Product Owner

Standard Chartered Bank is seeking a Product Owner - Digital Banking to drive the vision, strategy, and execution of our digital banking journeys. In this role, you will work closely with cross-functional teams, including technology, design, and business stakeholders, to enhance customer experience and deliver innovative digital solutions. You will own the product backlog, prioritize features based on business value, and ensure seamless delivery in an Agile environment.
The ideal candidate has a strong background in retail banking, digital channels, and Agile product management, with expertise in mobile banking, internet banking, payments, and customer experience enhancement. You should be data-driven, customer-centric, and adept at navigating complex banking As a Product Owner in our cross-functional squads, you will drive the outcomes of the squad to deliver on their objectives and key results. You will build and prioritise the product backlog to achieve business goals and manage stakeholder relationships to align expectation, prioritisation and overall product roadmap.

Strategy

The Product Owner:

• Is empowered with necessary business levers to influence real outcomes.
• Is responsible for owning the product journey, vision across the entire product life cycle, from inception, validation, build, delivery, run & iteration.
• Maintains a commercial lens over the product, understand and communicate with relevant stakeholders on the commercial performance metrics and viability of products.
• Is accountable for creating a transparent, clear, and easy to understand product vision.
• Owns the ‘WHY’ and ensure all members of the squad understand and embrace the vision & mission. The why should be closely aligned to the organization’s overall goals and ambitions.
• Inspires the squad to continuously thrive in a growth mindset.
• Sets goals for the squad and create actions plans to target.
• Owns, maintains & constantly optimizes the product roadmap & product backlog.

Business

The Product Owner:

• Leads and embeds a culture of evidence-based decision making.
• Conducts regular design sprints to fill the product backlog with customer validated and business viable features & initiatives.
• Leverages design thinking and customer jobs-to-be-done frameworks to synthesize and identify themes or opportunities.
• Conduct customer interviews to capture customer voice and verbatim feedback.
• Where required, produce lo-fi prototypes and conduct usability studies to find resonance with customers.
• Utilize a discovery canvas to bring discovery storytelling to life within a standardized structure.
• Embeds an MVP culture into the organization, consider how might we test and learn with minimal investment and development.
• Ensures that squad leverages existing investments & where necessary build out technical solutions that are complementary, scalable & cost efficient.

Product Delivery & Execution

• Drive the breakdown of complex Epics into clear actionable User Stories which are deeply aligned with business value, ensuring transparency and clarity throughout the development process.
• Set the standard for backlog readiness by ensuring each backlog item is backed by a robust Definition of Ready (DOR)/Definition of Done (DOD) criteria, providing clarity, defining expectations and measurable goals for the team to deliver.
• Engage in continuous backlog refinement in order to maintain a healthy backlog which is aligned to BRP, ensuring product backlog items are clearly defined, prioritised and meet the Definition of Ready (DOR), keeping teams focused on high-impact tasks.
• Engage in continuous backlog management by regularly prioritising backlog items whenever new insights or information is uncovered.
• Responsible for ensuring user stories are written with clear narratives and acceptance criteria by applying best practices like INVEST principles and Gherkin language to ensure backlog items are actionable, aligned and business goals and unambiguous in their requirements.
• Collaborate closely with technical teams to manage risk, balance feature requirements with regulatory constraints, and reduce the likelihood of costly rework, ensuring technical debt is kept under control.
• Balance functional and non-functional requirements, ensuring that every backlog item reflects the full scope of both customer and technical needs, with a clear strategy to mitigate potential issues or technical debt.
• Accountable to sign off on the delivery of the backlog items, ensuring each sprint backlog item meets the Definition of Done (DOD) criteria and aligns with business goals, and each product increment delivers value and meets high-quality standards.
• Collaborate as a core member of the squad, be present and actively drive and participate in key ceremonies including but not limited to backlog refinement, sprint planning, and sprint reviews to ensure alignment, transparency, and continuous improvement across the board.
• Ensure there is handshake and seamless alignment from other Product Owners to manage dependencies across product backlogs, driving coordinated roadmap execution and ensuring dependencies are acknowledged and addressed early in the process.

• Ensure transparent planning, tracking, and communication of progress and product value through our enterprise tools like ADO, Confluence and Clarity.
• Take ownership of proactive risk management for all product features, identifying, mitigating, and communicating potential risks early to ensure smooth execution and timely delivery including but not limited to GRAM and CRA.
• Initiate the Solution Intent (SI) in collaboration with tech teams for Chapter 1, ensuring its completion through clear alignment, while monitoring progress and offering support across Chapters 2 and 3.
• Partner with Supply Chain Management (SCM) to manage vendor relationships and maintain the procurement process, ensuring ownership aligns with the nature of the engagement: business-owned engagement (e.g., vendor-led training, industry reporting) to be handled by PO, and technology-owned engagements (e.g., technical services such as Google or Apple push notifications) to be managed by respective technology owners.

