Backlog
•    Perform regular review and identify area of improvement/optimization on the product or on workflow.
•    Build and foster a delivery excellence culture through leadership and direction.
•    Instil a high-performance culture and true “self-organizing” team by empowering the Squad, celebrate achievements, learning from reviews/feedback and conducting retrospective for continuous improvement.
•    Accountable for ensuring compliance and risk adherence of products and service, engage with stakeholders to ensure necessary controls are adhered to and approvals are obtained. 

Product Discovery and Experimentation

•    Champion and integrate a culture of evidence driven decision making
•    Optimize business value of the product or serve by ensuring timely delivery of the right solutions based on customer validated and business viable features and initiatives.
•    Utilize data analytics / feedback to generate idea or identify opportunity of improvement and validate these ideas or opportunities using discovery canvas toolkit or lo-fi prototype.
•    Instil MVP approach or fail-fast concept which allows the Squad to achieve result/output with minimal investment or effort.

Product Delivery and Execution

•    Adopt and embed both Change Delivery Standard (CDS) and Group’s Enterprise Software Delivery Lifecycle (eSDLC) throughout the lifecycle of the product or service.
•    Utilize enterprise tools like ADO, to manage sprint and to plan/track backlog items.
•    Owns and defines the DOR to ensure all backlog items are well-prepared for efficient development process and increase the likelihood of delivering high-quality product/service that meet business and customer needs.
•    Owns and defines the DOD to ensures that completed work meets the expected quality standards and is ready for release.
•    Lead and drive the Squad in defining both functional and non-functional requirements for the backlog items, ensuring the products or services meets business and customer need while maintaining high-level of performance reliability, secured and scalable. 
•    Adopt a standardized user story writing with Gherkin language for clarity.
•    Monitor core efficiency metrics (ie Speed-to-Production, Say-Do Ratio) and identify potential blockers/challenge which could result in delays.
•    Review testing criteria, scenarios and use cases to ensure that products meet Group’s quality standard and business needs.
•    Accountable to provide signoff on shippable product once it has met both DOD (acceptance criteria) and fulfilled testing standards for functionality and performance.
•    Conduct pre-implementation session with stakeholders which include product demo and planning for transition and Go-Live.
•    Perform sprint retrospective and review session with squad to encourage a growth mindset and continuous improvement.

Product Analytics

•    Adopt benefit realization mindset by leveraging on metric to maximize value creation.
•    Proactively identify and ensure that all journeys, features are performance managed.
•    Leverage in app behavioural analytics tools like Adobe to track CX and optimisation.
•    Identify and define data sources which can be use to validate and measure the performance / efficiency of the product / service.
•    Plan for post implementation review with Squad to define measurement windows and data capturing.
•    Ensure the data is available for analysis and collaboration with analytics and data technology teams.
•    Perform regular review of squad metric on Predictability, Quality and Squad Sentiment, provide guidance and support to the team to improve value delivery.

Technical Capabilities and Excellence

•    Champion and drive an accountable & sensible technical direction to build reusable, scalable and interoperable solutions that integrate with existing investments. 
•    Works closely with technology partners, ensuring backlog items are delivered in line with Group’s technology direction and standard to mitigate technical debt, risks and to keep cost of change low.
•    Adopt best practices in Agile framework to line up and deliver the backlog items, identify dependencies in the planning phase and secure contract ahead of development as part of technical DOR
•    Perform regular review and identify area of improvement during development and testing phase through automation, simplification, or innovative use of latest market trends.
•    Accountable to capture and maintain knowledge base of technical decisions, definitions and designs from Solution Review sessions.

