Product Owner (4751)

Job summary

Join Social Security Scotland and help shape the products and services that support millions of pounds of benefit delivery across Scotland. Working with multidisciplinary teams and stakeholders, you'll lead product priorities, drive continuous improvement and ensure services deliver value for users, operations and the organisation.

You'll join a team delivering and enhancing business-critical products and services that support key operational and organisational priorities. Working across digital, data, policy and operations, you'll help ensure services remain effective, user-focused and aligned to legislative and business requirements. Areas of work may include fraud and error prevention, service assurance, debt management and recovery, and the delivery of wider products and services.

A Product Owner is the lead for the product team in their programme or service.

At this role level, you will:

• be as interested in managing people as managing products
• work closely with the head of product (where they exist as a separate role) to provide leadership and direction to all products in a programme or a local product community
• maintain the high level roadmap
• be involved in a range of programme management activities in support of the service owner or programme lead
• be involved in hiring associate product managers, product managers, senior product managers and contractors
• provide leadership in your programmes and across the local community

Job description

Agile Leadership and Ways of Working

• Coach and lead teams in Agile and Lean practices, implementing effective ways of working by adapting your approach throughout the product lifecycle and applying internal insight and external best practice to drive impactful outcomes.
• Act as a recognised advocate for Agile ways of working, driving continuous improvement, challenging thinking, introducing innovative approaches, and fostering organisational Agile maturity through collaboration across teams and wider digital and data communities to achieve better outcomes.
• Act as an escalation point for major operational issues.
• Maintain awareness of the wider digital economy, emerging technologies, and cross-sector practices, applying relevant insights to improve delivery.
  

Product Strategy, Vision and Value

• Set clear long-term vision and strategic objectives for your product portfolio, maintaining focus on priorities that deliver the greatest value and ensure products and services meet the evolving needs of the users across multiple channels..
• Understand the marketplace and user needs, building compelling business cases and clearly articulating the value of products to gain stakeholder buy-in.
• Ensure products are effectively adopted and deliver measurable benefits by aligning delivery to business cases and integrating products with wider services.
  

Delivery and Product Lifecycle Management

• Lead multidisciplinary teams across the full product lifecycle, selecting appropriate tools and techniques at each stage to optimise delivery and using experience to guide teams in delivering high-quality, user-centred outcomes..
• Identify, manage and mitigate risks across all stages of the lifecycle, while developing sustainable support models.
  

Problem Solving and Continuous Improvement

• Anticipate and define problems within a wider organisational context, clearly articulating issues and enabling others to develop strong problem-solving capabilities.
• Anticipate constraints, understanding when to challenge or remove barriers to enable delivery.
  

Leadership, Collaboration and Capability Building

• Influence, challenge and support stakeholders at all levels to drive timely and effective decision-making.
• Coach and develop others, contributing to the growth and assessment of teams and supporting their progression.
• Build capability across teams, fostering a culture of learning and continuous improvement.

Person specification

Success Profiles

We use an assessment framework called ‘Success Profiles’ which lists the elements we test and provides detailed descriptions of each. Find out more about the framework here.

For this post, the following Success Profile elements will be assessed:

Experience:

1. Product Discovery and Delivery Approach
   Experience leading multi-disciplinary teams to research and develop user-centred products and service blueprints, aligned with organisational strategy and the wider context. This includes adapting innovative and established approaches to achieve product or service outcomes.

2. Benefits Realisation and Value Proposition
   Experience defining, measuring and tracking product benefits, with the ability to clearly articulate and promote the product value proposition to a range of stakeholders. Understanding of how benefits and value align with Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) principles where relevant.
   

Behaviours:

• Leadership - Level 4
• Communicating and Influencing - Level 4
  

You can find out more about Success Profiles Behaviours here: Success Profiles: Civil Service behaviours - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Technical / Professional Skills:

This role is aligned to Lead Product Manager within the Government Digital and Data Profession.

These skills will be tested during the Technical Assessment if you are successful at sift stage. They will be not be assessed at application stage.

Please review the following to understand the skill expectations: Product Manager - Government Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework

Benefits

Annual Leave - You will receive 25 days annual leave on joining us. This will increase to 30 days after four full years of service. You will also have 11.5 public and privilege days of leave every year. We also offer Flexi-time. Any extra hours you've worked can be taken as leave when suitable.

A Civil Service Pension - This job comes with a Civil Service pension. New joiners to the Civil Service will join a career average pension scheme as standard. Read more here - www.civilservicepensionscheme.org.uk.

Healthy work life balance - We can offer the possibility of full-time, part-time, term-time, and job shares. We also encourage flexible working.

Discounts - You can enjoy a vast range of retail, travel and lifestyle discounts through our benefit scheme.

Personal support for you - Our Employee Assistance Programme gives you confidential, independent information and guidance 24/7.

Volunteering special leave - Up to six days paid special leave a year for volunteering. We support our staff to help causes important to them.

Great locations - Our bright and modern offices in the heart of Dundee and Glasgow have been designed with staff in mind. Both locations are ideal for public transp