Digital Product Owner

Salary: £48,000 – £54,000 per year

Join us on the Journey…

National Express Group is a leading public transport operator with bus, coach and rail services in the UK, Continental Europe, North Africa, North America and the Middle East. Passengers made 898 million journeys on our services in 2018.

We have an exciting new opportunity for a Digital Product Owner to join our team based at our Head Office in Birmingham.

Here at our Head Office in Birmingham’s creative quarter of Digbeth, we run one of the UK’s busiest travel websites. Our mission is simple and significant in scope – to move as many people, as possible, around the UK. 

 As a consequence, we are constantly innovating and suggesting new ways of making our products faster, more reliable and more attractive to our customers. 

We are customer obsessed – from raising consideration of National Express Coach, through to customer interactions with our brand – we strive to ensure that each touch point of the customer journey is seamless and exceeds expectations

As the successful candidate, you will working alongside some of the UK’s biggest names in transport such as The Trainline, EasyJet and Ryanair. Also, the biggest names in entertainment such as Glastonbury Festival, Wembley Stadium and Twickenham we get our customers to where they need to be, on time and at a competitive price.

The ideal Product Owner is a clear thinker with vision, energy, attention to detail and drive, to manage and improve one of our key internal products.

You will own our business critical Contact Centre and Coach Station digital product. This is an essential platform for National Express Coach. Our frontline Contact Centre and Coach Station colleagues rely on the tool to respond to contacts, and meet customer needs around purchasing and amendments.

You will be leading the Product, interacting with our offshore development and test squad, to drive a high quality product that is continuously improved, and well aligned with business and user needs. 

What you’ll do…

• Champion the product vision, engaging and garnering a passion for the product from the team; ensuring all team members understand priorities from a business and customer perspective
• Comfortable and confident making fast paced decisions and ensuring that the product is aligned to business outcomes, solves customer problems and provides a great user experience 
• Responsible for the delivery of the product strategy and roadmap
• Manage the Product Roadmap; managing and coordinating discovery activities and forging strong relationships with stakeholders across the business that feed into the roadmap 
• Ensure a continuous pipeline of new features and regularly communicate product success to stakeholders
• Create and maintain a Product Backlog to facilitate the product vision and support the overall business strategy, encompassing both product specific and cross product initiatives
• Perform the Scrum Product Owner role within our product squad – playing an active role in ceremonies and ensuring that the product squads are focusing on the highest value initiatives, from a customer, technology and business perspective 
• Confident with scrum metrics and terminology – possess a detailed understanding of the team’s velocity, factors impacting this and how it can be optimised
• Accountable for ensuring that the development sprints are ready and the highest priority stories are committed
• Comfortable prioritising bugs and features, and is also extremely comfortable collaborating with technical resources to ensure the correct prioritisation of technical debt and technical improvements into squad processes and sprints
• Is comfortable generating user stories and acceptance criteria
• Can perform UAT, broader testing and sprint reviews
• Attending the relevant ceremonies and ensuring availability for the product squad for day-to-day questions, address any blockers and provision of product vision / guidance
• Can implement strong relationships across the squad; working very closely with developers, testers, project management and UX
• Integrate user research and data analysis into new product requirements, building an experience that your internal customers love
• Set and own various metrics related to your area and monitor the impact of new releases
• Comfortable running show and tells, generating release notes, presenting product progress and roadmaps to the Executive Board and wider stakeholders
• Communicate the product vision, concepts and ideas to the development team, providing context and the ‘why’ to upcoming features.
• Work with the product team, key stakeholders and other areas of the business to understand important problems facing our end users, exploring ideas to address them
• Be the voice of the customer within the squad, and build strong relationships with key stakeholders in order to effectively represent their needs
• Work with the stakeholders, Project Management and product team to agree candidates for release, communicating plans and progress to the business
• Contribute to the broader product culture at National Express: promoting an agile mind-set and a lean approach
• Play an active part in ensuring product uptime and high quality product experience for our customers

What we’re looking for…

• Minimum 3 years’ experience working in digital product, in a similarly fast paced and growing business.
• 1-2 years experience as a Product Owner, possibly looking to make a step into a more senior role, managing a highly visible and key product for our business.
• Agile and or Scrum experience.
• Knowledge of customer value drivers – understanding of the market and the needs of National Express users, and translating this into a robust Roadmap, underpinned by a pipeline of new features.
• Passionate about solving problems for our internal and external customers
• Understands the Customer Experience landscape and is able to articulate key moments of the customer journey, and how these relate back to the product.
• Experience of taking products to market, and product maintenance, operational processes and continuous improvements. 
• Analytical problem solver – comfortable making decisions and knowing when to escalate 
• Experience within the transport sector desirable but not essential.
• Excellent communication skills – across technology and business stakeholders
• Strong commercial acumen and strategic thinking.
• Detailed and broad experience in managing multiple stakeholders, from various business functions and varying levels of seniority. 
• Must be flexible and adaptable to change.

In return, we offer a wide range of benefits such as…

• Competitive Salary
• 25 days annual leave entitlement
• Company pension
• Free travel
• Access to NX Health Bus
• Employee Assistance Programme
• Variety of deals and discounts available through NX online porta