Technical Product Owner

OUP's digital products serve researchers, teachers and learners across educational and academic institutions. They include a broad range of digital, content and data-centric platforms, learning & assessment services, online journals, research platforms and integration with web and eCommerce application as well as a range of mobile product apps. The Press's enterprise Book Publishing applications and services manage the end-to-end content lifecycle of this digital content and data.

The Technical Product Owner (TPO) works in close collaboration with divisional and group Product Management team(s) and is accountable for the implementation of the approved product roadmap and strategy. The TPO works in collaboration with Product Managers and/or Owners, Key Users and delivery teams to transform product roadmaps into detailed requirements. Breaking concepts down from epics to features and user stories, ensuring clarity of well-defined deliverables to meet product and business goals. Varying by division, business unit and type of product, the TPO creates, owns, manages, and prioritises the product backlog for technical delivery.

The TPO works closely with delivery teams to plan iterations, provides day-to-day input, ensures that velocity is maintained as well as reviewing and being accountable for acceptance of technical outputs from teams. Where appropriate, the TPO is an empowered decision maker at the delivery team level, often working as the key OUP contact with third party delivery partners.

Key responsibilities in this role will include:

• Understand, align with, and contribute to the delivery of roadmaps and associated non-functional requirements (e.g. performance, security, UX, accessibility, legal, and development, business processes, and standards). Ensure that all epics, features and stories meet OUP standards so that features and functions meet the required quality standards and non-functional requirements.
• Based on the roadmap and PIs, create and manage the backlog of work for the product
• Manage the backlog of work through the delivery team and be accountable (with the Product Manager and/or Product Owner) for the acceptance of work
• Participate in regular product ceremonies, such as stand-ups, sprint demos, sprint planning, retrospectives and system demos so that customer and business needs are continuously reflected to the delivery team.
• Engage with other teams to ensure that dependencies are understood, and planning takes place as part of regular agreed alignment processes to ensure that dependencies on other teams do not delay product delivery. Be available to team(s) outside of your team when required
• Monitor and track progress to roadmap and PIs.

We operate a hybrid working policy that requires a minimum of 2 days per week in the Oxford office.

To be successful in this role, you will ideally have:

• Experience of working as a product owner or similar role (e.g. project manager, business analyst, platform manager, product manager).
• Experience of working with third party suppliers.
• Deep understanding of digital product development and delivery, including customer and market knowledge relevant to the product area.
• High-level technical understanding, including and software development methods and practises (technical coding skills not required).
• Expert knowledge of methodologies associated with digital product development and delivery, in particular Agile, specifically Scrum, delivery approaches and tooling.
• Strong knowledge of product and development management tools.
• Strong knowledge of user-centred design principles.

We care about work/life balance here at OUP. With this in mind we offer 25 days' holiday that rises with service, plus bank holidays and Christmas closure (3-days) and a 35-hour working week. We are open to discussing flexibility in respect to working patterns, dependent on role. We also have a great variety of active employee networks and societies.

We help make your money go further by contributing to your pension up to 12%, offering loans and savings schemes through our partnership with Salary Finance, in addition to travel to work schemes and access to a wide range of local discounts.

This role comes with the added benefit of a discretionary annual payment.

Please see our Rewards and Recognition page for more information.

We are committed to supporting diversity in our workforce, and ensuring an inclusive environment where all individuals can thrive. We seek to employ a workforce representative of the markets that we serve and encourage applications from all.