Product Owner

**About us**:
At YuLife we're transforming products once focused on death and illness into ones that inspire life and reward living — turning old-fashioned employee perks into life-enhancing benefits.

We are explorers, dreamers and innovators. We’re on a journey to build the best platform in the world, but we can’t do it without people like you, leading the way.

Forget the stereotypical tech companies of the past. Embrace the unconventional, exercise your imagination and help alter the future with YuLife.

Which hopefully is where you come in.

**The role**:
As a Product Owner at YuLife, you will be responsible for closely collaborating with the South Africa (SA) Yulife Team and the UK product team to support the development of the SA product vision and strategy.

You will be responsible for owning the execution of the strategy, which will involve working with external partners and internal colleagues across the business to gather requirements, define features/user stories, and deliver changes through effective collaboration between our UK IT team and our South African IT partners. This includes providing specifications, detailing user stories, UAT testing management and backlog management. This role will present the opportunity to work across multiple squads (agile teams) and the product management team to ensure capabilities required to enable the SA vision and associated outcomes are well-defined, prioritised, and communicated effectively through a product roadmap. This will include collaboration and stakeholder management of the global product managers. It will require skills in assigning and negotiating priorities for South Africa within the Global context.

**Day to day responsibilities include, but are not limited to**:

- Using your market, technology, and business knowledge to support creation of the YuLife SA product vision and strategy. This will require building strong commercial awareness and staying on top of relevant trends. Supporting strategy validation and refinement will also be core responsibility in the role.
- Leading the execution of the product strategy in alignment with the long-term vision and with an eye towards achieving near-term target outcomes. This will require working with a variety of external and internal partners, including multiple squads (agile teams) to bring the vision to life.
- Leading the integrations between our administration systems, this includes mapping the fields between the systems, understanding the flow and storage of data, having a basic understand of the architecture of the systems and being able to contribute to technical discussions around how to enable the processes
- Providing insights on engagement, usage and various other metrics to the decision makers via reports and BI analytics in Tableau to drive business decisions as well as maintain operational efficiency.
- Approaching various external partners to enable the ability for users to redeem our reward currency for meaningful rewards. This includes driving the integration between their system and ours, the user journey and building a continuous relationship with the partner.
- Continuous monitoring of the customer journey including; the onboarding, underwriting, engagement, usage, offboarding and claims process. Designing, developing and supporting the process including the way data is passed between the systems.
- Regular refinement of product roadmap and backlog based on continuous discovery, analysis, and integration of customer feedback. This role is responsible for writing features, epic, and user stories, including acceptance criteria. Ensuring capabilities prioritised in the backlog also balance technical bodies of work required for long term system integrity.
- Defining success for investments (business case and cost-benefit analysis), tracking benefit realisation on solutions that have moved to production, monitoring KPIs, conducting root cause analysis to understand key results drivers, and incorporating insights gained into product enhancements and strategy.

**The must-haves**:

- Minimum 3 years of commercial product ownership experience and 5+ years in financial services required (group risk insurance experience a huge plus).
Demonstrated ability to effectively build/communicate journey maps, user story maps, product roadmaps, and other industry standard artefacts to bring the product vision to life and create inspiring and desirable customer experiences that deliver on business outcomes, and are technically sustainable.
- Experience in defining requirements, building and managing product backlogs, and delivering on target outcomes with quality.
- Understanding of product management lifecycle and agile methodologies. Experience with acumen to effectively collaborate with architects, designers and all dev ops team members.
- Outcome oriented professional with strong analytical skills. Able to work at the user story level while keeping the big picture in mind and ensuring backl