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C2-Senior Product Management Analyst
Pearson
Harlow, , United Kingdom
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Description
Educating 100 million people worldwide and with offices in over 30 countries, Pearson is the global leader in educational publishing and qualifications, providing high quality qualifications and print and digital resource programmes to help students of all ages learn at their own pace, in their own way.
The ELT channel, part of the Pearson English line of business (LOB), is the word’s largest ELT publisher and offers resources that are uniquely placed to provide an engaging, robust and high quality choice for many learners and centres. Our publishing teams create a range of teaching and learning resources for deliverers and students of EFL education wherever whenever. Resources include print, blended and e-learning formats.
Qualifications
Purpose of the role
Reporting to the Product Manager, owns and manages the development of assigned ELT products in the Pearson English Institutional product portfolio. The focus of this role is on the LOB’s deliverables and timescales to meet customer needs, ensuring that a pragmatic approach is taken to achieve the delivery of the product Roadmap.
Key Accountabilities:
• Managing the backlog – With input from key stakeholders and the Product Manager, the product owner has the primary responsibility to prioritise, build, prune, and maintain the backlog, including:
◦ User stories
◦ Defects
◦ Refactoring, optimising and management of the technical debt
◦ Input into the assessment of pre-backlog initiatives
• Driving the iterations – Including, but not limited to:
◦ Participate, contribute and add value to the sprint planning meeting
◦ Participate, contribute and add value in Triage meetings
◦ Participate, contribute and add value to Release planning meetings
◦ Elaborating stories on a just-in-time basis with the team
◦ Ensuring that Acceptance Criteria are defined for each story
◦ Accepting stories into the backlog
◦ Accepting the sprint
• Co-planning the release – Working with the Technical Project Manager, Project Manager, other Product Owners, the Product Manager and Service Manager, the Product Owner is accountable for frequent, reliable, and continuous release of value-added product to the customer.
• Scope and acceptance criteria definition and management of the sprint deliverables – Responsible for ensuring that the delivery team has all the information required to successfully deliver the sprint backlog.
• Overall quality of the Product.
Key interfaces/stakeholders:
• Development Teams
• QA managers
• Technical Project Managers
• Architecture Owner
• MEL Commercial lead
• Project Manager
• Product Manager
• Pearson English Content, Technology, UX, Commercial and Customer Service teams
• Pearson CIO teams
• Geography teams
• Customers
• Suppliers
• Key Challenges:
◦ Prioritizing product backlog to ensure delivery on quality, time and budget while satisfying the needs of a variety of stakeholders.
◦ Working within an international, cross-team matrix structure and (as appropriate), across different Pearson operating companies, to ensure good communication and effective decision-making.
◦ Understanding of the educational digital market place, competing digital products, and how to build competitive digital products and services for the ELT market.
◦ Communication. Ability to articulate clearly and effectively technical and functional issues to a range of colleagues and third parties with a wide range of technical understanding.
◦ Collaboration and teamwork. Ability to work effectively and flexibly with a variety of internal project team members and other stakeholders
◦ Influencing: challenge assumptions. Effective in managing change and ambiguity
Experience:
◦ Essential
# Experience working with enterprise systems and platforms for online learning and assessment
# Experience working in dynamic Agile environments
◦ Desirable
# Publishing experience
# ELT Domain Knowledge
Competencies:
◦ Excellent technical understanding of online technologies, and learning management systems. Effective scope triage requires the constant evaluation of technical, functional, performance, and user-value trade-offs for effective decision making.
◦ Understanding of Service Oriented Architecture.
◦ Fluent in Programme, Portfolio and Project Management methodologies.
◦ Fluent in Agile methods, preferably SCRUM or Scaled Agile Framework.
◦ Stakeholder management.
◦ Outstanding communications skills at all levels of the organization.
Personal Style and Behavior:
◦ Trustworthy: Since the primary responsibility for prioritising and managing the backlog falls to this role, the most essential attribute of the product owner is trustworthiness. The teams have to trust the Product Owner to make the hard calls on scope triage and to defend their interest in quality and functionality; the Product Managers have to trust the product owner to faithfully represent their feature priorities to the teams. The keys to building trust in this role include:
# Transparency
# Honesty
# Meeting commitments
• o Communication, networking and influencing skills – work effectively with colleagues in business units across Pearson and to manage effectively in a matrix structure. The Product Owner is the “glue” that binds the product management function and all the other project stakeholders to the development team. Doing so requires good communication skills as the Product Owner translates user and business objectives into the level of detail suitable for implementation.
#
# Relationship building – build effective relationships with internal colleagues and external partners
# Decision-making skills – ability to work independently in driving and making key strategic and practical decisions. The Product Owner must be able to make decisions, every day, in the presence of far-from-perfect knowledge. This requires empowerment, courage, and the ability to admit when one is wrong.
# Managing ambiguity – ability to work confidently and effectively in complex, changing and ambiguous situations.
Commitment to Excellence – This includes excellence in both the work you do and the deliverables you produce (reports, presentations, demos, etc.) as well as the details of the product itself.