Team Context

At Aflac Northern Ireland we’re all about customer care and the customer experience. We are looking for talented, dynamic, inquisitive and skilled individuals to help us grow our expertise in end to end cloud enabled data driven solutions as part of Aflac’s global Cloud Data Transformation programme. We are looking to recruit a Product Owner to drive through change and spearhead Aflac’s journey from on-premise to the Cloud.

The Cloud Data & engineering Product Owner will be integral to our Belfast based Cloud Solutions Engineering teams and will be responsible for the definition of products and services underpinned by AWS solutions. The PO will support the Cloud Solutions Engineering team and be responsible for delivering on the iterative design, build and maintenance of the data platform. Promoting the usage of this platform to support innovative solutions that help to deliver broader insights across the company backed with detailed analytics and metrics. Improving not only product offerings but customer care. These cloud-based solutions will cover the full lifecycle from data discovery, metrics creation and analysis, quality, data stewardship, ingest, enrichment and exposure to multiple data consumers all underpinned by detailed product and platform analytics.

The intention is for our teams to continually adapt and reinvent their skills and capabilities over time as technologies change and evolve. We provide the right challenges and opportunities to enable your success, you to bring your enthusiasm, the ability to learn quickly, and to take minimum-viable-product technology to produce industrialised solutions.  Once you have successfully delivered robust and scalable cloud solutions for Aflac, there will be a new technology waiting to be explored and built to scale within our organisation.  We’ll be keeping things pretty fresh. 

Role Context

We want an experienced Cloud Savvy Product Owner who can emotionally engage with the Cloud vision, understand the impact to the business while focusing on the policyholder. The Product owner will strongly influence decisions regarding prioritisation and understand the key nature of data and analytics in driving modern software solutions.  You’ll need to be able to influence and engage with a range of stakeholders from executives to engineers and be able to communicate aspects of the product to different audiences in a language that they can understand. 

Experience with Cloud Products and solutions would be an advantage, and you do need to have proven experience of successfully working in Agile teams and getting the best from a capable group of developers, testers, and DevOps people.

What you’ll be doing

• Playing a key role within the Agile/Scrum team, displaying excellent leadership qualities 
• Understanding the vision of the cloud supported products and partnering with the US-based Product Owners where appropriate to translate the vision between business and technical teams
• Influencing and being vocal about product prioritisation and development of the product roadmap, being prepared to have difficult conversations when necessary regarding feasibility and timing. 
• Being mindful of the need for quality data and metrics to underpin all data driven solutions and savvy enough to know that without an investment in quality the resulting solutions will not meet the business requirements
• Taking technical team, customer and business stakeholder needs and turning them into a fully-scoped backlog 
• Assisting in breaking down backlog items into clearly-articulated epics and user stories with understood and agreed acceptance criteria
• Ensuring good relationships between the team, the Scrum Master, and other business stakeholders always remain key 
• Partnering to conduct successful cross functional backlog and planning sessions
• Collaborating with agile team members and ensuring that they always have a clear understanding of the requirements and priorities and an awareness of what’s potentially coming down the pipeline
• Be the interface with other agile teams and the rest of the organisation to manage dependencies and coach other agile teams, program level and portfolio level teams as needed through the agile planning and delivery process 

What you should have

Below is an overview of the skills and experience we are looking for, but remember, don’t rule yourself out if you don’t have everything on the list – it’s your intellect and your attitude we are after. 

Essential 

• Experience with Cloud technologies, particularly technology migration projects, data discovery, analytics and data driven products and applications. 
• Several years commercial experience, including previous experience as Product Owner in an Agile team working on enterprise level data projects 
• Prior experience or familiarity with business or data analysis, system & product metrics gathering and visualisation 
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills  
• Ability to clearly communicate a vision and translate effectively between business and technical teams, with experience capturing user stories and detailed acceptance criteria
• Understands the big picture but can drill down into the detail when required
• A self-starter who is passionate and proactive about creating clarity for the agile team 
• Bachelor’s degree, preferably in a Computing, Marketing, Design or with comparable commercial experience  

Desirable Criteria

• Experience in projects that support marketing or customer service
• Experience with different types of Agile project delivery
• Knowledge and experience of DevOps as part of Agile software development
• Experience of delivering Products for customers/clients located in different time zones 

So that’s us. Thanks for taking the time to read this far (pretty impressive in the era of the 280-character tweet). We look forward to hearing from you if you fancy joining a tech innovation company with the agility of a start-up and the stability of a Fortune 500 U.S. company.