Product Owner-Smartflows

Within Experlogix, we stay close some of the principles of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and it’s 7 core competencies. Within our agile teams, the Product Owner (PO) is responsible for defining 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 PO has a significant role in maximizing the value produced by the team and ensuring Stories meet the user’s needs.

The PO is the member of the Agile team who serves as the customer proxy responsible for working with Product Management and other stakeholders—including other POs—to define and prioritize stories in the Team Backlog. This allows the Solution to effectively address program priorities (set by the product team) while maintaining technical integrity. Ideally, the PO is collocated with the rest of the team (or at least with the technical lead), where they typically share management, incentives, and culture. But the PO also attends the relevant Product Management events for planning and Program Backlog/Vision refinement.

Responsibilities:

The PO fulfils the following duties:

• • Preparation and Participation in PI (Program Increment) Planning :
    • As a member of the extended Product Management team, the PO is heavily involved in program backlog refinement and prep for PI planning and also plays a significant role in the planning event itself. Before the planning event, the PO updates the team backlog and typically reviews and contributes to the program vision, Roadmap, and content presentations.
    • During the event, the PO is involved with story definition, providing the clarifications necessary to assist the team with their story estimates and sequencing. The entire Agile team, which includes the PO, also work together to determine their team PI objectives for the upcoming PI.
    • The PO works with the development manager and technical lead to get planning established, and gets frequent updates from the team on progress, and any changes in the planning.
  • Iteration Execution:
    • Maintaining the team backlog – With input from System Architect/Engineering and other stakeholders, the PO has the primary responsibility for building, editing, and maintaining the team backlog. Consisting mostly of user stories, it also includes defects (in close cooperation with QA) and enablers. Backlog items are prioritized based on user value, time, and other team dependencies determined in the PI planning event and refined during the PI.
    • Iteration Planning – The PO reviews and reprioritizes the backlog as part of the prep work for Iteration Planning, including coordination of dependencies with other PO’s, the technical lead, and the development manager. During the iteration planning event, the PO communicates story detail and priorities and ensures the team aligns and agrees on a final iteration plan.
    • Just-in-time story elaboration – Most backlog items are elaborated into user stories for implementation. This may happen before the iteration, during iteration planning, or during the iteration. While any team member can write stories and acceptance criteria, the PO maintains proper flow.
    • Acceptance criteria - POs collaborate with their team to detail stories with acceptance criteria and examples in the form of acceptance tests.
    • Accepting stories – The PO works with the team to agree on accepted story completion. This includes validating that the story meets acceptance criteria, that it has the appropriate, persistent acceptance tests, and that it otherwise complies with its Definition of Done (DoD). In so doing, the PO also assures a level of quality, focusing primarily on fitness for use.
    • Understand enabler work – While POs are not expected to drive technological decisions, they are supposed to understand the scope of the upcoming enabler work and collaborate with System and Solution Architects/Engineering to assist with decision-making and sequencing of the critical technological infrastructures that will host the new business functionality. This can often be best accomplished by establishing a capacity allocation, as described in the Team Backlog article.
    • Participate in team demo and retrospective – POs collaborate with their team and any other stakeholders in the team demo. They also participate in the Iteration Retrospective, where the teams gather to improve their processes and are active in the Agile Release Train’s (ART’s) Inspect and Adapt (I&A) workshop. They actively contribute ideas for improvement and work with the Release Train Engineer and Operations Director to improve processes and systems.
    • During each PI, the PO coordinates dependencies with other POs. This often occurs in weekly PO sync events /standups. The PO also has an instrumental role in producing the System Demo for program and Value Stream stakeholders.
    • Manage documentation: the Product Owner ensures the stories delivered during an Increment are documented accordingly by the technical writer, including but not limited to Release Notes, and Release Communications.
    • Work with Training department to build training materials for features
  • Inspect and Adapt:
    • Teams address their larger impediments in the I&A (Inspect and Adapt) workshop. There, the PO works across teams to define and implement improvement stories that will increase the velocity and quality of the program. The PI system demo is part of the I&A workshop. The PO has an instrumental role in producing the PI system demo for program stakeholders. To ensure that they will be able to show the most critical aspects of the solution to the stakeholders, POs also participate in the preparation of the PI system demo.
      
  • SAFe leverages several artifacts such as Features, Stories, Non-Functional Requirements, design artifacts, and so forth. Program and Team Backlog(s) govern the prioritization of these work items. They are managed by the Product Manager and the Product Owner who provide the content authority of their respective backlogs in a highly collaborative relationship. Product Owner optimizes the relationship with his team’s development manager and technical lead to ensure an optimal cooperation. Finally, the product owner cooperates with the Product Manager to contribute to the Strategic themes / Product vision, Product strategy, value streams and roadmap.

Required skills:

• Over 2 years as a Business Analyst, Product Owner, or related professional experience;
• Ability to gather, analyze and document business requirements;
• Experience with Agile methodologies;
• Experience participating in design sessions and documenting key decisions;
• Comfortable learning new software; willing to become a product expert;
• Objectivity and evidence-based reasoning;
• Proven ability to quickly learn and productize deeply complex topics;
• Self-motivated, self-managed, and able to work independently;
• Commitment to quality and exceeding expectations;
• Excellent verbal, written, and listening skills in English;
• Flexible workhours because of time difference;
• Previous experience with a CPQ, CRM, or other ERP system is a plus.

Why Experlogix?

• You will be working with a great global team of motivated and skilled people to collaborate with.
• We have a great work environment where apart from working hard, there is enough room for fun and relaxation. For example, by playing a daily game of table football or joining our quarterly social outings.
• You will have the availability to join our Personal Development Plan and follow courses, trainings or soft skills sessions.
• You will be working in a challenging international work environment.
• We have had a record breaking company growth over the last several years; with rewarding opportunities to see your contributions directly enhance the core product and positively impact customers.

Location

You will work from Xpertdoc EMEA HQ in Temse but will also be trained and supported by team members based in Canada.