Acquisition & Onboarding Product Owner

Job Description

Purpose of the role

The purpose of a Product Owner is to maximize the value of the product by defining a clear product vision (are they setting the vision or would this align to ), managing authoring, refining and prioritizing the Product Backlog balancing trade-offs across desirability, viability and feasibility – making sure the right thing is being ‘built’, and prioritising work based on business goals. They act as the primary liaison between stakeholders and delivery teams, ensuring the product meets user/customer needs and delivers optimal value. Product Owners are responsible for developing a roadmap and driving execution of their product area/sub-journey, applying continuous improvement principles and techniques.

Accountabilities

• Ensure Product Alignment with Business Goals: Ensure that the product & its features are aligned with broader objectives, driving value and contributing to the organization’s overall strategy. Utilisation of market research, analysis of customer feedback and monitoring of industry trends to identify new products, features or enhancements.  

• Communicate Product Vision to Delivery Teams: Clearly articulate the product vision and goals to the delivery teams, ensuring they understand, align and are inspired to deliver the business value and purpose of each feature or user story.

• Create and Refine User Stories: Write clear, concise user stories with detailed acceptance criteria, refining them as needed to ensure the development team has all the necessary information to implement features successfully. 

• Agile Events: Participate in key Agile events such as sprint planning, daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, and retrospectives to keep the team aligned and focused on delivering the product backlog. 

• Managing the Product Backlog: Responsible for creating, maintaining, and prioritising the product backlog, ensuring the highest value features are delivered first, based on business needs, customer requirements and organisational impacts, balancing risk migration and future proofing against the product strategy. 

• Act as the Voice of the Customer: Continuously gather feedback from customers and end-users to understand their pain points and ensure that the product meets their needs and improves their overall experience. 

• Acceptance Criteria Definition & Management: Review and accept or reject work completed by the development team during sprints, ensuring that all delivered features meet the agreed-upon acceptance criteria and deliver business value. 

• Collaborate with Stakeholders:  Work closely with stakeholders (e.g., customers, business leaders, and marketing teams) to gather requirements, define product goals, and ensure that the product vision aligns with business objectives. 

• Monitor Product Performance and Iterate: Regularly assess product performance using KPIs and customer feedback, adjusting the product backlog and roadmap to improve functionality and meet evolving customer needs. Manage on-going readiness and 'run' activities of live products including monitoring, governance and approvals. 

• Risk and Control:  Managing risk, including identification of potential risks, development of strategies to resolve or mitigate and escalate as necessary those risks, and alignment between the product management and control functions.

Assistant Vice President Expectations

• To advise and influence decision making, contribute to policy development and take responsibility for operational effectiveness. Collaborate closely with other functions/ business divisions.

• Lead a team performing complex tasks, using well developed professional knowledge and skills to deliver on work that impacts the whole business function. Set objectives and coach employees in pursuit of those objectives, appraisal of performance relative to objectives and determination of reward outcomes

• If the position has leadership responsibilities, People Leaders are expected to demonstrate a clear set of leadership behaviours to create an environment for colleagues to thrive and deliver to a consistently excellent standard. The four LEAD behaviours are: L – Listen and be authentic, E – Energise and inspire, A – Align across the enterprise, D – Develop others.

• OR for an individual contributor, they will lead collaborative assignments and guide team members through structured assignments, identify the need for the inclusion of other areas of specialisation to complete assignments. They will identify new directions for assignments and/ or projects, identifying a combination of cross functional methodologies or practices to meet required outcomes.

• Consult on complex issues; providing advice to People Leaders to support the resolution of escalated issues.

• Identify ways to mitigate risk and developing new policies/procedures in support of the control and governance agenda.

• Take ownership for managing risk and strengthening controls in relation to the work done.

• Perform work that is closely related to that of other areas, which requires understanding of how areas coordinate and contribute to the achievement of the objectives of the organisation sub-function.

