Product Owner

Whip Around was born in 2016, originally to help freight companies in New Zealand tackle their paper-based compliance burden. It was whilst working for some of the globe’s largest freight companies, that we saw first-hand how much time paper was costing fleet managers every day. Within a year, the US market was calling loudly as Whip Around met a clear pain point for businesses with fleets. Whip Around now services customers from coast to coast in the US and around the world.

Team culture is at the heart of our success, with personal improvement being just as important as company outcomes. We now boast a senior leadership team with experience from numerous successful global businesses and continue to double down on our vision to bring simplicity and efficiency to fleet management and compliance.

**Our Values**

Each of us at Whip Around are committed to living and breathing our Values in everything we do. At Whip Around you will become part of a culture that’s committed to helping you become the best version of yourself. Whip Around is dedicated to our people

- Be the Best You
- Be the Driver
- Always Bring Value
- Manaakitanga

**Why this role is important to us**

Our people are key to our success. Building great solutions for our customers is at the forefront of everything we do. To help us continue to deliver customer value at speed, the Product Owner will work directly with our delivery squads. This is a critical role, acting as the glue that sits between our Product Management & Engineering teams. You will lead your squad to execute against our roadmap while working closely with key stakeholders to understand our roadmap.

**What success will look like**

- You will work closely with the wider Product Team (other Product Managers, Design & Product Marketing) and contribute to discovery, product strategy, product design, UX testing, and roadmap planning.
- You own and lead solution design for your product area, pulling in your squad, stakeholders, and customers as needed.
- You understand how to thin slice initiatives, ensuring continuous value being released to market and to our customers.
- You are the business point of contact for your squad, working to keep stakeholders informed of priorities and your squad connected to the bigger strategic business picture.
- You own your squads backlog, which includes: defining acceptance criteria, setting milestones & goals, prioritising work and planning market value releases.
- You foster a culture of making decisions based on data while leveraging the experience of specialists. You use metrics that provide valuable insights to business decisions.
- You understand that a healthy product balances enhancements, bug fixes, technical improvements and new features, your area's backlog will always reflect this.
- You will lead the squad to ensure that they are delivering to business objectives while continuing to meet the sprint goals you set, and along with engineering leadership will ensure that the squads performance is at optimal level.
- You will bring our engineers closer to the customer by setting up success measures for every initiative inline with our strategic objectives (with support from the wider Product Team), track them post release, gain buy-in from the squad, and share results with the product team.
- You ensure that your squad understands, plans for, and takes accountability for delivering to business outcomes and schedules.
- You and your squad own all aspects of the delivery, including planning and managing your own risks and dependencies.
- You ensure any new work we build and design for has collaboration & input from key technical leads in Whip Around.
- You facilitate and monitor the identification of risks and issues.
- You maintain a high level of communication to all interested parties on progress, scope, estimates, and roadblocks to delivering product value for your area.
- Your squad owns the production quality and operations of its deliveries and you support them in this where needed.

**Requirements**:
**Critical Competencies**

- Experience leading teams / squads to delivery value to customers (both product & technical outcomes).
- A love for solving problems and an ability to deeply empathise with customers and their business challenges.
- Strong stakeholder management - including being in the detail, unblocking, facilitation, communicating upwards & downwards, and being point of contact.
- Comfortable working close with engineers and being able to understand the basics of any technical implementation.
- Working in fast paced environment and being able to navigate towards outcomes.
- Strong JIRA experience (setting up boards, filters, reporting, etc).

**Experience**

- Tertiary qualification with a degree in a related field (or equivalent experience)
- 3+ years experience as a Product Owner/ Product Manager in an Agile environment
- SCRUM certification or Product Owner certification a bonus
- SAAS experience or working in tech en