Product Owner

When you join Kainos, you get to think beyond limitations to make an immediate and positive impact – like transforming digital services for millions of citizens or helping Fortune 500 companies get live and thrive on Workday.You’ll be part of a people-first culture that is growing around the world. We’re a creative, committed, and diverse group of individuals who succeed as a team.At Kainos your ideas are heard and valued and you’ll leave a legacy that you can feel proud of. Join us and discover how our people write our story.

Main purpose of the role & responsibilities in the business:

As a Product Owner (Consultant) at Kainos, you will be responsible for the product backlog across multiple functional areas. This responsibility includes gathering and prioritising product and customer requirements, working closely with development, sales, pre-sales, marketing and professional services to ensure customer satisfaction goals are met and exceeded, and to help us maintain our leading market position.

You will be working with a well-qualified and expert team, in the leading Workday partner for automated testing globally, with a customer base of >200, many of which are household names. And we’re growing both in terms of revenues and customers, but also in terms of our service offerings and the team. This is an opportunity to join at a crucial time to put your stamp on our products and services and how we continue to lead in our market. The position offers opportunities for the right individual to grow into other more senior areas within the Kainos Smart business or in the wider Kainos business.

To continue to drive the success of Kainos Smart products and services we need to ensure that we prioritise, define, and drive the delivery of our roadmap, drawing on resources and innovation across the business and from partner. It will provide the opportunity to engage with clients and with a wide range stakeholders across Kainos.

You will be responsible for:

• Evolving the Product Roadmap for at least one main functional area
• Capturing requirements from:
  • Existing customers;
  • Field (Product Enhancement Requests and Contractual commitments);
  • Market (through collaboration with Sales, Customer Success, Services, and Product Marketing to address market problems);
  • Professional Services teams;
  • Internal sources
• Defining the product backlog, creating actionable user stories for development teams
• Managing and prioritising the backlog to ensure goals are met, optimising the value of development team effort
• Driving a clear understanding of and managing to release acceptance criteria for each product feature, including the criteria for the minimal viable product
• Identifying and measuring the success criteria for each delivered feature
• Measuring, tracking and improving non-functional aspects of the product
• Sustaining and cultivating the right relationships with technology partners;
• As required, stepping in to support sales efforts with product demos and customer discussions on more technical aspects of the product

Minimum (essential) requirements:

• Have experience as a SaaS product owner in an Agile software development environment
• A minimum of 2-3 years’ experience working as a Product Owner in a SaaS environment on managing backlog, working with development teams and building Product Roadmaps.
• Demonstrable experience and capability to successfully carry out the key elements of the Product Owner role above.
• Have experience as a product owner in an Agile software development environment.
• Excellent communication skills are vital. You’ll need to be a persuasive and effective communicator with strong negotiating skills. It’s not only about talking, you’ll need to be able to listen, understand, and build on other’s viewpoints. You will have an enthusiasm for new technologies and innovation and be prepared to take advantage of the flexibility provided to challenge and be proactive in bringing new ideas to how we work and to the product roadmap.
• You will need an eye for detail, particularly to interpret supplied information and understand sources and challenge where necessary
• The ability to facilitate team meetings and group conversations
• Comfort and ability to engage with customers to understand requirements, and support functional or technical product discussions
• Relevant commercial experience and awareness to help set priorities of product investments and drive commercial product success
• A good understanding of technology, digital services and trends
• The ability to communicate effectively with the team and external stakeholders.
• Being flexibile to travel if required to customer and partner locations worldwide

Desirable:

• Experience with Automated Testing Frameworks.
• Software Testing Experience.

People Management:

Your role will include managing people with your responsibilities to include:

• Agreeing, setting and reviewing your and your team’s goals aligned to Kainos, Workday practice and your Capability
• Providing support so that your and your team’s goals can be achieved
• Reviewing and refining goals for relevance and to keep performance on track
• Reviewing performance against goals and provide feedback
• Conducting 1:1 monthly and/or project completion feedback meetings
• Requesting and providing regular feedback in Workday
• Completing End of Year reviews and agreeing the outcomes for the year
• Identifying training to support your and your team’s development
• Pursuing and supporting you and your team members’ career paths and progression
• Reviewing weekly workload forecasting (staff allocations and timesheet checks) and utilisation
• Actively being involved in recruitment/interviews
• Reviewing attrition and retention metrics

About Kainos Smart:

Our cloud-based automated testing tool, Kainos Smart, is one of a kind. It is the only product that has been built exclusively for testing Workday. It is designed to make automated Workday testing easy for all users regardless of technical or testing background. With Smart you can quickly create repeatable tests covering Workday business processes, security configuration and integrations. Using Smart, our clients are saving thousands of man hours on testing and gaining much greater assurance on the correctness of their Workday deployment.