Product owner

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Contract type: 14 months fixed-term maternity cover with opportunity to extend

Working hours: Part or Full time (negotiable)

Remuneration: £50,000 to £70,000 depending on experience

Location: Flexible. Work remotely or from our London office. Occasional in-person meetings will require travel to London office.

Reporting to: Head of Product

Apply: The deadline for applications is 6pm Thursday 24 April. Apply with your CV through this Google form

Please do not apply if you do not have the right to work in the UK, we cannot support visa applications.


This is a rare, incredibly exciting and rewarding opportunity to join a high performing team and a rapidly expanding health tech scale-up, with a meaningful social mission.

We are looking for a confident, talented and motivated Product Owner to champion and manage a portfolio of our products, end to end; from vision to delivery. We want to find someone who will help us achieve our mission and evolve and scale our products and services in the public and private sectors, in the UK and Ireland and beyond.

We are open minded to the professional background and experience of candidates (hence the salary banding). We are always looking for people with energy and the right attitude, who are willing to apply and develop themselves within an area they are really passionate about.

Our current Product, Design and Engineering team includes 3 product owners, 1 content designer, 2 QA testers and software and data engineers. We’re committed to design and are also currently hiring a visual designer.

What we need from you

You will need to be a highly motivated self-starter - ready to take ownership of multiple projects. You will need to be self-organised, highly disciplined and feel comfortable working openly and
collaboratively to overcome or remove blockers.

You will be an expert at collating, synthesising and communicating user needs and defining scopes which meet the needs of multiple stakeholders/perspectives. You will be enthusiastic about creating positive social change, be user-focused, collaborative, hard- working and have a flexible approach suited to working within an agile fast-paced healthcare environment.

You will be a team player, and work in cross-functional teams, with designers, developers, other Product Owners and develop and maintain relationships with external stakeholders as well as with other key stakeholders within the organisation (inclusive of clinical, business development, data, operations and finance).

You will be user-centred and naturally inclined to put users at the centre of development, always looking at ways to ethically measure and iteratively improve the experience of service users and
internal users of our services and systems. You will embrace a design-led ‘build, test and learn’ approach and continuously seek optimisation.

Key responsibilities

  • Work day to day with engineering teams to continuously release new features, improvements and fixes

  • Work closely with the Head of Product and VP of Engineering to define and nurture product vision and strategy

  • Write up project pitches and lead product development projects in-line with Basecamp’s Shape Up process

  • Take ownership of and manage delivery team backlogs to define scopes in order to meet deadlines

  • Inject energy and freshness into team ceremonies

  • Have a user-centric approach to problems whilst maintaining a sharp focus on business strategy and aims

  • Work with our VP of Engineering, other POs and Dev Leads to ensure alignment of product and technology (including planning and prioritisation).

  • Work closely with designers and content designers to design solutions, specify requirements, support testing and prototyping and manage the delivery of assets and components

  • Engage with other departments to appreciate their needs as users of our software as well as involve them in the development of project pitches

  • Manage and oversee roll out plans inclusive of running training sessions for new features

  • Provide insight to colleagues on product performance

  • Foresee and mitigate challenges and issues

  • Generate detailed user stories and acceptance criteria

  • Personally UAT stories and work with QA engineers to ensure features are acceptable

  • Constantly review user feedback and analytics in order to optimise our products and improve user experiences

Experience

  • A demonstrable history as a Product Owner for at least 2 years

  • Working in a fast paced agile, start-up/scale up environment

  • Experience with a varied product portfolio (adding new features whilst optimising/maintaining existing ones)

  • Working within a multidisciplinary team of designers, researchers, developers - as well as collaborating with colleagues across the entire organisation

  • Write acceptance criteria that support software development and QA

  • Well versed with agile methodologies, including Shape up, Kanban

  • Confident leading team ceremonies (standups/planning/retrospectives)

  • Demonstrable experience of working with senior internal and external stakeholders

  • Experience and confidence in managing complex priorities and backlogs

  • Exposure to/management of ecommerce products and services

  • Experience completing UAT and supporting QA

Technical skills

  • Writing ACs and user stories

  • Gather requirements and define scopes

  • Backlog prioritisation, to maintain momentum and deliver to scope on time

  • Extensive experience with Agile software development tools (we use Shortcut), inclusive of analytics and performance metrics.

