Product Owner - Platform Engineering

At Elanco (NYSE: ELAN) – it all starts with animals!

As a global leader in animal health, we are dedicated to innovation and delivering products and services to prevent and treat disease in farm animals and pets. We’re driven by our vision of ‘Food and Companionship Enriching Life’ and our approach to sustainability – the Elanco Healthy Purpose™ – to advance the health of animals, people, the planet and our enterprise.

At Elanco, we pride ourselves on fostering a diverse and inclusive work environment. We believe that diversity is the driving force behind innovation, creativity, and overall business success. Here, you’ll be part of a company that values and champions new ways of thinking, work with dynamic individuals, and acquire new skills and experiences that will propel your career to new heights.

Making animals’ lives better makes life better – join our team today!

Position Description:

IT in Elanco is an evolving and growing space, with key focuses on improving the health of our estate and reducing friction for both IT and business. This role hones in on improving the health of our large application estate by creating tools to empower other product people to maintain their applications and on the rules of the estate at large to ensure best practices.

You will join a team of talented product owners and engineers to ensure existing applications are secure, reliable, and efficient. You will also be the face of our internal customers, partnering with them to solve the biggest challenges across our enterprise using everything from our discovery capabilities to inner-sourced application development.

A successful PO at Elanco is a highly motivated individual who is passionate about collaborative problem-solving and who proactively identifies opportunities and drives tangible outcomes. A strong combination of technical awareness and experience with Agile (specifically Scrum or Kanban) will be essential to the success of this role.

Product Description:

Over the past 5 years, Elanco IT has been on an incredibly exciting journey. Separating from our parent company and standing up on our own gave us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build a modern technology stack free of the burden of large-scale technical debt. We are now looking to take this one step further by leveraging newly established engineering capabilities to help Elanco deliver on customer needs faster than ever before. This is a great opportunity to drive a newly created engineering team, embed a strong Agile culture and practices, and tackle some of the largest challenges in Animal Health.

Responsibilities:

Delivery

• You will be in charge of a product suite that helps our application owners make smart decisions. This is a new workstream, but it has the backing of high-profile projects.
• Closely collaborate with key business partners to identify, shape and lead key engineering opportunities initially focused on application health and refine those into a clear/concise product backlog.
• Responsible for creating, reviewing, and refining User Stories, ensuring that they meet a Definition of Readiness (DOR), and acting as the day-to-day representative of this value.
• Manage stakeholder expectations to ensure the right outcomes are being met, decisions are made where needed, and risks are managed.
• Work out loud, clearly communicating across IT, including running product spotlight, sharing interactive updates, and allowing all the IT org to input and shape potential opportunities.
• Manage a product roadmap for our application products, providing a clear direction on future features, technologies, and opportunities.
• Facilitate frequent product demos to solicit feedback, recognise achievements and build a culture of positive momentum.
• Build strong partnerships with key stakeholders within business areas, product management, and IT, and use them to influence and drive alignment on the highest-value items.
• Ensure value is measured and appropriately described and sold to share the success of the team's work.

Community

• Be an agile culture ambassador partnering across engineering to drive an open, collaborative and innovative team.
• Proactively engage with the IT community (internally and externally) across multiple channels, looking to share, represent, educate, and inspire.
• Participate in the agile community, serving as a coach alongside other Product Owners, Managers, and teams to advance our delivery discipline.
• Help drive and support a collaborative, open, agile working culture across teams.
• Actively build and stay informed of emerging delivery, product development and agile practices.
• Innovation: Foster an innovation culture with ‘Show, don’t tell’ at the heart of everything we do.

Basic Qualifications & Key Experiences:

• 3-5+ years’ experience as a Product Owner/Manager or a similar role.
• Real-world experience working in an agile delivery team.
• Experience working on IT development programmes or an engineering/cloud background is advantageous.
• Experience eliciting and breaking down needs into actionable user stories, and ability to own, prioritise, and manage a product backlog.
• Comfortable and effective at conveying complex technical challenges into easy-to-consume explanations for a non-technical audience.
• Certified product owner (CSPO) or similar certification preferred.
• Experience working in a regulated, multi-agency and international environment is advantageous.
• Team player capable of building high-performing, collaborative and ownership-driven teams in a highly dynamic environment

Other Information: 2 days a week in our Hook office (RG27 9XA) is required.

Elanco is an EEO/Affirmative Action Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of age, race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, protected veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status