Position: Senior/Lead Product Owner
Company: Forte Group Inc.
Experience required: 5y
Category: Product Manager
English level: upper
Published: 2022-08-01T00:00:00+03:00

**About the Product:**

Our client is developing from scratch a web platform that automates the analysis and further processing of customer financial information when submitting a request for a mortgage. From a customer perspective, the platform is a mortgage offer aggregator that allows users to upload all financial documents and get information on what conditions they could get a mortgage from multiple providers, compare and choose the best deal. From a business perspective, this is an end-to-end business management system with both customer and internal personnel administrative apps and a sophisticated backend with 3rd party integrations. Architecturally, the platform contains multiple components, such as a consumer web application, business administration application, agents portal, CRM system, documents processing, IP telephony, and integrations with multiple engines to automate financial calculations.

**About the Team:**

The engineering team consists of several Feature Teams working on the product functionality, Integration, Telephony, DevOps, and core Test Automation teams. Teams use Azure DevOps to manage their backlog and prioritize work items. Meetings and interpersonal communication run via Slack and Google Meet. They’re following the Scrum process and practicing the Agile Way of Working in close, day-to-day collaboration with each other.
The team has a flat reporting structure, your role assumes a lot of autonomy and direct communication with decision-makers from business and engineers in teams.

**YOU ARE NOT a Development Team Member:**
Job #1 is to provide business perspective, vision, and requirements to a self-organizing team.  This means providing the “who”, “what”, and “why”, but being mindful that the team is responsible for “how” to solve complex challenges and build working software, not you. Specifically, **Product Owners do not:**
● Fundamentally change or add stories to a sprint once it has begun (clarification is ok)
● Determine “how” something should be implemented.
● Estimate tasks
● Make promises to stakeholders or users about what will be delivered

**You are the Senior Product Owner:**
**The Senior Product Owner is the centralized resource between the PO team and the stakeholders** and is the representative of the whole PO team, and has the authority to make decisions/assumptions regarding the tactical and strategic direction of the whole product. They are business experts who strive to break down value into its smallest part so that teams can deliver more frequently and with higher quality. 

**Principal Accountability / Be the Product Expert:**
● Demonstrates complete expertise in the product 
● Understand and document functional dependencies in the systems
● Aid with user acceptance testing during final releases
● Regularly demonstrate product changes to internal and external users/stakeholders
● Facilitate sprint reviews on all features and functionality
● Demo the product often, outside of the sprint review

**Principal Accountability / Build the Roadmap:**
● Communicates internally and externally, develops and maintains Product Roadmap(s) in cooperation with PMs and other POs
● Create backlog items in collaboration with the Product Managers and CEO on the client-side, who is responsible for the Epic/Feature-level backlog
● Define and foster collaboration on clarifying requirements and acceptance criteria together with PM and Development Team, so that the right size stories are created
● Groom the backlog through prioritization and story minimization to queue upcoming sprints
● Facilitate workshops (as needed) to build alignment on product ideas

**Principal Accountability / Illustrate the “Who”, “What” and “Why”:**
● Identify, document, and communicate user-based personas that interact with the product
● Facilitate ideation, discovery, and requirements sessions with stakeholders, influencers, and users
● Understand and meticulously document value statements for each story
● Work with technical stakeholders (developers, architects) to identify story interdependence
● Facilitate the definition of acceptance criteria with the team
● Assure everyone understands stories “in the same way”
● Leverage visualization to bring simplicity and clarity to stories
● Write explicit behavior for complex functional algorithms

**Principal Accountability / Lead the PO Team:**
● Lead the PO team in terms of day-to-day activities
● Help the PO team members to meet challenges, grow professionally, advise on best practices, do 1-2-1s and facilitate knowledge sharing across the team
● Interview candidates to the PO roles, provide go/nogo recommendations to invite the right people into the team from both hard and soft skills perspective
● Work with stakeholders to have expectations from the PO team correctly set, help the PO team (as a group) to form goals aligned to the expectations being set, help the PO team continuously deliver and adapt to changing environment
● Drive the product and business-planning process across multiple cross-functional teams
● Provide support to the PO team when ambiguity arises on an inter-feature level
● Collaborate with management to identify and plan product releases with Deliver Manager by reviewing milestones with stakeholders
● Partner with the POs to balance right and right now decisions on the team

**Principal Accountability / Be the Culture:**
● **Acts as a Servant Leader** –garner respect from your team and be willing to get your hands dirty 
● **Communicative and social** –talk with the teams frankly about challenges/successes 
● **Facilitative** – be prepared to lead and demonstrate value-add principles to the team 
● **Assertive** – ensure agile principles are adhered to and be the voice of reason and authority
● **Enthusiastic** – be excited about team goals
● **Continual Improvement** – proactively look for ways to work more efficiently
● **Conflict Resolution** – facilitate discussion and alternatives when conflict arises
● **An attitude of transparency** – disclose (to stakeholders) the stage of development to build trust

**We offer:**

● Experience exchange with colleagues all around the world
● Opportunities for self-realization and professional growth
● Friendly team and enjoyable working environment
● Flexible working hours
● Engineering, corporate and social events
● Social package: professio