Senior Agile Product Owner

Join EV's NZ presence with an amazing diverse global team, and a strong suite of dependable innovation best practices.

• Remote-first, 4-day work week
• Profit sharing
• Inclusive and diverse workplace 

About Elephant Ventures

We are Elephant Ventures, a growing innovation consultancy with teams in the US, Philippines, New Zealand, Kenya, and Brazil. We help people go from early stage innovation all the way through market traction, typically within 3-6 months!

Our sweet spots are lean product development and data engineering, so if you're a strong engineer, product owner, or experience designer let's connect!  We pursue individuals with broad skill sets, with an emphasis on collaboration, creativity, and a track record of tackling big opportunities & challenges.

You'll fit right in with the Phunt herd if you…

• Like working with people who take the time to understand and help each other
• Appreciate the power of agile & scrum to build effective, high morale teams
• Enjoy variety and exposure to multiple market segments, from healthcare & finance, to government & social impact
• Want to always keep learning

Here are some examples of interesting recent projects: A crypto arbitrage hedge fund, a telemedicine app, intelligent data pipelines feeding an interactive dashboard, a white label banking SDK, and an ML-powered makeup shade matching tool.

Fun fact: Every now and again we turn on our venture foundry to spin up new products & startups! (Check out Ultranauts.co as a great example!)

About This Role

The Sr. Agile Product Owner drives definition and development, actively managing engagement strategy, profitability, process, and satisfaction of individual client projects through all stages of development.

Responsibilities:

• Drives ideas through the product discovery process with UX and engineering
• Leads, inspires and supports cross-functional scrum teams to deliver high-quality, complex software products, while consistently meeting milestones and business objectives.  
• Collaborates with Project leaders to formulate product vision, strategy, roadmap and growth initiatives
• Owns and manages the product backlog, breaking down initiatives into actionable chunks of value, and works with the engineering team to implement them.
• Develops release plans, balancing priorities, costs and risks with business value
• Serves as a liaison between client and development team.  
• Manages expectations of client stakeholders and continuously assesses their needs, technology trends, and major competitors to validate product priorities and to set strategic direction
• Gather and document requirements, write detailed user stories and acceptance criteria
• Champions process, evolving and promoting delivery processes to increase adoption and adherence to best practices.
• Performs other related duties as assigned. 

Required Skills/Abilities/Core Attributes: 

• Experience managing multiple teams, projects simultaneously
• Proven leadership to drive cross-functional teams to a consensus and manage groups without direct authority
• Strategic thinker with the ability to identify product innovation opportunities aligned with customer/market needs and business priorities.
• Experience presenting to senior business and technical leaders  
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Excellent time management skills with a proven ability to meet deadlines.
• Strong sense of responsibility, a self-starter who takes initiative for improvement.
• Excellent organizational skills and attention to detail.
• Excellent interpersonal and customer service skills.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Passion for excellence at every level.
• Ability to prioritize tasks and to delegate them when appropriate.
• Ability to work both independently and collaboratively with cross-functional teams as well as stakeholders.
• Excellent requirements gathering and documentation skills that clearly communicate concepts and ideas to stakeholders, engineering and XD teams at all levels.
• Ability to develop clear and detailed user stories and acceptance criteria that accurately reflects product and business requirements
• Ability to function well in a high-paced and at times stressful environment.
• Effectively partners and builds relationships with business leaders and management.
• Train and mentor junior Product owners and new hires.

Required Education and Experience:

• Bachelor's degree in business, technology, engineering or similar relevant field
• Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) and/or Certified Scrum Master (CSM)
• A minimum of 7 years of product, project, and/or program management experience in consulting or a client-facing role,  with a proven track record of successfully developing excellent products within deadlines. 
• In-depth knowledge of Agile software development processes and principles, particularly in the scrum master and product owner role, managing a product backlog.  
• Experience in leading technical and non-technical brainstorming / ideation sessions and translating the output of these sessions into product features.
• Experience in working with offshore teams

We also welcome applications if have less senior level experience, but interested to forge a path towards a Senior PO role.