Job Description

Purpose of the role

The purpose of a Product Owner is to maximize the value of the product by defining a clear product vision (are they setting the vision or would this align to ), managing authoring, refining and prioritizing the Product Backlog balancing trade-offs across desirability, viability and feasibility – making sure the right thing is being ‘built’, and prioritising work based on business goals. They act as the primary liaison between stakeholders and delivery teams, ensuring the product meets user/customer needs and delivers optimal value. Product Owners are responsible for developing a roadmap and driving execution of their product area/sub-journey, applying continuous improvement principles and techniques.

Accountabilities

• Ensure Product Alignment with Business Goals: Ensure that the product & its features are aligned with broader objectives, driving value and contributing to the organization’s overall strategy. Utilisation of market research, analysis of customer feedback and monitoring of industry trends to identify new products, features or enhancements.  

• Communicate Product Vision to Delivery Teams: Clearly articulate the product vision and goals to the delivery teams, ensuring they understand, align and are inspired to deliver the business value and purpose of each feature or user story.

• Create and Refine User Stories: Write clear, concise user stories with detailed acceptance criteria, refining them as needed to ensure the development team has all the necessary information to implement features successfully. 

• Agile Events: Participate in key Agile events such as sprint planning, daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, and retrospectives to keep the team aligned and focused on delivering the product backlog. 

• Managing the Product Backlog: Responsible for creating, maintaining, and prioritising the product backlog, ensuring the highest value features are delivered first, based on business needs, customer requirements and organisational impacts, balancing risk migration and future proofing against the product strategy. 

• Act as the Voice of the Customer: Continuously gather feedback from customers and end-users to understand their pain points and ensure that the product meets their needs and improves their overall experience. 

• Acceptance Criteria Definition & Management: Review and accept or reject work completed by the development team during sprints, ensuring that all delivered features meet the agreed-upon acceptance criteria and deliver business value. 

• Collaborate with Stakeholders:  Work closely with stakeholders (e.g., customers, business leaders, and marketing teams) to gather requirements, define product goals, and ensure that the product vision aligns with business objectives. 

• Monitor Product Performance and Iterate: Regularly assess product performance using KPIs and customer feedback, adjusting the product backlog and roadmap to improve functionality and meet evolving customer needs. Manage on-going readiness and 'run' activities of live products including monitoring, governance and approvals. 

• Risk and Control:  Managing risk, including identification of potential risks, development of strategies to resolve or mitigate and escalate as necessary those risks, and alignment between the product management and control functions.

Director Expectations

• To manage a business function, providing significant input to function wide strategic initiatives. Contribute to and influence policy and procedures for the function and plan, manage and consult on multiple complex and critical strategic projects, which may be business wide..

• They manage the direction of a large team or sub-function, leading other people managers and embedding a performance culture aligned to the values of the business. Or for an individual contributor, they lead organisation wide projects and act as deep technical expert and thought leader, identifying new ways of working and collaborating cross functionally. They will train, guide and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long term profits, organisational risks and strategic decisions..

• Provide expert advice to senior functional management and committees to influence decisions made outside of own function, offering significant input to function wide strategic initiatives.

• Manage, coordinate and enable resourcing, budgeting and policy creation for a significant sub-function.

• Escalates breaches of policies / procedure appropriately.

• Foster and guide compliance, ensure regulations are observed that relevant processes in place to facilitate adherence.

• Focus on the external environment, regulators, or advocacy groups to both monitor and influence on behalf of Barclays, when appropriate.

• Demonstrate extensive knowledge of how the function integrates with the business division / Group to achieve the overall business objectives.

• Maintain broad and comprehensive knowledge of industry theories and practices within own discipline alongside up-to-date relevant sector / functional knowledge, and insight into external market developments / initiatives.

• Use interpretative thinking and advanced analytical skills to solve problems and design solutions in often complex/ sensitive situations.

• Exercise management authority to make significant decisions and certain strategic decisions or recommendations within own area.

• Negotiate with and influence stakeholders at a senior level both internally and externally.

• Act as principal contact point for key clients and counterparts in other functions/ businesses divisions.

• Mandated as a spokesperson for the function and business division.

All Senior Leaders are expected to demonstrate a clear set of leadership behaviours to create an environment for colleagues to thrive and deliver to a consistently excellent standard. The four LEAD behaviours are: L – Listen and be authentic, E – Energise and inspire, A – Align across the enterprise, D – Develop others.

All colleagues will be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship – our moral compass, helping us do what we believe is right. They will also be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Mindset – to Empower, Challenge and Drive – the operating manual for how we behave.

Essential skills:

• Excellent communication, collaboration and influencing skills with stakeholders at all levels of seniority and across organizational boundaries.
• Change Agility Catalyst product insight and strong understanding of Change delivery best practice frameworks, processes and tooling across the change lifecycle.
• Experience of leading user-centred design of solutions that address colleague needs and align with strategic objectives.
• Strong negotiation and partnership skills, with experience of executing successfully within a complex, cross-cutting programme or portfolio.

Desired skills:

• Ability to leverage a broad and diverse set of stakeholder perspectives and data-led insights to challenge the status quo and deliver creative, innovative products.
• Experience of agile change delivery ways of working, including establishing and managing priorities and delivering incremental value aligned to strategic objectives.
• Familiarity and strong understanding of the Persistent Teams funding model to ensure the design, evolution and successful adoption of the model across the organisation.
• Experience of driving business process transformation through simplification, digitization and automation.