Product Owner - AI

PA Media Group; Hull and East Yorkshire; Hybrid; GBP 60,000 - 80,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading media organization in the UK is seeking an AI Transformation Lead to enhance workflows through AI-enabled solutions. The role involves stakeholder engagement, prototyping, and navigating change management to ensure successful adoption of new processes. Ideal candidates will have hands-on AI experience, strong communication skills, and a commercial mindset. This position requires 10 days per month in the London or Yorkshire offices to build relationships and facilitate workshops.

Qualifications

• Experience in media, content, or data-intensive industries is desirable.
• Background in management consulting or operational transformation preferred.
• Understanding of change management methodologies is beneficial.
• Experience in navigating matrix organisations is a plus.
• Familiarity with editorial workflows and content quality challenges is advantageous.

Responsibilities

• Identify and design AI-enabled alternatives for improving workflows.
• Facilitate workshops to drive ideation and stakeholder engagement.
• Prototype AI-enabled improvements and validate with users.
• Build compelling business cases to secure stakeholder commitment.
• Manage change to ensure adoption of new AI-enabled processes.
• Prioritise opportunities to deliver rapid value.

Skills

Sharp intellect and commercial acuity

Exceptional facilitation and communication skills

Process analysis and redesign expertise

Hands-on AI implementation experience

Strong AI literacy with practical prototyping capability

Comfort with ambiguity and pace

Proven stakeholder influence

Commercial judgment about prioritisation

Tools

JIRA

Confluence

Miro

Job description

Values

• Integrity: Acting with trustworthiness, fairness, and accountability in everything we do.
• Ambition: Setting bold goals, striving for excellence, and inspiring progress.
• Innovation: Being curious, solving problems, and embracing a creative future. We constantly ask, 'how might we?' to reimagine what's possible.
• Collaboration: Building meaningful connections, valuing diverse perspectives, and achieving more together.

Core Responsibilities

• Hunt and map transformation opportunities across our business units through continuous stakeholder engagement and process analysis - identifying where current workflows create friction, waste time, or limit capability, then designing AI-enabled alternatives that deliver measurably better outcomes.
• Facilitate rapid discovery and ideation using structured workshop techniques to extract deep process knowledge from business teams, challenge assumptions about "how things must be done," and co-create AI-enabled solutions that stakeholders believe in because they helped design them.
• Move at pace through rapid proof-of-concept cycles - prototype AI-enabled process improvements in days, validate with actual users in their working environment within weeks, and scale successes quickly using lean approaches that eliminate unnecessary friction.
• Build compelling business cases that secure commitment by quantifying expected value across efficiency gains, quality improvements, and new capabilities unlocked - speaking the language of different stakeholders from operational leaders to commercial directors.
• Drive adoption through change management - you're not just delivering prototypes, you're facilitating organisational transformation, ensuring new AI-enabled ways of working actually get adopted and deliver the promised value.
• Own the opportunity backlog with ruthless prioritisation focused on rapid value delivery, making pragmatic trade-offs that balance quick wins against strategic transformation initiatives, killing experiments that don't demonstrate value.
• Drive initiatives from concept through to production using rapid delivery approaches that enable fast learning, pivot quickly when assumptions prove wrong, and scale aggressively when solutions demonstrate clear value.
• Educate and engage business stakeholders on AI potential and risks, building informed enthusiasm whilst establishing appropriate governance that enables innovation without compromising our commitment to trust and integrity.

Strategic Contributions

• Rapidly prototype breakthrough solutions using agentic AI tools, proving value through working demonstrations that stakeholders can experience directly - turning scepticism into excitement through tangible results rather than theoretical discussions.
• Create self-service AI capabilities that democratise access across the organisation - building prompt libraries, configuration templates, and low-code solutions that enable teams to solve their own challenges without waiting for engineering resources.
• Establish lightweight frameworks for responsible and ethical AI deployment that protect against risks without creating bureaucratic overhead - enabling teams to experiment safely whilst maintaining the trust our customers depend upon.
• Champion AI adoption through compelling workshops and facilitation - you're exceptional at reading a room, building consensus, navigating organisational politics, and maintaining momentum even when stakeholders have competing priorities or resist change.
• Continuously scan the AI horizon for emerging capabilities, experimenting with new tools and techniques to identify opportunities before competitors recognise them.

Working Arrangement: This role requires 10 days per month in our London or Yorkshire offices to maintain close collaboration with business stakeholders, facilitate workshops, and build the relationships essential for driving transformation across our diverse portfolio.

Qualifications and Experience

• Sharp intellect and commercial acuity that enables you to quickly grasp complex business processes, identify leverage points for transformation, and articulate value in language that resonates with diverse stakeholders - from operational efficiency with operations leaders to revenue opportunities with commercial directors.
• Exceptional facilitation and communication skills that build enthusiasm and drive consensus - you run workshops that energise participants, navigate organisational dynamics with political savvy, maintain momentum through inevitable obstacles, and secure commitment from stakeholders who initially resist change.
• Process analysis and redesign expertise - you can map current-state processes with forensic detail, identify inefficiencies and bottlenecks with fresh eyes, and design future-state workflows that leverage AI capabilities to achieve dramatically better outcomes. You ask "why do we do it this way?" until you understand the real constraints versus inherited assumptions.
• Hands-on AI implementation experience delivering business transformation - you've moved beyond theory to actually deploy AI solutions that changed how organisations work, learned from failures quickly, and scaled successes aggressively. You understand what works in practice versus what sounds good in presentations.
• Strong AI literacy with practical prototyping capability - you're fluent with modern AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.), can engineer effective prompts, understand capabilities and limitations well enough to identify opportunities, and can build quick prototypes that prove concepts (though the FDE handles sophisticated implementation).
• Comfort with ambiguity and pace in a newly formed team - you thrive in environments with minimal process, create structure where needed without adding unnecessary friction, and maintain momentum when the path forward isn't immediately clear. You make confident decisions with incomplete information.
• Proven stakeholder influence without relying on positional authority - you build enthusiasm through demonstration rather than presentation, secure commitment through rapid value delivery, and maintain trust even when experiments fail. You understand that transformation is about people, not just technology.
• Commercial judgment about prioritisation - you instinctively understand the difference between impressive innovations and value-creating transformations, making pragmatic trade-offs that balance business impact against implementation complexity and organisational readiness for change.

Desirable Skills

• Experience working within media, content, or data-intensive industries where you've seen the challenges of scale, quality, and trust firsthand.
• Background in management consulting, business process reengineering, or operational transformation that gives you structured frameworks for analysing and redesigning workflows.
• Understanding of change management methodologies and organisational psychology that informs how you drive adoption of new ways of working.
• Experience navigating matrix organisations or working across multiple business units with distinct cultures, priorities, and commercial models.
• Proficiency with tools such as JIRA, Confluence, Miro, or similar platforms for process mapping, workshop facilitation, and knowledge management.
• Background in journalism, content operations, or related fields that gives you intuition for editorial workflows and content quality challenges.