Product Owner

**WPP is the creative transformation company. We use the power of creativity to build better futures for our people,** **planet, clients and communities.**

**Working at WPP means being part of a global network of more than 109,000 accomplished people in 110 countries. We create transformative ideas and outcomes for its clients through an integrated offer of communications, experience, commerce, and technology. WPP and our award-winning agencies work with most of the world's biggest companies and organisations - from Ford, Unilever and P&G to Google, HSBC, and the UN.**

**WPP has headquarters in New York, London and Singapore and a corporate presence in major markets worldwide.**

**WPP IT provides IT services for WPP, the world's largest communications services group. As a creative transformation company, WPP is helping its clients transform the future through extraordinary work. WPP IT is an integral part of that journey and we are proud to provide technology for some of the world's most creative brands.**

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LI-Hybrid

**Why we're hiring**:
At WPP, technology is at the heart of everything we do, and it is WPP IT's mission to enable everyone to collaborate, create and thrive. WPP IT is undergoing a significant transformation to modernise ways of working, shift to cloud and micro-service-based architectures, drive automation, digitise colleague and client experiences and deliver insight from WPP's petabytes of data.

The Product Owner is responsible for for assisting in managing the product development lifecycle, developing detailed technical requirements, and completing functional specifications for the GroupM Media Central product, interfacing with the technical team to ensure product is developed, tested and deployed to specification.

You will also support roadmap planning and proving technical leadership to ensure that GroupM remains ahead of the market, valuable to its users and commercially successful.

You must possess a unique blend of business and technical savvy with incredible attention to detail, foresight, and the drive to make vision a reality.

Media Systems are those used for the scheduling, ordering, tracking, measurement, and reporting of media transactions executed on behalf of GroupM's clients with Media Vendors. Media Systems may also implement, or be integrated with systems providing, tactical planning, electronic trading, optimisation, or finance functionality.

**What you'll be doing**:

- Reports into the Media Central Product Director
- Partner with regional and market process consultants to drive requirements standardisation, simplification and improvement.
- Partner with regional process owners to prioritise requirements based on business needs, resources and budget.
- Oversee release plans of product development for media finance and core finance.
- Ensure systems sections are compliant with any relevant GroupM / WPP policy.
- Proactively perform quality reviews to monitor risks.
- Partner with and support the market's technology equivalent role.
- Be or become an expert of media finance and core finance in order to support conversations with functional leads in a market and make decision on the product
- Translates customer/client needs and business needs into new product features and services and works closely with product owner/business partnering staff, Transformation team, WPP finance tema and internal staff to implement product's features
- Assist execution of technical product road maps, development schedules and product designs for GroupM
- Synthesize requirements from several internal sources; keep the master RTM up to date
- Write functional specifications including requirements and detailed user cases and storyboards for new product features
- Explain designs and constraints to stakeholders
- Work closely with development teams during design and implementation
- Develop system test specification
- Lead showcases to demo functionalities of the product for media and core finance

**What you'll need**:
**Essential Skills & Experience**
- Solid understanding of software development life cycle models as well as expert knowledge of both Agile and traditional project management principles and practices and the ability to blend them together in the right proportions to fit a project and business environment
- Experience in core finance industry is essential.
- Expert in delivering solutions to support core finance processes including client/vendor contracts, accounts receivable, accounts payable, general accounting, fixed assets, treasury.
- Exposure to solutions that support media bill, pay, campaign close and reporting processes for all media types (digital and traditional).
- Balanced business/technical background:

- Sufficient level of technical background to provide highly-credible leadership to development teams and to be able to accurately and objectively evaluate complex project risks and issues
- Ability to prov