VP Product Owner - Engagement, Commercial & Customer Interactions

Purpose of the role

The purpose of a Product Owner is to maximize the value of the product by defining a clear product vision (are they setting the vision or would this align to ), managing authoring, refining and prioritizing the Product Backlog balancing trade-offs across desirability, viability and feasibility – making sure the right thing is being ‘built’, and prioritising work based on business goals. They act as the primary liaison between stakeholders and delivery teams, ensuring the product meets user/customer needs and delivers optimal value. Product Owners are responsible for developing a roadmap and driving execution of their product area/sub-journey, applying continuous improvement principles and techniques.

Accountabilities

• Ensure Product Alignment with Business Goals: Ensure that the product & its features are aligned with broader objectives, driving value and contributing to the organization’s overall strategy. Utilisation of market research, analysis of customer feedback and monitoring of industry trends to identify new products, features or enhancements.  

• Communicate Product Vision to Delivery Teams: Clearly articulate the product vision and goals to the delivery teams, ensuring they understand, align and are inspired to deliver the business value and purpose of each feature or user story.

• Create and Refine User Stories: Write clear, concise user stories with detailed acceptance criteria, refining them as needed to ensure the development team has all the necessary information to implement features successfully. 

• Agile Events: Participate in key Agile events such as sprint planning, daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, and retrospectives to keep the team aligned and focused on delivering the product backlog. 

• Managing the Product Backlog: Responsible for creating, maintaining, and prioritising the product backlog, ensuring the highest value features are delivered first, based on business needs, customer requirements and organisational impacts, balancing risk migration and future proofing against the product strategy. 

• Act as the Voice of the Customer: Continuously gather feedback from customers and end-users to understand their pain points and ensure that the product meets their needs and improves their overall experience. 

• Acceptance Criteria Definition & Management: Review and accept or reject work completed by the development team during sprints, ensuring that all delivered features meet the agreed-upon acceptance criteria and deliver business value. 

• Collaborate with Stakeholders:  Work closely with stakeholders (e.g., customers, business leaders, and marketing teams) to gather requirements, define product goals, and ensure that the product vision aligns with business objectives. 

• Monitor Product Performance and Iterate: Regularly assess product performance using KPIs and customer feedback, adjusting the product backlog and roadmap to improve functionality and meet evolving customer needs. Manage on-going readiness and 'run' activities of live products including monitoring, governance and approvals. 

• Risk and Control:  Managing risk, including identification of potential risks, development of strategies to resolve or mitigate and escalate as necessary those risks, and alignment between the product management and control functions.

Vice President Expectations

• To contribute or set strategy, drive requirements and make recommendations for change. Plan resources, budgets, and policies; manage and maintain policies/ processes; deliver continuous improvements and escalate breaches of policies/procedures..

• If managing a team, they define jobs and responsibilities, planning for the department’s future needs and operations, counselling employees on performance and contributing to employee pay decisions/changes. They may also lead a number of specialists to influence the operations of a department, in alignment with strategic as well as tactical priorities, while balancing short and long term goals and ensuring that budgets and schedules meet corporate requirements..

• If the position has leadership responsibilities, People Leaders are expected to demonstrate a clear set of leadership behaviours to create an environment for colleagues to thrive and deliver to a consistently excellent standard. The four LEAD behaviours are: L – Listen and be authentic, E – Energise and inspire, A – Align across the enterprise, D – Develop others..

• OR for an individual contributor, they will be a subject matter expert within own discipline and will guide technical direction. They will lead collaborative, multi-year assignments and guide team members through structured assignments, identify the need for the inclusion of other areas of specialisation to complete assignments. They will train, guide and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long term profits, organisational risks and strategic decisions..

• Advise key stakeholders, including functional leadership teams and senior management on functional and cross functional areas of impact and alignment.

• Manage and mitigate risks through assessment, in support of the control and governance agenda.

• Demonstrate leadership and accountability for managing risk and strengthening controls in relation to the work your team does.

• Demonstrate comprehensive understanding of the organisation functions to contribute to achieving the goals of the business.

• Collaborate with other areas of work, for business aligned support areas to keep up to speed with business activity and the business strategies.

• Create solutions based on sophisticated analytical thought comparing and selecting complex alternatives. In-depth analysis with interpretative thinking will be required to define problems and develop innovative solutions.

• Adopt and include the outcomes of extensive research in problem solving processes.

• Seek out, build and maintain trusting relationships and partnerships with internal and external stakeholders in order to accomplish key business objectives, using influencing and negotiating skills to achieve outcomes.

All colleagues will be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship – our moral compass, helping us do what we believe is right. They will also be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Mindset – to Empower, Challenge and Drive – the operating manual for how we behave.

Join us as a VP Product Owner - Engagement, Commercial & Customer Interactions, where you can help shape the future of customer communications at Barclays. We are looking for a dynamic and forward-thinking leader to define and deliver the strategy for Statements & Documents, ensuring customers receive clear, compliant and effective communications across physical and digital channels.

This role is central to the management and evolution of one of Barclays' most critical customer communication capabilities, supporting millions of customer interactions annually. You will be responsible for the strategic direction, governance and ongoing modernisation of our document estate, balancing customer needs, regulatory requirements, operational resilience and commercial outcomes.

As the VP Product Owner - Engagement, Commercial & Customer Interactions you will lead a broad portfolio spanning customer statements, regulatory communications, document storage and retrieval, platform strategy and document generation capabilities. Working closely with Technology, Operations, Risk, Compliance, Legal and Product teams, you will drive continuous improvement, strengthen controls and deliver a strategic roadmap that enhances customer experience while maintaining a robust control environment.

This is a unique opportunity to lead a business-critical capability at scale, influencing how Barclays communicates with customers and supporting the bank's wider digital transformation ambitions.

To be successful as a VP Product Owner - Engagement, Commercial & Customer Interactions, you should have:

• Strong experience in product management, customer communications, proposition development or document management.
• Proven ability to define and execute strategy within a complex operational or regulated environment.
• Demonstrated experience delivering large-scale transformation and business change initiatives.
• Strong understanding of governance, risk management and control frameworks.
• Experience leading business-critical platforms, services or operational capabilities.
• Ability to influence and lead colleagues across a broad stakeholder landscape, including senior leadership.
• Strong commercial acumen with a track record of delivering customer and business outcomes.
• Experience using customer, operational and performance data to identify opportunities and drive improvement.
• Excellent communication, presentation and stakeholder management skills.
• Solid working knowledge of Excel and PowerPoint.

Some other highly valued skills may include:

• Experience managing customer communications, document generation platforms or content management solutions.
• Knowledge of document retention, records management and regulatory communication requirements.
• Experience leading technology modernisation, platform migration or digital transformation programmes.
• Experience overseeing third-party suppliers and service providers.
• Background in banking, financial services or another highly regulated industry.
• Experience managing operational resilience, incident management and service continuity processes.
• Understanding of customer statement production, regulatory correspondence and digital document delivery.

You may be assessed on the key critical skills relevant for success in role, such as risk and controls, change and transformation, strategic thinking, leadership, business acumen, stakeholder management and digital and technology, as well as job-specific technical skills.

This role will be based out of Pune.