Lead Associate - Product Owner

Key Responsibilities

• Contribute to defining and evolving the product vision, strategy, and multi‑year roadmap.
• Own one or more product backlogs, ensuring all items are well‑defined, prioritised, and aligned to customer and business goals.
• Shape product features and articulate clear user stories, acceptance criteria, and design intent to guide development.
• Balance customer value, technical feasibility, operational impact, and strategic alignment when prioritising.
• Support product lifecycle management from discovery through delivery, optimisation, and benefits realisation.

• Deeply understand customer roles, needs, pressures, and success measures across internal and external users.
• Facilitate discovery activities such as interviews, workshops, process observations, and shadowing.
• Translate customer needs into actionable user stories and problem statements.
• Act as the voice of the customer in Scrum teams, ensuring outputs translate into meaningful outcomes.
• Ensure product solutions deliver measurable value and contribute to continuous improvement.

• Work within one or more Scrum teams to deliver high‑quality increments that support the product vision.
• Participate in and guide Agile ceremonies including backlog refinement, sprint planning, stand‑ups, and retrospectives.
• Provide clarity, direction, and context to developers, UX designers, and QA engineers throughout the delivery cycle.
• Support UI/UX prototyping efforts, ensuring user‑centred design principles are applied.
• Maintain a strong presence throughout development, ensuring alignment and resolving blockers related to requirements.

• Mentor Associate Product Owners, assisting with skill development, prioritisation, writing stories, and stakeholder engagement.
• Support training, coaching, and the development of best practices across the Product Owner Community of Practice.
• Model product‑led behaviours and encourage a culture of experimentation, data‑driven decisions, and customer‑centricity.
• Contribute to improving product frameworks, templates, and ways of working across the organisation.

• Monitor product performance using feedback, analytics, and operational metrics to identify opportunities for enhancement.
• Drive quality through rigorous acceptance criteria, definition‑of‑ready/definition‑of‑done standards, and collaboration with QA teams.
• Support product warranty activities including audits, refinements, and continuous optimisation.
• Seek out improvements in processes, documentation, communication, and feature delivery workflows.

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise

• Experience supporting delivery of AI, digital transformation, or modernisation programmes.
• Familiarity with DevOps practices, engineering workflows, and cloud delivery environments.
• Understanding of product management, business analysis, and architectural practices.
• Proven experience as a Product Owner or Lead Associate -  Product Owner within Agile environments.
• Strong understanding of Agile Scrum methodologies and product management principles.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills—able to articulate complex ideas to all audiences.
• Ability to translate customer needs into well‑defined user stories, requirements, and acceptance criteria.
• Strong problem‑solving skills with the ability to break down complexity into deliverable increments.
• Demonstrated leadership capabilities and ability to mentor junior product roles.
• Data‑driven mindset with experience using insights to support prioritisation and feature decisions.
• Experience with user‑centred design, UI/UX collaboration, and wireframing/prototyping.
• Strong client focus and ability to build trusted relationships across business and technology teams.
• Exposure to software engineering concepts or technologies (e.g., .NET, Python, Java).
• Familiarity with cloud computing fundamentals (Azure/AWS).