Digital Commerce: Product Owner III

Role Purpose

The Product Owner III is a member of the agile team, responsible for defining user stories and prioritizing the team backlog to streamline the execution of program priorities while maintaining the conceptual and technical integrity of the features or components for the team. The role owns multiple products of varying to high complexities, impact and visibility products and engages and collaborates with product management to execute the product vision, strategy, and roadmap.

Role Description

• Takes the lead in the solution design of new features and works with business stakeholders to create the optimal user experience and assess the impact on the backend.
• Facilitates workshops and leads the requirements gathering process, including creating wireframes and engaging stakeholders for input and sign-off.
• Ensures UI alignment with wireframes and feature requirements, guiding designers and actively participating in demo sessions to substantiate design decisions based on backend knowledge.
• Documents the impact of the user experience on data models, business logic and microservices in detail, including context diagrams, system/data flows, and high-level system integration requirements.
• Reviews integration and architecture specifications and provides input to ensure they address all requirements.
• Acts as a subject matter expert and guides product development, coaching and supporting junior and senior product owners in their development.
• Provides input into the refinement of the program backlog, ensuring the team is familiar with the features being brought into PI planning, collaborating with program management in the refinement of the backlog and keeping them informed of progress in achieving team PI objectives.
• Continuously refines and sequences the product backlog:

1. Gathers the requirements for the product and captures them in the form of a product backlog, consisting of user stories with acceptance criteria.
2. Ensures all user stories are written and that each user story has acceptance criteria.

• Provides visible, transparent, and clear direction, ensuring the development team is clear on priorities:

1. Provides clear solution direction to the agile team (or multiple agile teams).
2. Applies economic decision making.
3. Sequences user stories based on team PI objectives.
4. Balances PI objectives with local team requirements.
5. Ensures team backlog readiness for next iteration.
6. Includes the team in backlog refinement.

• Participates in ART level events: ART sync, Product Owner Scrum of Scrums, Inspect and Adapt, PI Planning, daily stand-ups, and system demos.
• Helps create a release plan and track progress towards the release of a product.
• Drives mobile digital omnichannel customer engagement based on customer preference and omnichannel strategies.
• Ensures a consistent and delightful customer experience across all digital touchpoints of the Shoprite customer journey.
• Provides strategic input to customer experience improvements that help drive customer acquisition, customer retention, and conversion.
• Tests new features in the staging environment (user acceptance testing) in collaboration with business stakeholders, to provide business sign-off on the feature.
• Actively promotes and advocates product features and customer-first product design including high levels of customer empathy.
• Adheres to and improves customer service levels across businesses and service.
• Provides integrated reporting and feedback.
• Engages at a senior level with respect to customer centric product concepts and best practices.
• Serves as a lead subject matter expert to guide product development.
• Coaches and supports junior and mid-level product owners in their development.

Qualifications and General Experience

• Degree in Business, IT, Engineering, Marketing, or another relevant field – (essential).
• Certified Product Owner / certified SAFe Product Owner – (essential).
• +6 years’ experience in a Lead or Senior Product Owner role, with experience working in an agile team and proven success launching new and complex product features and translating business strategy and analysis into successful consumer products – (essential).
• Extensive experience collaborating across multi-disciplinary teams to deliver complex projects – (essential).
• In-depth understanding and experience with analytics and big data – (essential).
• Strong commercial experience in digital-led business development environments – (essential).
• Extensive customer user and loyalty experience – (essential).
• Solid knowledge of legal compliance (POPIA, Electronic Information Act, etc.) – (essential).
• General marketing or retail experience – (essential).
• Ecommerce experience – (essential).
• Exposure to the African digital market and customers – (desired).

Specific Experience: Platform

• Demonstrated ability to guide and prioritize decisions related to mobile app development, with a solid understanding of front-end frameworks (e.g., React Native, Swift, Flutter) and back-end integrations.
• Hands-on experience designing and managing APIs as core product assets, ensuring seamless integration with mobile apps and headless platforms to enable scalable, user-centric solutions.
• Proficiency in leveraging tools like AppsFlyer, Insider, and Firebase to extract actionable insights, measure performance, and optimize engagement, contributing directly to data-informed product strategies.
• Skilled at managing integrations with third-party systems and headless architectures, ensuring the mobile app platform evolves to meet future business and technical demands without compromising on agility or user experience.