Key stakeholders

•    Squad & Hive members
•    Hive Leads
•    Domain Tech Leads
•    Engineering Leads
•    Technology Chapter Lead
•    PO Chapter members & Leads
•    UI/UX Designers
•    Business Stakeholders

Domain Knowledge
•    Own end-to-end delivery of key Digital Payment Journeys with a focus on product innovation with the aim to ensure delivery of capabilities within budgets/timelines while ensuring the best-in-class client experience
•    Lead new product development, enhancement of existing products/features and product management for payment capabilities in-line with the overall group retail payment products strategy. 
•    Own & define the backlog for digital payments journeys across real-time, scheduled, and cross-border use cases. Align digital payment capabilities with core customer journey & product propositions across Cards, Lending and Deposits. 
•    Drive product and journey standardization for Retail Payments globally while implementing compliance with local regulation across markets
•    Have awareness and understanding of the regulatory framework in which the Group operates, and the regulatory requirements and expectations relevant to the role.
•    Monetize capabilities and develop analytics to track performance

Skills and Experience

•    Experience in global diverse organisation in building overall capability and technical expertise for 8+ years
•    Leads min of 1-2 initiatives for the Hive
•    Have a strong understanding of payment capabilities, payment schemes, network association, digital products and financials drivers. 
•    Experience in industry bench marking for technical skills
•    Experience in identifying skill gaps and mitigate risks to deliverables
•    Bachelor's degree in Business, Finance or a related field (or equivalent experience)
•    Previous experience as a Product Owner or similar role in banking product delivery using agile framework
•    Customer-centric mindset with a passing for delivery high-quality products that meet or exceed customer expectations and drive business value
•    Strong understanding of Agile principles and methodologies, including Scrum, Kanban, or Lean, and experience working in agile development teams
•    Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams, stakeholders, and customers
•    Analytical mindset with the ability to prioritise competing demands, make data-driven decisions, and adapt to changing requirements and priorities
•    Leadership qualities with the ability to influence and motivate team members, foster a culture of innovation and collaboration, and drive results in a fast-paced environment
•    Knowledge of product management tools and techniques, such as user story mapping, personas, MVP, and other product roadmap development
•    Familiarity with SDLC processes and methodologies is a plus
•    Strong problem-solving skills and a proactive approach to addressing challenges and overcoming obstacles in product development and delivery
•    Relevant certifications to demonstrate expertise and commitment to the field e.g., PSPO I, PSPO II, CSPO

Role Specific Technical Competencies

•    Tech Debt
•    Software Product Delivery
•    Enterprise Change Delivery
•    Payments Schemes & Network Knowledge
•    (ISO messaging standards, SWIFT GPI & RTGS networks)
•    Regulatory and Compliance Fluency 
•    (Understanding of financial crime, FATF travel rules, AML guidelines)  

About Standard Chartered

We're an international bank, nimble enough to act, big enough for impact. For more than 170 years, we've worked to make a positive difference for our clients, communities, and each other. We question the status quo, love a challenge and enjoy finding new opportunities to grow and do better than before. If you're looking for a career with purpose and you want to work for a bank making a difference, we want to hear from you. You can count on us to celebrate your unique talents and we can't wait to see the talents you can bring us.

Our purpose, to drive commerce and prosperity through our unique diversity, together with our brand promise, to be here for good are achieved by how we each live our valued behaviours. When you work with us, you'll see how we value difference and advocate inclusion.

Together we:

• Do the right thing and are assertive, challenge one another, and live with integrity, while putting the client at the heart of what we do
• Never settle, continuously striving to improve and innovate, keeping things simple and learning from doing well, and not so well
• Are better together, we can be ourselves, be inclusive, see more good in others, and work collectively to build for the long term

What we offer

In line with our Fair Pay Charter, we offer a competitive salary and benefits to support your mental, physical, financial and social wellbeing.

• Core bank funding for retirement savings, medical and life insurance, with flexible and voluntary benefits available in some locations.
• Time-off including annual leave, parental/maternity (20 weeks), sabbatical (12 months maximum) and volunteering leave (3 days), along with minimum global standards for annual and public holiday, which is combined to 30 days minimum.
• Flexible working options based around home and office locations, with flexible working patterns.
• Proactive wellbeing support through Unmind, a market-leading digital wellbeing platform, development courses for resilience and other human skills, global Employee Assistance Programme, sick leave, mental health first-aiders and all sorts of self-help toolkits
• A continuous learning culture to support your growth, with opportunities to reskill and upskill and access to physical, virtual and digital learning.
• Being part of an inclusive and values driven organisation, one that embraces and celebrates our unique diversity, across our teams, business functions and geographies - everyone feels respected and can realise their full potential.