Product Owner SAP Finance

As a Product Owner – (SAP Finance) based in the Amsterdam office you will be part of the Core Applications IT team. You will be the single point of contact for our business departments and serve as the subject matter expert for the capabilities SAP can offer to enable improved finance business processes for our finance departments. You will ensure that the Product Roadmap is continuously updated, and epics and user stories are prioritized and ready in time for the development teams to deliver on. You will manage the teams from our IT Vendor to ensure they deliver up to standard. As a product Owner you are responsible for the run (AM) and the Change (AD) of your domain.

Together with the other PO’s you will align on dependencies and contribute to improvements on our (agile) way of working. On the roadmap you will balance the need for new or improved business functionality and improvements needed for the run and compliance.

Product Owners (POs) is the content authority for the team level of the Scaled Agile Framework. The PO is responsible for the team backlog, writing, prioritizing, and accepting user stories, and representing the customer to the Agile team. They optimize return on investment by ensuring that the Scrum team members are engaged in delivering the most valuable product features.

The Product Owner is responsible for defining user stories and prioritizing the Team Backlog. This role is responsible for streamlining the execution of Portfolio priorities while maintaining conceptual and technical integrity of the Features or components the team is responsible for. They have a significant role in quality control and is the only team member empowered to accept stories as done. Product Owner will decided in the Change Advisory Board (CAB) on the go-no go of every bi-weekly deployment.

The role has significant relationships and responsibilities outside the local team, including working with Business / Stakeholder Management to prepare for the Portfolio Board EPIC Backlog, actively participating in Synch meetings (Core Applications planning meetings, scrum of scrums, demo’s, retrospectives, etc.) and steer on delivering Business value by our solutions.

Key Roles and Responsibilities

• Provide vision and direction to the Agile development team and business stakeholders;
• Plan and prioritize product feature backlog and development for the product;
• Fully understand the product vision, roadmap and growth opportunities to enable onward articulation into the development team;
• Assess value, prioritize backlog items based on this value, time, and other team dependencies determined and refined in the planning meeting, to ensure focus on those with maximum value that are aligned with the company’s goals and product strategies;
• Provide backlog management, iteration planning, and elaboration of the user stories;
• Work closely with Portfolio Board member to create and maintain a product backlog according to business value or ROI;
• Provide an active role in mitigating impediments impacting successful team completion of release and Iteration goals;
• Establish story acceptance criteria, accepts stories into the baseline (Definition of Ready and Definition of Done);
• Keep abreast with ITIL/Agile/Scrum/SAFe best practices and new trends, and seek to relentlessly improve the operation of the Product Owner role;
• Align with business on high priority incidents and steer the AM and AD team to continuous improvements to decrease the number of incidents and service requests. Check and Approve Problem management tickets on quality of Root Cause Finding and see to the implementation of the Root Cause Solving.

About you

Education requirements

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent in Computer Science, Information Technology or related field;
• Scrum Agile Framework for the Enterprise (SAFe) Product Owner / Product Manager Certification or Professional scrum product owner (PSPO) or certified scrum product owner (CSPO);
• Implementing & Leading SAFe;
• Other SAFe certifications (e.g. SAFe Scrum Master, SAFe for Teams, SAFe DevOps, etc.) are a plus.

Experience requirements

• 5+ years of experience in leading an IT team in delivering business value;
• 3-5 years of experience as an agile scrum/PO;
• Demonstrated experience in distributed agile teams;
• Previous program or development management experience;
• Demonstrable planning experience;
• Relevant Agile coaching experience is a plus;
• Experience working in Agile approaches: Scrum, Kanban etc.;
• Experience in (senior) stakeholder management;
• Demonstrated experience managing teams and building and maintaining product roadmaps;
• Experience in an IT Run (AM) context and ITIL.

Skills required

• Applicable knowledge of the technologies and portfolio of the products used by the company;
• Demonstrable knowledge of product development in a relevant industry;
• Strong knowledge of the SAFe’s practices and its application/operation;
• Powerful communication skills, with an innate ability to say “no” in a way that will not discourage or upset the business;
• Effective conflict resolver;
• Team empowerer – through strong collaboration and knowledge brokering;
• Understand fundamentals of Agile development;
• Understand the value of commitments to delivery made by a development team;
• Understand incremental delivery and the value of metrics;
• Understand backlog tracking, burndown metrics, velocity, and task definition;
• Be able to relate to, and integrate with alternate development methodologies (e.g. waterfall);
• Be conversant in DevOps practices and understand the strong relationship and bi-directional dependency required with deployment teams.