Product Owner, Common Components at Rainforest Alliance

RESPONSIBILITIES:
Product Ownership:

• Lead the technical aspects of shared services and common components, such as system architectures, integrations, and technical requirements.
• Supervise the design, development, and implementation of technical solutions in alignment with the product roadmap defined in partnership with the Product Development Manager.
• Work closely with other project devlivery managers and the Director of Product Development to gather and analyse market trends, customer needs and competitor insights to inform product decisions.
• Support and maintain a clear vision of reusable components ensuring they align with the overall product and technology strategy.
• Work closely with architects and engineering leads to ensure common components follow best practices, scalability and security requirements.
• Help support and balance new feature development with ongoing maintenance and scalability needs.
• Drive continuous product and technical improvements to reliability maintainability and efficiency.
• Work with the wider Project Delivery Managers to gather feedback on existing components and find opportunities for improvement.
• Ensure evaluation of value assessments determining potential impact, feasibility and return on investment of a proposed feature or component.
• Evaluate whether a feature is technically and financially viable before development ensuring that there is a justification of value of feature based on expected benefits, costs and alignment with strategic goals.

Backlog Management:

• Own and prioritize the technical backlog, ensuring tasks are well-defined, actionable, and aligned with broader product goals.
• Work with developers, architects, and engineers to clarify technical requirements and ensure feasibility.
• Create and refine user stories, acceptance criteria and epics in collaboration with the team and wider stakeholders.
• Continuously groom and adjust the backlog based on feedback, changing customer and business priorities and evolving customer needs.

Collaboration with Project Delivery Managers:

• Partner with the Project Delivery Managers to align business needs with technical capabilities, ensuring seamless integration and a shared vision.
• Provide technical expertise during workshops, strategy sessions, and cross-departmental collaborations.
• Balance the needs of multiple squads by prioritising features that provide the highest cross product value.
• Drive consistency in how teams use and implement common components to reduce duplication and fragmentation.
• Collaborate to define best practices for integration, UI And UX consistency and API usage across products.

System Design and Testing:

• Lead system design discussions, focusing on technical usability, scalability, and performance.
• Coordinate and participate in global testing efforts, validating technical implementations and ensuring alignment with user needs.
• Collaborate on architectural discussions such as API Design, data modelling and technology choices to optimise performance and scalability.
• Support the definition of testing requirements including Unit, Integration, performance and security testing to ensure component reliability.
• Ensure Components are tested for compatibility across multiple products, platforms and environments.

Technical Problem-Solving:

• Act as a proactive technical problem solver, addressing challenges in collaboration with the technology team and other stakeholders.
• Analyse and address system-related issues, ensuring technical solutions align with organizational requirements.
• Work closely with engineering leads and architects to conduct root cause analysis (RCA) for performance bottlenecks, technical issues, integration failures and system inefficiencies.
• Support the identification, prioritisation and escalation of critical technical issues that relate to common components ensuring minimal disruption across teams.
• Work closely with engineering leadership to evaluate trade-offs in technical decisions, balancing short term fixes with long term scalability.

Budget Management:

• Supervise budgeting for the unit, ensuring cost-effective resource allocation and adherence to financial targets.
• Encourage teams to build reusable cost effective solutions to reduce long term maintenance costs and reduce technical debt.

Continuous Improvement:

• Find opportunities to optimize the technical landscape, including process improvements, automation, and integration enhancements.
• Stay up-to-date with emerging technologies and trends to recommend innovative solutions.
• Continuously analyse usage data, performance metrics and user feedback to identify areas for improvement.
• Drive consistency in implementation, documentation and integration of common components across different squads.
• Establish a contribution model where teams and individuals can propose enhancements and ensure collaboration across squads.
• Regularly engage with Engineering Teams, Architects and product managers to gather feedback on common components.
• Encourage innovation by running hackathons, (PoC) projects or pilot initiatives to test new ideas before full adoption.

Support and Rollout:

• Partner with global support teams to ensure smooth technical rollouts, including validation and troubleshooting during implementation.
• Perform impact assessments to understand the scope and reach of changes to avoid potential disruptions across products and teams ensuring that both technical and business stakeholders are aware of risk factors and have contingency plans in place for potential disruptions across products, teams and services.
• Ensure that Rollback procedures are in place and collectively agreed with teams in-case deployment introduces critical issues that cannot be resolved quickly.
• Establish knowledge sharing forums to keep teams informed on component updates, new features, technical depreciations, etc.
• Provide input to training materials from a technical perspective to support effective user adoption.
• Other duties as assigned.

QUALIFICATIONS:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field; a master’s degree is preferred.
• Proven experience in technical product ownership, software development, or a related role with a focus on system design and implementation.
• Strong understanding of Agile methodologies and experience in managing technical backlogs.
• Excellent problem-solving skills with the ability to translate business requirements into technical solutions.
• Experience in system architecture, integrations, and working with shared services or common component platforms.
• Strong communication skills to effectively convey technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
• Familiarity with tools like JIRA, Confluence, or equivalent Work Flow management tools
• Dedicated, meticulous, and capable of working in a fast-paced environment.
• Strong rationale for resilience and emotional intelligence, with a demonstrated ability to work under pressure.
• Excellent writing, editing and verbal communication and listening skills.