Product Owner

Role

The Product Owner role requires a self motivated, driven candidate with experience delivering technology projects in the financial services industry. They will have experience working with market risk, credit risk or collateral workflows and analytics either at a financial institution or a financial technology vendor. The role is based at the Cassini London office, and will report to the Head of Product.

The Product Owner role will require the ability to drive the project management and delivery of specific margin and collateral analytics projects. They will be able to produce business requirement documentation, define user stories / journeys and convert them into high level specifications for the projects they own. The Product Owner will be able to research and analyze complicated business use cases quickly and be able to translate these into a well defined project plan and set of high level requirements which can be read and understood by development, management and product teams using tools such as smartsheets, JIRA and Aha. They will have excellent communication skills and will be able to guide development teams and business analysts through their project plan to ensure that the full business requirements are met.

Specific responsibilities will include:

• Management of a team of Business Analysts, including prioritizing their workload, training them on Cassini functionality and use cases
• Take full ownership of margin and collateral analytics projects, from start to finish
• Produce project plans, project reporting metrics and project documentation to communicate with internal stakeholders
• Prioritize development work based on project planning and identified dependencies
• Define features and user stories in JIRA and understand dependencies on development items for project completion
• Work with Business Analysts to define specific requirements for individual user stories
• Prototype software features, using tools such as wireframes, user workflow diagrams or sample margin calculators
• Work alongside the QA team to define acceptance criteria and sign off development features as they are produced
• Work with external parties, such as clients and partners to define new use cases and features
• Communicate new feature releases to clients and document new functionality for end users
• Participate in industry working groups where relevant to the specific project they are working on
• Communicate new feature releases to internal stakeholders such as Support, Delivery and Product teams

Relevant Experience

A Product Owner will have a strong understanding of product management and working in Agile scrum teams. They will also have significant knowledge of the workflows and use cases for users of margin and collateral analytics, either pre- or post-trade:

• Experience working with cleared OTC, ETD or Bilateral derivatives
• Experience of Initial Margin and collateral workflows
• Experience of Repo, Stock Borrow Lend or other financing solutions
• Understanding of margin models and optimization algorithms
• Knowledge of either the buy-side or sell-side’s operating processes
• Strong working knowledge of JIRA and other project management tools
• Some python and VBA coding experience is preferable

Requirements

• Expert is project planning, including using tools such as Aha, JIRA and Smartsheets
• Expert in coordinating Agile development teams, and working using the Agile methodology to define software requirements
• Proven ability to define and run software development projects
• Problem-solving capability and the ability to convert a client problem into a technology solution
• Russell group university degree (2.1 or above) in relevant fields
• At least 5 years experience in a finance (bank / buyside) or technology solution provider in a Product Management role

Reporting Line

The Product Owner will report to the Head of Product