  • Will have, as part of a previous role, understood a complex user-facing or B2B application, capable of breaking down its features and architecture in a way non-technical employees could understand.

  • Practical experience working on multiple projects within a multidisciplinary team in a fast paced, iterative environment.

  • Basic skills and experience using tools to generate low-fi mockups/wireframes/flows (we use Miro, Figma, Whimsical and Excalidraw)

  • Remote working skills (we use Slack, Google Meet and Notion)

Soft skills

  • Ability to work confidently and collaboratively within a majority remote organisation

  • Excellent listening and communication

  • Highly collaborative

  • Align a cross-functional team in delivering value to our users and the business

  • Quick to learn

  • Attention to detail, inquisitive and observant

  • Ability to manage expectations of internal and external stakeholders

  • Recognising, sharing and celebrating success

  • Have an awareness of what it means to work within healthcare, to be responsible for delivering services that protect and support users particularly those who may be more vulnerable

Character and personality

  • A good listener, honest critic and imaginative problem solver

  • A willingness to get stuck in and be hands-on

  • Patient

  • Disciplined, organised and thorough

  • Ability to keep calm and think rationally under pressure, and react quickly and efficiently to change

  • Drive and determination to always get the job done, and willingness to go the extra mile to do so

  • Alignment with our mission and organisational values

Nice to have, but not essential

  • A relevant degree

  • Experience of working with OKRs or similar objective based frameworks

  • Experience of working within the healthcare sector

  • Experience using/managing a CMS

  • Background in design, software engineering, ecommerce (conversions, performance, UX and analytics), technical writing or business management

What you’ll get from us

We are always interested in upskilling our employees, and are flexible in ways to do it: be it courses, books, onsite or remote learning with a colleague - whatever suits the situation best. If there is a particular skill or product you would like to work on and improve, we’ll always try to accommodate you.

We’re also keen to allow the team to work in the way they want - you can choose the OS of your machine, your chair, standing desk, dual monitors etc. If there is anything you need, don't be afraid to ask.

As well as remuneration in the region of £50-70k based on experience, SH:24 provides a number of other benefits, including 25 days of annual holiday (in addition to the days between Christmas and New Year), truly flexible working, excellent pension contributions and life insurance.

Interview process

The SH:24 interviews will be held from Friday 25 April with the process as follows:

  1. 15 minute ‘get to know you’ video interview with a member of the Product team

  2. 60 minute face to face or video call interview, with a small panel, where we will ask you to present a prepared exercise

  3. 15 minute follow-up interview with a senior member of the team

How to apply

The deadline for applications is 6pm Thursday 24 April. If you are interested in joining our product team, please apply with your CV through this Google form.

Working at SH:24

SH:24 is a pioneering online sexual and reproductive health service, delivered in partnership with the NHS. We make it easy for people to self-manage their sexual and reproductive health online by providing free STI test kits, contraception and treatment, information and advice - 24 hours a day. We’ve won a host of awards and industry recognition for what we do, and we’re happy to say that our reach and services offered are expanding every day.

We are not-for-profit and passionate about delivering discreet, convenient and clinically safe sexual health services. Our vision is to make it easier and faster for people to access sexual and reproductive health services, no matter where they live; we’ve been doing it since 2013. We’re also proud of our community and the people who work for us; those who have helped us shape a company that puts our users at the heart of everything we do by designing services that are easy to use, easy to access and easy to understand by all that need them.

As an employer, SH:24 is committed to inclusivity.

We want to increase representation of currently under-represented groups to make SH:24 more diverse. Our aim is to build an inclusive team, where everyone is able to be themselves at work and feel supported, empowered, valued, respected, fairly treated and able to achieve their full potential. As an inclusive employer we will not tolerate discrimination.