Lead - Product Owner

POSITION SUMMARY

The Agile Practitioner (AP) will be a key coach for squad(s); they are responsible for performing a servant-leadership role and involved in coaching, mentoring, and training the squad(s) on agile and lean practices to help squads scale.  AP will collaborate with internal and external stakeholders to communicate transparently and adhere to Agile values, principles, practices.  With the use of sprit of scrum, good judgment and skill, the AP will evolve Chubb’s agile practices to influence development and delivery approaches that will help the squad (s) mature their planning and manage work/domains.

Agile Practitioner will be supporting Squad Owners (also known as Product Owners) and Domain Leads (Product Managers) for overseeing concurrent high visibility work/domains by utilizing agile methods in fast paced changing environment(s) to ensure squads are able to deliver projects with flexibility whilst maintaining an acceptable level of predictability.  AP will work closely with squad(s) to support and encourage self-organization to coach squad members towards driving Product and Engineering excellence via an agile mindset that will help the squad(s) identify and resolve blockers and risks for improved delivery and demonstrate a collaborative approach to mitigate impediments with the Engineering Leads, Domain Leads, Principal Engineers and Squad Owners.

Agile Practitioner must be able to use their knowledge and experience to identify traditional project management principles and practices versus an Agile development approach in the right proportions for the organization to enable squad (s) to achieve a high level of performance and quality in delivering a variety of development and operational work/domain(s).

ESSENTIAL JOB RESPONSIBILITIES

• Team Building – Promote and support high performing squad(s) with diverse capabilities, who are aligned in their intentions to achieve Objectives and Key Results(OKRs). Encourage a respectable, repeatable, and sustainable relationship between squad members to push the squads to learn about themselves, each other and how to best work together towards excellent levels of quality.
• Servant Leadership –Utilize different team building and personality models to motivate diverse personalities to effectively coach and train the squad(s) to relentlessly improve by applying enabling and empowering concepts towards self-organization for actualizing accountability of squad(s), delivering commitment(s), segmenting and parsing impediments that will lead towards improved transparent communication and collaboration.
• Squad Owner Support –Provide coaching and support to Squad Owners (Product Owners) in managing backlog for deliverables, facilitate squad engagement and ownership at key points within the delivery process to persevere or pivot and remaining calm and collected in high stress situations.
• Process Management and Improvement – Work with Engineering Leads, Domain Leads and Agile Chapter Lead to evolve and foster a well-defined Agile development process and governance structure to champion ongoing process improvements within development squads to embed best practice for an Agile development workflow including good communication, planning and collaboration.
• Facilitate Quarterly Release Planning (QRP) and Execution –Facilitate the QRP activities and empower the Squad Owner and Squad(s) to define scope and schedule. Support the execution towards expected delivery of value with the use of Agile ceremonies and methods to continually adopt the change and work towards relentless improvement.
• Predictability Improvement – Work with management and showcase the trend of quality, say do ratio, stakeholder feedback. Prepare action plan to improve the Cost of Poor quality with collaboration with Squads (Agile teams) and present the trend to the management.
• Coaching/Mentoring – Extend coaching support to the organization, actively participate and contribute to Agile Chapter, conduct training, mentor Associate Agile Practitioners, onboard and train new Agile Practitioners, assist squads in driving relentless improvement

POSITION ACCOUNTABILITIES

• Self-starter with demonstrated capabilities to coach and train 2-3 squads for managing progress and holding the squads accountable to their commitments.
• Excellent communicator to ensure development blockers and risk clarity for successful delivery; escalating these through the agreed governance structure for mitigation.
• Develop servant leadership attributes to drive the business needs to establish and maintain a high level of trust and confidence across the squads.
• Manage and resolve conflicts, facilitate discussion and proactively identifies opportunities to improve the efficiency of the domain/platform.
• Sustain and optimize planning and estimation for development work by having clear grasp of the squad’s skillset and availability.
• Serve with a growth mindset approach to honor others with energy and creativity, maintaining an ability to focus on detail whilst keeping the bigger picture in mind.
• Build inspired visions with confidence and motivation with the squads that can self-organize whilst continually and relentlessly improve on value delivery.
• Propel value via empowerment of positive and productive relationships with squads across the business, and stakeholders.
• Actively support the QRP and readiness of QRP, Scrum of Scrums and AP/PO sync ceremonies.

Qualifications & Job Requirements

• Overall 12-15 years of software industry experience
• 5+ years of experience working with cross-functional teams as a Scrum master
• Bachelor’s Degree in related field or equivalent experience
• SM certifications (PSM-I/II, PMI-ACP or similar)
• Preferred any scaling certifications like SAFe, LeSS
• Excellent presentation, written, and verbal communication skills
• Excellent mentoring skills
• In-depth experience with agile frameworks such as Scrum, Kanban, or SAFe
• Fluent and highly articulate communicator with excellent interpersonal and influencing skills
• Demonstrated ability to develop strong relationships with leaders, SMEs and peers to support OKRs
• Fluent with data-driven analysis and data visualizations for presentations
• Demonstrated experience with JIRA, Confluence and other development and product management tools
• Strong technical background in a software development environment to lead multi-discipline teams
• Excellent communication, facilitation and organizational skills