Team Context

At Aflac Northern Ireland we’re all about the customer experience and one of the new teams we’re establishing will be responsible for building solutions that re-imagine the customer experience at Aflac. Using web & mobile technologies such as Angular, Ionic and Node to deliver core capabilities to our policyholders and focusing on a mobile-first strategy making it easy for our customers to interact with us, change policy information, submit claims – all from the smartphone in their pocket.  At the same time, we’re building desktop website technology that will help deliver an omni-channel experience to our policyholders, ensuring that their interactions with Aflac are as frictionless as possible.   

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 for the enterprise.  Once you have successfully delivered robust and scalable 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 experienced Product Owners who can emotionally engage with the vision of the product, understand the impact to the policyholder, and strongly influence decisions regarding prioritisation.  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 web and mobile platform development is not required, but 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 and defending the vision of the product and partnering with the US-based Product Owner to translate the vision between business and technical teams 
• Influencing and being vocal about product prioritisation and development of the product roadmap 
• Taking customer needs and turning them into a fully-scoped product backlog 
• Breaking down backlog items into clearly-articulated epics and user stories  
• Ensuring good relationships between the team, the Scrum Master, and other business stakeholders 
• Partnering to conduct successful backlog grooming and planning sessions 
• Collaborating daily with agile team members and ensuring that they have a clear understanding of the requirements and priorities at all times 
• Interfacing 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 

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 really after. 

Essential 

• 6 years commercial experience, including 3+ years as Product Owner in an Agile team 
• 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 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 development team 
• Bachelor’s degree, preferably in a Computing, Marketing, Design, or STEM subject. Comparable commercial experience may also be considered 

Desirable Criteria

• Experience with web and mobile technologies, particularly requiring technology migrations 
• 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 new tech innovation company with the agility of a start-up and the stability of a Fortune 500 U.S. company.