Product Owner

Job description

Job responsibilities

Job purpose:

As a Product Owner, you will work across multidisciplinary teams in an agile and user centric way and have responsibility for the quality of the products you will develop, ensuring our products and services better meets the needs of users and the organisation, whilst ensuring they can be delivered and embedded in a seamless manner.

You will own the design and iteration of products or services, and support delivery teams with your knowledge of user needs and business goals to define scopes and priorities and solve problems for our users and stakeholders. This may be over multiple products or services, changeable landscapes and some of which may be at scale or have strict timescales.

You will be passionate about working collaboratively and helping others solve problems and enjoy delivering within a fast paced and complex organisation, working closely and building trusting relationships with key business subject matter experts and stakeholders over multiple specialisms.

NHSBSA product managers put people at the heart of everything they do. They are inclusive, ensuring NHSBSA services work to improve lives, directly or indirectly and are fully accessible to everyone. They work in the open, testing assumptions, continuously learning and iterating, doing the hard work so that its easier for our users.

The post holder will lead and promote business excellence, promoting the NHSBSA values and act as a role model. They will be forward-thinking and commercially minded supporting the delivery of an ambitious strategic plan.

In this role, you are accountable for:

1. The successful delivery of user centred products, including owning the product vision and roadmap from inception through to delivery of the product(s) covering all stages of the product lifecycle.

2. You will effectively manage competing priorities, adapting products and services where needed to meet both internal and end users needs, ensuring your product team builds the right things at the right time to maximise user and business value. Work with internal and external customers to analyse the needs and align the product roadmap to strategic goals.

3. Using product management principles and approaches, you will capture and translate user needs into deliverable outcomes for your end user. You will define the minimum viable product and define, agree and amend priorities where appropriate and be responsible for acceptance criteria.

4. You will monitor service quality and set appropriate KPIs in collaboration with interested parties and communicate the achievement and performance of your product to stakeholders. You will use qualitative and quantitative data to make the best decisions about the relative priority of work to improve the product or service (often with incomplete information or degrees of uncertainty involved) and work to continuously iterate near and longer-term plans for your team, ensuring these are suitably open, flexible and adaptive to change.

5. Working closely with operational delivery teams, you'll find solutions to overcome operational constraints to deliver a successful product or service. You will ensure the product meets the needs of operational teams as well as end users throughout the products entire product life cycle, implementing best practice in new product or service development.

6. You will lead and/or support the securing of funding for agile delivery through a business case and through delivering a good pitch to internal and external key stakeholders. You can prioritise spending based on return on investment (ROI) and strategic intent: this may include contract ownership and accountability for realisation of benefits.

7. You will use your subject matter expertise to understand and communicate constraints to manage expectations with colleagues in policy, operations, technology as well as regulatory, financial and legal colleagues.

8. Actively contribute to the product owner community to ensure respective product and service teams understand what each other are working on to ensure synergies and opportunities are taken advantage of.

9. Act as an ambassador for the product internally and externally and as the primary contact for queries related to the product.

10. Support and lead with the identification of development and initiatives to promote and improve the services provided by BSA, through digitisation.

11. Develop strong networks across a range of stakeholder organisations and within the NHSBSA and will promote strong integration of digital improvement activity. You will foster collaborative thinking and problem solving within and beyond your team, using appropriate techniques and tools to identify and prioritise further issues and opportunities to explore.

12. Working with key stakeholders and management teams, you will ensure products are delivered consistent with NHSBSA approaches and values, including relevant governance frameworks, and report on project process, priorities, risks and solutions. Using your networks and relationships, you will also ensure user feedback is regularly taken on board and they are informed of ongoing improvements.

13. Support the Service Owners and leadership team to deliver on their priorities and actively participate in engagement with internal and external stakeholders to assess what is possible through product delivery whilst being accountable to sponsors for the delivery of user-initiated change. Ensuring that digital project delivery is aligned to wider NHSBSA digitisation, joint working across NHSBSA digital teams must be utilised where possible, to deliver a project aligned with the NHSBSA Strategy.

