Senior Product Owner

As a Product Owner, you'll be the beating heart of agile delivery teams, translating user needs and business objectives into products that work. You'll own the product backlog, shape priorities, and work hand-in-hand with delivery managers, user researchers, developers, testers, and technical architects to ensure every sprint delivers real value. 

This isn't a role where you'll sit on the sidelines writing tickets. You'll be embedded in client organisations—understanding their challenges from the inside, advocating for users, and making the tough calls about what to build and when. You'll challenge assumptions, facilitate difficult conversations, and help teams navigate ambiguity with confidence. 

Our clients span both public and private sectors, from government departments transforming citizen services to enterprises modernising legacy platforms. You'll bring adaptability and intellectual curiosity—thriving in environments where the brief isn't always clear and the path forward needs to be discovered together. 

• You will participate in the daily scrums, sprint planning meetings and sprint reviews and retrospectives. You will ensure the next sprint is ready to commence. You will inspect the product’s progress at the end of every sprint and have complete authority to accept or reject work done.
• You will work with Product Management to evolve the Product Backlog through the full cycle including definition, implementation, and release.
• You will have the ability to connect with all stakeholders, across multiple locations, to create and fully form product features. 
• You will initiate and translate Product Road Map into manageable Product Backlog for Scrum teams.
• Liaise with the Software Architects to understand the features and changes in product requirements and support the release planning and sprint planning exercises.
• Work with the Scrum Master and Development Team to establish a maintainable velocity, ensure quality, eliminate defects, and motivate team.
• Connect with the internal clients in the definition and creation of Product features.
• Distil inputs from a variety of users and stakeholders to create a complete picture of the market problems to be solved by the proposed software. 
• Challenge stakeholders to ensure that an understanding is achieved that is coherent, complete, credible, sufficiently concrete to facilitate the development of software, and that the principles underlying the product are identified and described. 
• Define software capabilities to meet the understood requirements including usability, utilising artefacts that provide engineering with sufficient guidance to ensure progress. Expert knowledge of the existing capabilities of the software and planning for its future evolution must inform this. 
• Support UAT during all phases of testing to ensure that the solutions are ready for release.
• Communicate in a clear and concise fashion to both Development Teams and Stakeholders (including senior managers) at all stages of the development lifecycle.

You've worked as a Product Owner or in a similar role—perhaps as a Business Analyst, Scrum Master, Delivery Manager, or Product Manager—and you understand what it takes to keep agile teams moving. You're comfortable with backlog management tools, experienced in writing user stories, and skilled at facilitating workshops and ceremonies. 

More importantly, you think beyond the backlog. You're curious about why things work the way they do, comfortable challenging stakeholders when their assumptions don't stack up, and energised by the messiness of real-world problem solving. You communicate clearly and persuasively—whether you're presenting to a senior leadership team or pairing with a developer on acceptance criteria. 

Experience in consultancy is valuable but not essential. What matters is your ability to adapt, your appetite for learning, and your commitment to delivering work that makes a genuine difference. 

• Strong experience as a Product Owner / Product Manager in a related discipline with a software product vendor.
• Skilled communication bridge between Development Teams and Stakeholders, representing business challenges and requirements clearly to engineers and relevant points of technical designs and constraints to business users.
• Good process analysis and mapping skills, comfort with complex business domain modelling. 
• Strong business analysis skills. The ability to provide an accurate assessment of a feature’s business value. 
• Ability to envisage software features that solve market problems and that can be implemented at feasible levels of cost and risk. 
• Experience of working in a truly Agile environment and expert knowledge of Agile methodologies e.g. Kanban, Scrum and SAFe.

At Version 1, we believe in providing our employees with a comprehensive benefits package that prioritises their well-being, professional growth, and financial stability. 

One of our standout advantages is the ability to work with a hybrid schedule along with business travel, allowing our employees to strike a balance between work and life. We also offer a range of tech-related benefits, including an innovative Tech Scheme to help keep our team members up-to-date with the latest technology. 

We prioritise the health and safety of our employees, providing private medical and life insurance coverage, as well as free eye tests and contributions towards glasses. Our team members can also stay ahead of the curve with incentivized certifications and accreditations, including AWS, Microsoft, Oracle, and Red Hat. 

Our employee-designed Profit Share scheme divides a portion of our company's profits each quarter amongst employees. We are dedicated to helping our employees reach their full potential, offering Pathways Career Development Quarterly, a programme designed to support professional growth. 

Ashley Smith - Talent Acquisition Capability Partner

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