Product Owner

activpayroll Ltd.; United Kingdom; Hybrid; GBP 60,000 - 80,000; Full time

Job summary

activpayroll Ltd. is seeking a Product Owner to join its Technology department on a permanent basis. The role involves refining user outcomes, creating user stories, and driving measurable results within an agile scrum framework.

You will define the what and why, prioritise work, and collaborate with internal and external clients to maximise product value. You will act as the voice of the customer, shaping the product roadmap, and ensuring delivery aligns with strategic goals.

Qualifications

• Translate user and business needs into actionable solutions.
• Strong analytical and creative thinking.
• Excellent interpersonal and cross-functional collaboration across engineering, product and customer teams.
• Experience with HCM/Payroll solutions.
• Familiarity with Azure DevOps or equivalent tooling.

Responsibilities

• Be the voice of the customer and product expert for the team.
• Refine the Product Roadmap with the Head of Product.
• Prioritise Objectives, Key Results and Deliverables aligned to strategy.
• Develop and maintain a prioritized backlog of user stories.
• Meet clients to understand and address their challenges and needs.
• Collaborate with multi-disciplinary teams across locations to deliver value.

Skills

Voice of customer

Analytical thinking

Interpersonal skills

Stakeholder management

HCM Payroll

Azure DevOps

UX awareness

Cross-functional teamwork

Tools

Azure DevOps

Job description

Product Owner

Department: Technology

Employment Type: Permanent

Location: Any activpayroll location

Reporting To: Product Director

Description

Our Product and Development teams at activpayroll continually strive to deliver the outcomes that matter most to our customers. As a result, the role of Product Owner at activpayroll is a critical one who works with clients (external and internal) to refine the user outcomes, generate user stories and capture the measurable key result that will confirm success.

The Product Owner role is also critical in the team as they are responsible for confirming the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ for work committed to deliver to the development team – this means gathering, prioritising and setting the activity to be delivered, accepting the completed work and working with the development team to ensure successful delivery – all completed within the agile scrum methodology.

On a typical day, it looks like this:

• Being the voice of the customer and an expert in the product delivered and the value it delivers to our clients
• Taking all steps required to understand the end-to-end client and user experience of the solution, any integrations and any dependencies impacting a great experience
• Working with the Head or Product to refine the Product Roadmap over time against the Product Vision
• Focusing and aligning prioritisation of Objectives, Key Results and Deliverables around the targeted priorities set at a strategic level for the organisation
• Working with internal / external customers to analyse the needs and align delivery to the product roadmap
• Developing scope and define backlog items (e.g. epics, features and user stories) to guide the development team
• Developing and maintaining a prioritised backlog of user stories for the product
• Meeting with clients directly (in-person or virtually) to understand and solve their challenges where appropriate and in line with the product vision
• Making judgements (assessing the value and cases for activity) and recommendations on inclusions for each quarterly plan in partnership with the Head of Product Management to maximise the value to clients and alignment with our product strategy and vision
• Communicating proactively with stakeholders to ensure the outcomes, activity and delivery is clear
• Working closely and successfully with a multi-disciplinary development team, stakeholders and domain teams (including clients and partners) locally and internationally
• Being ready to report on status of product developments and initiatives as required (but formally at least every 2 weeks)
• Ensuring any escalation requiring action in the product is assessed, prioritised and actions clearly communicated and visible to the stakeholders as required
• Supporting and ensuring the success of both product (value) delivery and operational readiness to ensure clients maximise their value
• Tracking the key result success measures for everything delivered to clients
• Being able to articulate and communicate the product roadmap to any stakeholder internally or externally where required including clients, partners and market analysts interested in our solutions

Being able to demonstrate the product for clients, partners and stakeholders where required

What attributes typically make someone brilliant in this role:

• Ability to translate user and business needs into solutions that work for users and deliver outcomes for clients with some understanding of the technical considerations that need to be made
• Strong / honed analytical and creative thinking skills
• You will possess brilliant interpersonal skills required to communicate and coordinate activities across a diverse set of cross functional engineering, product management, UX, support and customer facing professional teams
• You will be a motivator of those around you and driver of making positive change happen
• Ideally you will have experience working with HCM / Payroll solutions
• Experience with Azure Dev Ops (or similar) is desirable
• You’ll have an understanding of user experience and how to communicate experience and process improvement ideas to developers and UX teams
• Have experience of working and managing 3rd party partners and their roadmap requirements and relationships
• Experience working in a high growth highly successful business environment and the cultural and professional expectations that come with that