Senior Product Owner

Overview

We are a leading financial services provider committed to making decisions easier and lives better for our customers and colleagues around the world. From our environmental initiatives to our community investments, we lead with values throughout our business. To help us stand out, we help you step up, because when colleagues are healthy, respected and meaningfully challenged, we all thrive. Discover how you can grow your career, make impact and drive real change with our Winning Team today.

Responsibilities

Working in a fast-paced, changing environment where every day brings something new and innovative ideas are encouraged to help our customers reach their financial dreams and aspirations. The Manulife Bank Delivery team is seeking a passionate Product Owner who can drive our digital banking transformation. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to translate business and customer needs into innovative digital banking solutions. Leverage your technical background to lead product development, ensuring alignment with our digital strategy and customer needs. The Product Owner contributes to the realization of Value Stream strategy, vision, and OKRs by aligning and prioritizing business goals with actionable results. Key Accountabilities:

Define and communicate the product vision and roadmap to the squad, stakeholders, and technology partners.
Collaborate with cross-functional teams to gather and prioritize product requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria.
Work closely with the squads and FinTech partners to ensure timely delivery of product features and improvements.
Lead PI Planning activities ensuring prioritized features are refined and sized to deliver on commitments.
Leverage your deep technology background to lead the squad members, with a focus on leveraging technology for creative problem solving
Possess a foundational understanding of the technologies being used by the engineering team such as APIs, front end applications and vendor integrations for effective communication and decision making, Experiences in leveraging technology to tackle business problems
Ability to understand the tradeoffs between a technical target state and near-term deliverables
Conduct market research and analysis to identify customer needs, market trends, and competitive landscape.
Define and supervise key product metrics and KPIs to measure product success and identify areas for improvement.
Lead and prioritize the product backlog, ensuring that it aligns with the product vision and business goals.
Engage with team members to gather feedback and ensure alignment on product priorities and direction.
Identify trade-offs to ensure alignment on priorities between the team and partners
Lead product demonstrations, gather feedback, and iterate on product features and functionality.

Backlog Management

Lead the squad in ensuring value creation for the business, customers, and end-users by leading the squad backlog and ensuring that the highest value work is always being implemented.

Work with the squad to define hypotheses, run experiments (surveys, concept testing, analytics tools, A/B testing), and analyze data to make decisions on user stories that influence the direction of delivery.
Build and groom the backlog ensuring it’s clear and understood by all squad members.
Incorporate feedback from team member demos, interviews, user research, and engineering into the squad backlog.
Accept completed user stories of the squad by ensuring all stories meet the definition of done.

Squad Alignment & Communication

Provide strategic team leadership in leading delivery of business outcome-focused work.
Encourage and empower the team and lead without direct authority. Ability to gauge how the team is doing and drive the necessary actions to improve.
Effective communication to clearly articulate priorities to the team and stakeholders and create strong relationships with team members.
Brings a coaching attitude to scaled agile practices and banking product knowledge.
Encourage innovation within the team by helping establish a culture that nurtures creativity, facilitate brainstorming sessions, and rapidly prototype innovative ideas to stay ahead of market trends.

Additional Requirements

5+ years of experience as a Product Owner or Product Manager
5+ years of experience in the digital banking industry
Strong knowledge of digital banking platforms, FinTech solutions, mobile/web banking apps
Solid understanding of agile methodologies preferably in SAFe
Experience using JIRA and Confluence