VP Product Owner, Liquidity Management Platform

VP Product Owner, Liquidity Management Platform at Barclays

Embark on a transformative journey as VP Product Owner, Liquidity Management Platform at Barclays, where you'll spearhead the evolution of our digital landscape, driving innovation and excellence within Global Transaction Banking. This pivotal role involves harnessing cutting-edge technology to revolutionize our digital offerings, ensuring unparalleled customer experiences.

Are you ready to shape the future of the next-generation Liquidity Management Platform in one of the world’s leading financial institutions? We’re seeking a visionary Product Owner to join our dynamic Global Transaction Banking team. This is your opportunity to make a real impact, driving innovation, delivering market-leading solutions, and transforming how corporate clients manage their cash globally. As a Product Owner, you will act as the strategic voice of your product, balancing customer desirability, business viability, and technical feasibility. You will be instrumental in defining the vision, setting the roadmap, and guiding cross-functional teams to bring market-leading capabilities to life.

As a key member of our Product team, you’ll work at the cutting edge of financial technology, collaborating with world-class talent, and bringing bold ideas to life in a fast-paced, forward-thinking environment. If you’re passionate about building products that power the global economy, this is the role for you.

Role Purpose and Accountabilities

The core purpose of a Product Owner is to maximize the value of the product by defining a clear product vision, managing, authoring, refining, and prioritizing the Product Backlog. This involves balancing trade-offs across desirability, viability, and feasibility – ensuring the right thing is being built and prioritizing work based on business goals. You will act as the primary liaison between stakeholders and delivery teams, ensuring the product meets user/customer needs and delivers optimal value, while driving the execution of your product area/sub-journey with continuous improvement principles.

• Ensure Product Alignment with Business Goals: Align the product and its features with broader organizational objectives, driving value and contributing to the overall strategy through market research, customer feedback, and industry trend analysis.
• Communicate Product Vision to Delivery Teams: Clearly articulate the product vision and goals to delivery teams, inspiring them to understand and deliver the business value of each feature or user story.
• Develop Vision and Roadmap: Create a strategic vision and roadmap for your product(s)/journey(s), understanding and meeting business goals by specifying features and capabilities.
• Define OKRs: Establish cascading Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for your product(s)/journey(s).
• Drive Feature Refinement and Acceptance Criteria: Lead feature refinement efforts and own the acceptance criteria for capabilities and/or features.
• Create and Refine User Stories: Write clear, concise user stories with detailed acceptance criteria, refining them as needed for successful feature implementation.
• Manage the Product Backlog: Responsible for creating, maintaining, and prioritizing the product backlog, ensuring the highest value features are delivered first based on business needs, customer requirements, and organizational impacts, balancing risk mitigation and future-proofing.
• Act as the Voice of the Customer: Continuously gather feedback from customers and end-users to understand pain points and ensure the product meets their needs and improves overall experience.
• Collaborate with Stakeholders: Work closely with internal and external customers and stakeholders (e.g., business leaders, marketing teams) to gather requirements, define product goals, and ensure alignment with business objectives.
• Lead Agile Squads: Guide an agile squad comprising developers, business analysts, testers, and SMEs.
• Participate in Agile Events: Actively engage in sprint planning, daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, and retrospectives to maintain team alignment and focus.
• Acceptance Criteria Definition & Management: Review and accept or reject completed work during sprints, ensuring features meet agreed-upon criteria and deliver business value.
• Monitor Product Performance and Iterate: Regularly assess product performance using KPIs and customer feedback, adjusting the product backlog and roadmap to meet evolving needs. Manage ongoing readiness and 'run' activities of live products, including monitoring, governance, and approvals.
• Risk and Control: Manage risk, including identification, development of mitigation strategies, necessary escalation, and alignment between product management and control functions.

Skills and Certifications

To be successful in this role as a VP Product Owner, Liquidity Management Platform, you should possess the following skillsets and certifications:

• Skills: Agile methodologies, Strategic thinking, Lean portfolio management, Product development, Stakeholder management, Design thinking, Business strategy.
• Relevant Certifications: Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) certified Product Owner/Product Manager, Leading SAFe, Scrum Alliance certified Scrum Product Owner, Professional Scrum Product Owner, or its equivalent.

Vice President Expectations at Barclays

As a Vice President, you are expected to contribute to or set strategy, drive requirements, and make recommendations for change. This includes planning resources, budgets, and policies, managing and maintaining processes, delivering continuous improvements, and escalating breaches. You will lead collaborative, multi-year assignments, guiding team members through structured assignments, and identifying the need for other specializations. This role involves training, guiding, and coaching less experienced specialists and providing information that impacts long-term profits, organizational risks, and strategic decisions.

You will advise key stakeholders, including functional leadership teams and senior management, on functional and cross-functional areas of impact and alignment. Managing and mitigating risks through assessment is crucial, in support of the control and governance agenda. You must demonstrate leadership and accountability for managing risk and strengthening controls within your team's work. A comprehensive understanding of organizational functions is essential to contribute to business goals, collaborating with other areas to stay abreast of business activity and strategies.

Solutions will be created based on sophisticated analytical thought, comparing and selecting complex alternatives, requiring in-depth analysis and interpretive thinking to define problems and develop innovative solutions. You will adopt and include the outcomes of extensive research in problem-solving processes. Building and maintaining trusting relationships and partnerships with internal and external stakeholders is key to accomplishing business objectives, utilizing influencing and negotiating skills to achieve outcomes.

All colleagues are expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence, and Stewardship, along with the Barclays Mindset – to Empower, Challenge, and Drive.

Key skills/competency

• Product Ownership
• Agile Methodologies
• Stakeholder Management
• Product Vision
• Roadmap Development
• User Stories
• Backlog Prioritization
• Financial Technology
• Risk Management
• Digital Transformation