Senior Product Owner

Working in a fast-paced, changing environment where every day brings something new and innovative ideas are encouraged to help our customers reach their financial dreams and aspirations. The Manulife Bank Delivery team is seeking a passionate Product Owner who can drive our digital banking transformation. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to translate business and customer needs into innovative digital banking solutions. Leverage your technical background to lead product development, ensuring alignment with our digital strategy and customer needs. The Product Owner contributes to the realization of Value Stream strategy, vision, and OKRs by aligning and prioritizing business goals with actionable results.

Key Accountabilities:

• Define and communicate the product vision and roadmap to the squad, stakeholders, and technology partners.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to gather and prioritize product requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria.
• Work closely with the squads and FinTech partners to ensure timely delivery of product features and improvements.
• Lead PI Planning activities ensuring prioritized features are refined and sized to deliver on commitments.
• Leverage your deep technology background to lead the squad members, focusing on leveraging technology for creative problem solving.
• Possess a foundational understanding of the technologies being used by the engineering team such as APIs, front end applications, and vendor integrations for effective communication and decision making.
• Ability to understand the tradeoffs between a technical target state and near-term deliverables.
• Conduct market research and analysis to identify customer needs, market trends, and competitive landscape.
• Define and supervise key product metrics and KPIs to measure product success and identify areas for improvement.
• Lead and prioritize the product backlog, ensuring that it aligns with the product vision and business goals.
• Engage with team members to gather feedback and ensure alignment on product priorities and direction.
• Identify trade-offs to ensure alignment on priorities between the team and partners.
• Lead product demonstrations, gather feedback, and iterate on product features and functionality.
• Lead the squad in ensuring value creation for the business, customers, and end-users by leading the squad backlog and ensuring that the highest value work is always being implemented.
• Work with the squad to define hypotheses, run experiments (surveys, concept testing, analytics tools, A/B testing), and analyze data to make decisions on user stories that influence the direction of delivery.
• Build and groom the backlog ensuring it’s clear and understood by all squad members.
• Incorporate feedback from team member demos, interviews, user research, and engineering into the squad backlog.
• Accept completed user stories of the squad by ensuring all stories meet the definition of done.

Squad Alignment & Communication:

• Provide strategic team leadership in leading delivery of business outcome-focused work.
• Encourage and empower the team and lead without direct authority. Ability to gauge how the team is doing and drive the necessary actions to improve.
• Effective communication to clearly articulate priorities to the team and stakeholders and create strong relationships with team members.
• Brings a coaching attitude to scaled agile practices and banking product knowledge.
• Encourage innovation within the team by helping establish a culture that nurtures creativity, facilitate brainstorming sessions, and rapidly prototype innovative ideas to stay ahead of market trends.

Requirements:

• 5+ years of experience as a Product Owner or Product Manager.
• 5+ years of experience in the digital banking industry.
• Strong knowledge of digital banking platforms, FinTech solutions, mobile/web banking apps.
• Degree in computer science, information technology or business.
• Solid understanding of agile methodologies preferably in SAFe.
• Experience using JIRA and Confluence.

What can we offer you?

• A competitive salary and benefits packages.
• A growth trajectory that extends upward and outward, encouraging you to follow your passions and learn new skills.
• A focus on growing your career path with us.
• Flexible work policies and strong work-life balance.
• Professional development and leadership opportunities.

Our commitment to you:

• Values-first culture: We lead with our Values every day and bring them to life together.
• Boundless opportunity: We create opportunities to learn and grow at every stage of your career.
• Continuous innovation: We invite you to help redefine the future of financial services.
• Delivering the promise of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: We foster an inclusive workplace where everyone thrives.
• Championing Corporate Citizenship: We build a business that benefits all stakeholders and has a positive social and environmental impact.

Manulife is an Equal Opportunity Employer

At Manulife/John Hancock, we embrace our diversity. We strive to attract, develop and retain a workforce that is as diverse as the customers we serve and to foster an inclusive work environment that embraces the strength of cultures and individuals. We are committed to fair recruitment, retention, advancement and compensation, and we administer all of our practices and programs without discrimination on the basis of race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, religion or religious beliefs, creed, sex (including pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions), sexual orientation, genetic characteristics, veteran status, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, family status, disability, or any other ground protected by applicable law.

It is our priority to remove barriers to provide equal access to employment. A Human Resources representative will work with applicants who request a reasonable accommodation during the application process.