• Collaborate with other areas of work, for business aligned support areas to keep up to speed with business activity and the business strategy.

• Engage in complex analysis of data from multiple sources of information, internal and external sources such as procedures and practises (in other areas, teams, companies, etc).to solve problems creatively and effectively.

• Communicate complex information. 'Complex' information could include sensitive information or information that is difficult to communicate because of its content or its audience.

• Influence or convince stakeholders to achieve outcomes.

All colleagues will be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship – our moral compass, helping us do what we believe is right. They will also be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Mindset – to Empower, Challenge and Drive – the operating manual for how we behave.

Join us as an Acquisition & Onboarding - AVP Product Owner in Barclays' Acquisition and Onboarding business, to manage and develop existing and new products and/or services; and where applicable, ownership of related customer and colleague journeys, developing the product strategy, driving change through Barclays execution teams, making key decisions in the product lifecycle and owning associated outcomes for customers, colleagues and the bank, achieved through appropriate service level agreements, regulatory compliance, risk management and controls. This role specifically leads a technical Feature Team within the Current Account onboarding journey, accountable for delivery, control integrity and performance outcomes aligned to acquisition, risk and regulatory objectives.

Purpose of the Role

To lead a high-performing Agile Feature Team delivering onboarding journey outcomes, ensuring alignment to product strategy, customer experience, regulatory requirements and business performance, while providing people leadership to BA4 Product Owners.

To be successful as an Acquisition & Onboarding - AVP Product Owner, you should have:

Basic/ Essential Qualifications:

• Proven ability to develop customer-centric strategies, propositions and solutions that address customer needs while delivering commercial, operational and customer outcomes.
• Deep product and proposition expertise, acting as a Subject Matter Expert (SME) capable of advising stakeholders on customer onboarding journeys, product capabilities, features and roadmap priorities.
• Strong experience defining product strategy, proposition evolution and service improvements, translating strategic objectives into actionable delivery plans.
• Demonstrated ownership of Agile product delivery, including backlog prioritisation, sprint planning, roadmap management, dependency management and delivery tracking using Jira and Agile methodologies.
• Experience managing incidents, production issues and delivery risks, ensuring timely resolution and minimising customer, operational and reputational impact.
• Ability to assess product and journey enhancements for technical feasibility, legal and regulatory compliance, operational readiness and risk implications.
• Strong understanding of risk management principles, with experience embedding controls by design, identifying control weaknesses and leading remediation activities.
• Proficiency in monitoring and interpreting product performance metrics, including acquisition performance, customer engagement, usage trends, customer feedback and control effectiveness to drive continuous improvement.
• Excellent stakeholder management and influencing skills, with a proven track record of collaborating across Product, Technology, Risk, Compliance, Operations and other business functions to deliver outcomes.
• Experience leading, coaching and developing Product Owners or equivalent roles, including objective setting, capability development, performance management and fostering high-performing teams.
• Strong experience managing launch and release readiness activities, including User Acceptance Testing (UAT), Limited Customer Pilot (LCP) execution, implementation planning and production deployment support.
• Understanding of supplier-integrated product delivery and third-party governance, including management of external partners such as KYC providers, credit reference agencies and other strategic suppliers.
• Strong analytical, decision-making and problem-solving capabilities, with the ability to balance customer needs, business objectives, regulatory requirements and delivery constraints.
• Comfortable leveraging AI-enabled tools to enhance product analysis, backlog refinement, documentation quality, insight generation and delivery efficiency, while maintaining accountability, ownership and professional judgement for all outputs.

Desirable skillsets/ good to have:

• Experience in product management/ownership
• Experience in digital product design
• Experience with Agentic AI, Spec Driven Development, Rapid Prototyping etc..

You may be assessed on the key critical skills relevant for success in role, such as experience with Knowledge of product management/ownership ,digital product design,Agentic AI, Spec Driven Development, Rapid Prototyping etc.

This role will be based out of Pune.