Product Owner/specialist

You may have heard of Te Waihanga. We're small (but mighty) and haven't been around long by government standards. But our job is as big as it gets, helping New Zealand get the right infrastructure, whether it's transport connections that get us from a to b, water and power connections needed to support affordable homes, or schools and hospitals that support our communities.
This challenge is why we need you.
We're after a passionate Product Owner or Product Specialist to take a leadership role in the delivery, continuous development, and operation of our suite of analytics related products. This will include ownership of specific operational activities, including management reporting, and responsibility for ensuring policies, processes and procedures are followed and remain fit for purpose. This role is an exciting new position in the team where you'll help produce high value products that help inform and shape outcomes for generations to come.
What you'll do
In this role, you'll be a key member of a small, high-performing, and agile team pushing the boundaries in the analytics space. You'll work with the Director Data Science and Analytics to set a clear vision for each product and work closely with the development team to deliver upon these. You'll be flexible and a true allrounder, part business analyst, part project manager, part motivator and coach, have a good knowledge of technology solutions and development methods, coupled with an unwavering focus on delivering high value to the users of our tools. You'll be a natural champion of the products you look after and great at communicating and facilitating engagement and collaboration with a varied set of stakeholders who have real influence within the sector.

**You will**:

- Be able to manage requirements from elicitation to delivery.
- Have the nous to ask the right questions and challenge assumptions.
- Be detailed oriented, know how to prioritise, how to work at pace, and deliver minimum viable product (MVP) quickly.
- Have great negotiation skills and be able to work with a range of stakeholders
- Have experience working with developers, assigning work, and holding people and providers to account.
- Be grounded in agile principles and practices and have enough knowledge about technology to help ensure we get the most from our investments in data, and our cloud analytics infrastructure.

**Key responsibilities will include**:
**Product leadership including**:

- Working with the Director of Data Science and Analytics to define goals and a clear vision for assigned products and initiatives, including developing product roadmaps.
- Managing day to day development including providing clear objectives to the team, managing the task backlog, task prioritization, and removing blockers of progress.
- Management reporting on development progress and insights from the tools.

**Product delivery including**:

- Eliciting requirements from our users or prospective users through a variety of ways including facilitating workshops, meetings, surveys, or feedback forms. Ensure solutions continue to provide maximum value for users.
- Using agile principles and methods to manage, assign and track tasks, working with both internal and external, developers, data specialists and vendors to continuously develop and enhance our products.

**Operational delivery and support including**:

- Delivery and operation of the National Infrastructure Pipeline (Pipeline), the Infrastructure Priority List, and monitoring products, with the support of the team.
- Support delivery of key products from the broader Strategy group, including the New Zealand Infrastructure Strategy.

**Relationship and stakeholder management**:

- Work closely with stakeholders from across central government, local government, the private sector, and the analytics community to improve coordination and access to evidence and insights within the infrastructure sector.
- Delivering training or producing training aids to help users get the value from our products. Be a champion for the value our suite of tools deliver.

**To do this you will have**:

- Bachelor's degree or post graduate degree in software engineering, computer science, data analytics, statistics/mathematics, economics, engineering, or equivalent experience in another relevant field.
- Experience working in a software product or project development team.

**You will a high degree of skill**:

- Gathering requirements from the business and stakeholders, supported by a strong understanding of continuous integration and deployment.
- Producing high quality written content coupled with excellent verbal communication skills and a high level of ability to communicate complex analysis and systems in a clear, precise, and actionable ways.
- Rapidly coming up to speed with new tools and software.
- Solving problems using good intuition and instinct to test assumptions, identify consequences, and ask the right questions.
- Developing new relationships