Director, Product Owner

As a Director, Product Owner within the New Products & Activities team at National Bank of Canada, you will play a key role in driving strategic transformation initiatives across our Capital Markets business. Partnering closely with business, operations, compliance, technology, and risk stakeholders, you will lead complex, cross-functional initiatives from strategy through execution, ensuring the successful delivery of business outcomes, operational efficiency, and sustainable value.

Focus: Lead the optimization and modernization of the end-to-end onboarding experience for counterparties and clients across Capital Markets. This mandate focuses on streamlining processes, enhancing stakeholder and client experiences, reducing operational friction, and strengthening controls across multiple business lines and support functions. This highly visible initiative sits at the intersection of business transformation, process excellence, technology enablement, and regulatory requirements, offering the opportunity to shape the future state of client and counterparty onboarding at National Bank.

Your Job

• Communicate the business vision for the solution and own the achievement of expected business outcomes, value realization, and stakeholder adoption.
• Own business scope, priorities, and roadmap decisions, including the approval of scope changes based on value, strategic objectives, and business outcomes.
• Ensure business requirements are complete and signed off with stakeholders, clearly articulating the business need, objectives, and target users.
• Identify the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and define deliverables, breaking down scope into value-based increments and establishing business sequencing considerations.
• Maintain backlog health and oversee delivery governance, including the management of technical and architectural debt, validation of Definition of Ready and Definition of Done criteria, and confirmation that increments meet business needs.
• Ensure delivery decisions support business objectives, value realization, operational readiness, solution sustainability, and reusability, while validating that processes and time-to-market (T2M) standards are applied.
• Own business risks related to scope, value realization, stakeholder readiness, operational readiness, and solution adoption, providing business decisions, priority updates, value realization reporting, and risk assessments to governance forums.
• Own stakeholder engagement, requirements alignment, prioritization decisions, and change management, presenting increment priorities and changes clearly, mobilizing teams toward business outcomes, and ensuring Day 2 operational readiness.

Your Team

This position reports to the Managing Director in the New Products and Activities team within the Capital Markets sector. Our team consists of around 50 highly experienced, talented, and dedicated individuals and stands out for its strong collaboration, agility, and deep understanding of capital markets activities and operating models.

You will work closely with specialized experts (trading, risk solutions, operations), with strong visibility and fast learning on strategic, regulatory, and optimization initiatives.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s/Master’s degree and 10+ years of relevant Capital Markets experience.
• Strong expertise in the counterparty onboarding process (data, processes, regulatory requirements, etc.).
• Previous experience on large initiative, process optimization and senior executive management.
• Influential leadership, autonomy, and sound judgment; strong collaboration skills.
• Analytical mindset and strong organization; comfortable with ambiguity and under pressure.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Willingness to travel as needed.