Product Analytics

The Product Owner:

• Clearly aligns squad OKRs & KPIs with stakeholder and senior management, ensure these objectives and targets are well understood and aligned to the nature of your product.
• Communicates and embed the OKRs and KPIs into every aspect of the product life cycle.
• Identifies and maps the data sources required to validate and measure the performance of the features.
• Performs post implementation review with squad, define measurement windows and prepare necessary data & metrics.
• Ensures the data is made available for analytics through collaboration with analytics & data technology teams.
• Ensures that customer journeys are embedded with the instruments to obtain usability metrics and customer behaviors.
• Continuously monitor dashboards and reports to feed product discovery sprints

Processes

• Oversee product lifecycle activities, ensuring adherence and alignment to Enterprise Software Delivery Lifecycle (eSDLC), Change Delivery Standards (CDS), and other governance standards.
• Awareness and understanding of the regulatory framework in which the Group operates, and the regulatory requirements and expectations relevant to the role.

People & Talent

• Coach & mentor squad members to continuously uplift capability
• Foster a culture based on trust, psychological safety & collaboration.
• Lead through example and build the appropriate culture and values. Set appropriate tone and expectations from their team and work in collaboration with risk and control partners.
• Employ, engage and retain high quality people.
• Responsibility to review team capacity plans to ensure capabilities are released as per agreement with stakeholders.

Risk Management

The Product Owner:

• Is accountable for ensuring compliance and risk adherence of products and services, engage with stakeholders to ensure necessary controls are adhered to and approvals are obtained.
• Identifies all risks and issues that may impact project viability. Track, manage and report them as per the Bank’s standards.

Governance

• The Product Owner is responsible for to adherence to Bank policies on Project management, investment, solution design, planning, structure, frameworks.

Regulatory & Business Conduct

• Display exemplary conduct and live by the Group’s Values and Code of Conduct.
• Take personal responsibility for embedding the highest standards of ethics, including regulatory and business conduct, across Standard Chartered Bank. This includes understanding and ensuring compliance with, in letter and spirit, all applicable laws, regulations, guidelines and the Group Code of Conduct.
• Effectively and collaboratively identify, escalate, mitigate and resolve risk, conduct and compliance matters.
• Effectively implement the regulatory requirements from stakeholders.

Key stakeholders

• Group Digital Banking Management Team
• Country and Region Digital teams
• Group / Region COO
• Country Wealth and Retail Banking (WRB) Leads
• Group TTO
• Group SC Design Team
• Control Functions – OR, ICS, BRM

• Business Analysis
• Communication
• Project Management
• Product Ownership
• Data Analytics

• Education - Graduate
• Certifications - Certified Scrum Product Owner (Cspo)
• Languages - English
• 10+ year experience and proven knowledge in the customer interaction channels, especially Mobile Banking, Online Banking, ATM, Interactive Voice Response, Wearables or any other digital channels or devices.
• 10+ years in Agile as a Product Owner (or a similar role), strong skills of maintaining and prioritizing a backlog.
• Deep understanding of industry trends and client needs, ability to create a value proposition and a squad vision.
• Strong business acumen.
• Demonstrated track record of leading teams to deliver objectives.
• Previously coached and mentored team members with regular feedback sessions.
• Previously defined product requirements and development roadmap based on functional expertise.
• Strong prioritization and analytical skills to manage backlog for the squad.
• Strong communication skills to synchronize tasks, clarify requirements and delivery expectations with stakeholders.
• Good to have knowledge of design thinking frameworks, user stories, customer experience and journeys.

We're an international bank, nimble enough to act, big enough for impact. For more than 170 years, we've worked to make a positive difference for our clients, communities, and each other. We question the status quo, love a challenge and enjoy finding new opportunities to grow and do better than before. If you're looking for a career with purpose and you want to work for a bank making a difference, we want to hear from you. You can count on us to celebrate your unique talents and we can't wait to see the talents you can bring us.

Our purpose, to drive commerce and prosperity through our unique diversity, together with our brand promise, to be here for good are achieved by how we each live our valued behaviours. When you work with us, you'll see how we value difference and advocate inclusion.

Together we:

• Do the right thing and are assertive, challenge one another, and live with integrity, while putting the client at the heart of what we do
• Never settle, continuously striving to improve and innovate, keeping things simple and learning from doing well, and not so well
• Are better together, we can be ourselves, be inclusive, see more good in others, and work collectively to build for the long term

In line with our Fair Pay Charter, we offer a competitive salary and benefits to support your mental, physical, financial and social wellbeing.

• Core bank funding for retirement savings, medical and life insurance, with flexible and voluntary benefits available in some locations.
• Time-off including annual leave, parental/maternity (20 weeks), sabbatical (12 months maximum) and volunteering leave (3 days), along with minimum global standards for annual and public holiday, which is combined to 30 days minimum.
• Flexible working options based around home and office locations, with flexible working patterns.
• Proactive wellbeing support through Unmind, a market-leading digital wellbeing platform, development courses for resilience and other human skills, global Employee Assistance Programme, sick leave, mental health first-aiders and all sorts of self-help toolkits
• A continuous learning culture to support your growth, with opportunities to reskill and upskill and access to physical, virtual and digital learning.
• Being part of an inclusive and values driven organisation, one that embraces and celebrates our unique diversity, across our teams, business functions and geographies - everyone feels respected and can realise their full potential.