Product Owner/Manager
Toronto, Ontario
DEVELOPMENT /
Full Time, Permanent /
Hybrid
The Opportunity
Univeris is embarking on a multi-year program of initiatives to transform our products and business to position us for growth in the Canadian wealth management industry driven by the new regulator CIRO. To ensure this transformation program's success, we seek an experienced software Product Manager to deliver new and enhanced products to market. Product Managers at Univeris bridge the gap between the business and product development to realize our corporate objectives. The role has significant interactions outside the product development team, including customers, marketing, internal stakeholders, product designers, software engineers and architects.
The Role
- Developing and maintaining a Product Roadmap in collaboration with product leadership to realize the goals of the product's vision and corporate objectives.
- Preparing product and business requirements documents to support product development initiatives.
- Defining and communicating relevant product requirements in collaboration with customers, business analysts and other stakeholders.
- Maintaining and prioritizing a sufficient backlog of ready-to-work backlog items to facilitate sprint planning, such as epics, user stories and tasks.
- Accepting user stories as being completed based on their established acceptance criteria and the definition of done. The Product Manager also fulfills a critical quality assurance function, focusing primarily on fitness for use.
- Planning and executing the launch strategy for each product release in collaboration with key stakeholders to ensure all teams are enabled.
- Proactively participate in release and product increment planning.
- Leading the product team members in writing stories, with accountability for maintaining a healthy backlog of stories.
- Ensuring user stories are "ready" for development to start work according to an established "definition of ready" in collaboration with the Product Team.
- Ensuring each user story has the necessary Acceptance Criteria defined in collaboration with the product team.
- Coordinating dependencies and activities with the entire Product Team as necessary to support "team-of-teams" initiatives.
- Sharing market information and business insights with the Product Team to give context to the requirements to help ensure that the team is solving the correct problems.
- Continuously developing relevant product domain expertise and sharing that expertise with the product team.
- Tracking progress toward program increment and release objectives and communicating to the organization.
- Defining new user personas as necessary in conjunction with the product team and user experience experts.
- Leading program increment planning activities for the product team.
- Participating in all Agile ceremonies with the product team, including daily standups, sprint planning, backlog refinement, demos and retrospectives.
- Collaborating with Scrum Masters to practice agility and capitalize on Scrum to maximize the product value and ensure continuous improvement.
- Presenting the work summary for the product team in sprint reviews and inviting appropriate stakeholders to give feedback.
- Contributing to and reviewing product release documentation, including user and technical guides.
- Assisting Product Marketing with creating product collateral, presentations and thought leadership articles.
- Continuously building and maintaining productive relationships with customers.
The Product Manager is associated with one or more cross-functional product teams and fulfills the primary accountabilities outlined below for all assigned products.
The Product Manager fulfills the following responsibilities for all assigned products and product capabilities:
The Successful Candidate
- 3-6 years of industry experience as a Product Manager in an Agile software development environment.
- Expert level understanding of Agile product management principles with Scrum.
- Working knowledge of the Atlassian suite (Jira & Confluence) or similar tools.
- Experience coaching and developing less experienced Product Managers.
- Leadership - proven ability to lead a high-performance team and deliver in a fast-paced and dynamic environment.
- Communication - able to clearly and concisely communicate in verbal and written form to both internal and customer stakeholders, with emphasis on understanding the customer's perspective.
- Organization - consistent and structured in managing information, documentation, agile boards and other artifacts produced.
- Learning agility - ability to quickly learn new business and technical concepts and apply them in delivering value.
- Experience working for an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) delivering B2B software products.
- Experience with regulatory organizations and frameworks, such as IIROC or the MFDA (CIRO).
- Proven ability to take on the leadership of large-scale enterprise software products and quickly develop expertise in that domain.
- Hands-on experience in the wealth management industry (ideally) or financial services.
- Pragmatic Marketing, CSPO or similar Product Management certifications.
- Experience trading stocks or making personal investment decisions.
Your Formal Qualifications
Your Proven Qualities
Extras You Might Offer As Tiebreakers