14. Actively engage in user research sessions to get first-hand feedback from users and take a data driven approach to prioritisation.

15. Manage delegated budgets as required, with responsibility for the day-to-day finance work for the project.

16. Play an active role in the government product owner community sharing your learning and celebrating progress made by other people and teams.

17. Ensuring that project outputs are complaint with DHSC and NHSBSA policies, in addition to complying with statutory UK legislation and directives.

18. Be accountable for his/her own personal development needs in order to be fully equipped to meet current and future management and organisational needs.

19. Dealing with highly complex and sensitive information where you will need to influence and persuade Senior Leaders and internal/external stakeholders to take an appropriate approach in relation to difficult and contentious issues.

In addition to the above accountabilities, as post holder you are expected to:

Undertake additional duties and responsibilities in line with the overall purpose of your role and as agreed by your line manager.

Demonstrate NHSBSA values and core capabilities in all aspects of your work.

Foster an environment where your own and colleagues safety and well-being is promoted.

Contribute to a culture which values diversity and inclusion.

Comply with NHSBSA policies, procedures and protocols as they apply to your role.

Working relationships

Responsible to: Lead Product OwnerKey relationships and connections: Senior Managers and Directors in the NHSBSA, Department of Health and Social Care Directorate, Arms Length Bodies and the wider Product Owner Community, Cross Directorate including Digital and SGBD.

Person Specification

Personal Qualities, Knowledge and Skills

Essential

• Ability to make informed decisions based on user need, available technology and value for money.
• Demonstrable detailed understanding of the variety and complexities of digital contexts and can design services to meet them, including the wider digital economy and advances in technology
• High level ability to understand and identify problems, analysing and helping to identify the appropriate solution. You can classify and prioritise problems, document their causes and implement remedies
• Ability to translate vision into deliverable goals
• Driven and self-starting
• Analysis skills
• Sensitivity and tact towards vulnerable users who you will be interacting with at times

Desirable

• The product lifecycle and how products in different stages of it benefit from different design and development approaches
• Common technology standards - including software, security, privacy and accessibility standards (e.g. W3C)
• Professional standards and practices relevant to digital public health services (e.g. NHS Service Manual, Government Service Standard & Manual, Technology Code of Practice)
• Contemporary organisational management practices
• The wider private/public/third sector digital landscape - including public sector procurement and contracting frameworks or supplier management.

Experience

Essential

• Significant demonstrable experience and understanding of user-centered design, technology and data perspectives
• Experience of applying an agile methodology and mindset to all aspects of your work, using an iterative method and flexible approach, ensuring product delivery teams and other stakeholders understand and deliver against user needs and overall objectives.
• Experience of utilising and driving product insight and other data to evaluate needs and priorities, whilst using your understanding of user centric design, technology and data perspectives, to ensure that products benefit from relevant innovations, remain future proof and aligned to moving technology and best practice, focused on user needs, continuous improvement, efficiencies and return on investment.
• Experience of digital projects
• Significant experience of projects and project management techniques.

Desirable

• Detailed knowledge of NHS and NHSBSA services would be desirable
• User-centred service design practices and methodologies for public-facing, business-facing or internal services and applications
• Agile methodologies (e.g. Scrum, Lean, Kanban) including how to apply an agile mindset to all aspects of their work.

Qualifications

Essential

• An appropriate recognised management qualification equivalent to a degree qualification and/or significant relevant equivalent experience.
• Evidence of continuous professional development.

Desirable

• Post- graduate qualification in relevant discipline
• Professional/accredited qualification in Change Management Certification (e.g. Prosci)
• Product Owner Certification from a recognised provider.
• GDS Service Management Course attendance

Employer details

Employer name

NHS Business Services Authority

Address

Stella House

Newcastle upon Tyne

NE15 8NY

Employer's website

https://www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/what-we-do/work-us (Opens in a new tab)