Product Owner

The Role

At Unite Students our aim is to create a Home for Success for our students, using technology and data to empower them to find their home and have a great stay with us, and a great experience throughout their student life.

As a Product Owner you will deliver the vision of the product, translating stakeholder objectives into defined, innovative solutions that best meet customer needs and business requirements. You will take a hands-on approach to provide direction and leadership to the product team, ensuring sprints deliver measurable value to customers and the business as a priority, with clearly articulated goals and outcomes. You will communicate plans and progress in a highly effective manner, and will work with engineering teams and UX to adapt and overcome challenges. Additionally, you will drive the strategic direction by shaping a roadmap and delivering initiatives that create the most value for customers, utilising customer insights to guide the strategy for the product and the roadmap.

What You`ll Be Doing

• Ensure the delivered features meet the required level of quality and needs of the customer.
• Be the champion of customer experience, collaborating with User Experience and your squad(s) to craft features and user stories.
• Define a strategic roadmap taking into consideration MVP, prioritisation, and dependencies. Build a product roadmap which clearly delivers against agreed OKRs.
• Be available to the squad and engaged in progress, adapting to emerging change to overcome obstacles and blockers.
• Responsible for day-to-day management and prioritisation the product backlog to meet team-defined definition of ready and definition of done.
• Gather and work with customer research, User Experience, and Insight to put customer value at the heart of decision making. Collect customer insight on the customer problems that are being solved and constantly improve this based on feedback and data.
• Work collaboratively with the Product Manager and with all relevant areas of the business to ensure adoption and advocacy of the products and features. Organise and lead workshops and meetings with stakeholders to align on requirements, gain feedback and showcase your team s work.
• Define measures of success and effectively communicate performance (including risks) to the wider business and Senior stakeholders. Ensure all decisions are data-driven including multi-variant testing; create customer and business value-focused dashboards.
• Ordering and maintaining the product backlog to ensure there is a healthy supply of development tasks that are prioritised.
• Review the effort required to deliver a feature and include this in the prioritisation of work for the team.
• Remove any impediments to the successful delivery of features and products.

What We`re Looking for in You

• Proven experience as a Product Owner within a highly productive and fast-paced agile environment.
• Excellent communication skills, including inspiring trust and influence, communicating information in a clear and commercial manner, adapting style for different audiences, and the ability to articulate and rationalise reasoning to the team without impacting morale.
• Experience of working with Digitally Native end customers, ideally with knowledge of Gen Z and/or Gen Alpha.
• Experience of working mobile-first in relation to feature design with demonstrable exposure to UX.
• Experience running AB and MVT tests as part of a CRO programme and user flow optimisation.
• Effective use and application of data and insight to guide decisions on interaction behaviour.
• Commercial channel management/contributor, experience delivering to OKRs.
• Management of third-party suppliers, agencies, and stakeholders.
• Cross platform development experience.

What You`ll Get in Return

• A discretionary annual bonus so you can share in the company`s success
• 25 days` paid holiday and an annual holiday buying scheme, with 5 additional days awarded for long service
• A generous pension scheme - employer contributions between 5% and 11% depending on how much you save
• Various benefits to support your health and wellbeing including a Healthcare Cash Plan, an Employee Assistance Programme, a Wellbeing platform and a Gym benefit that you can share with your family and friends
• Enhanced Family Leave including 18 weeks full pay for birthing parents and 4 weeks for non-birthing parents
• Lots of other great benefits including an annual ShareSave scheme, Employee Life Assurance, a discounts portal and more!

About Unite Students

Founded in 1991, Unite Students is a FTSE 100 business and the UK`s leading provider of purpose-built student accommodation. You can find us in 25 leading university towns and cities, with 74,000 students calling US home! We are driven by our values, culture, and a commitment to develop diverse and inclusive teams, filled with positive energy and new ideas.

Instinctive inclusion. We know that to create and maintain a happy healthy organisation, we have to work hard to ensure inclusion isn`t just what we do but who we are.

People make Unite Students. Employees, students and neighbours all contribute to building environments where we can all thrive.

Room for Everyone

We`re proud to be an employer that embraces individuality, and we`re passionate about building inclusive teams. We focus on creating a collaborative culture where you can be you, where your voice is heard, and where you can truly belong. We take great pride in being rated Gold Investors in People and are constantly striving to provide the highest standard of learning and development opportunities and professional pathways for our people. Building a home for success, for both our employees and students, requires exceptional people with a passion for creating room for everyone, doing what`s right, keeping US safe, and raising the bar. Join us as we build better experiences for students that live with us.

We are US.