Product Owner Online

Job Advert Summary

The Product Owner is responsible for defining, shaping and delivering customer-centric digital product capabilities across the e-commerce platform. Sitting at the intersection of customer insights, commercial outcomes and engineering delivery, this role leads the solution design of new features end-to-end from discovery and backlog ownership through to release and performance measurement.

The Product Owner is expected to bring both business judgment and meaningful technical understanding to every problem they work on. Working within an Agile delivery model, the role operates in a cross-functional ecosystem and requires the ability to influence without authority across product, engineering, design, data and commercial stakeholders.

Woolworths values initiative, resilience, attention to detail, and strong communication. Join a proud South African brand committed to transformation and innovation.

Minimum Requirements

• 7+ years of experience working in a technology and/or retail company.
• 5+ years product owner and/or business analysis experience
• Qualification in Computer Science, Information Systems, Marketing, Business Administration or Engineering, or equivalent experience
• Product Owner/Manager certification advantageous
• Agile or Scrum certification (CSPO, PMC) a plus

CORE COMPETENCIES

• Customer and quality obsessed, striving for simple solutions to often complex problems
• Economic decision-making
• Storytelling with data to influence decisions
• Ability to facilitate cross-functional engagements and workshops
• Creating wireframes, product specifications, and user stories.
• Excellent communication, influencing and stakeholder management skills - ability to collaborate and work in a matrix organization
• High integrity, consistent and clear and visible values.
• Resilient, positive and able to manage complexity, uncertainty and rapid change

Duties and Responsibilities

DISCOVERY & SOLUTION DESIGN

• Lead continuous exploration of new features: defining optimal user experiences, operational improvements, and assessing technical impacts on the end-to-end journey.
• Facilitate requirements workshops and stakeholder sessions, including creation of wireframes, context diagrams, system/data flows and high-level integration requirements.
• Document the impact of UX decisions on business logic and system architecture, ensuring traceability from customer need to technical specification.
• Review integration and architecture specifications (IFS) from functional analysts to validate alignment with all product requirements.
• Define and test customer hypotheses; conduct competitor benchmarking to inform target-state design.

BACKLOG OWNERSHIP & DELIVERY READINESS

• Own and continuously refine the product backlog: translating requirements into well-formed user stories with clear acceptance criteria.
• Sequence the backlog based on team PI objectives, balancing commercial priorities with local team capacity and constraints.
• Participate in ART-level events: PI Planning, ART Sync, Product Owner Scrum of Scrums, Inspect & Adapt, daily stand-ups and system demos.
• Collaborate with programme management to ensure team PI objectives are understood and progress is transparently communicated.
• Maintain team backlog readiness for each iteration; include the development team in refinement and actively unblock impediments.

STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT & GOVERNANCE

• Serve as the primary product decision-maker for the squad, providing visible and clear direction on priorities.
• Engage senior stakeholders to input on customer-centric product concepts, obtain sign-off on wireframes and features, and drive aligned commercial decisions.
• Apply economic decision-making (DVF and cost-of-delay reasoning) to sequencing and trade-off discussions.
• Ensure all risk, compliance and change management requirements are met at each stage of product development, including sign-off from relevant risk committees.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE & COMMERCIAL OUTCOMES

• Drive customer engagement across the journey touchpoints and specific value stream verticals.
• Provide strategic input into the customer experience improvements that measurably improve acquisition, retention and conversion.
• Actively advocate for customer-first product design, brining high levels of customer insight to every feature decision.
• Define and monitor commercial KPIs for delivered features, including revenue, order volume, operational efficiency, and NPS. Use metrics for enhancement recommendations based on post-launch performance.
• Help create and maintain release plans, tracking progress towards product milestones.

TECHNICAL INTEGRATION & PLATFORM DEPTH

• Work with architects and technical leads to lead integration efforts across platform capabilities and defining error states
• Develop value cases that articulate customer desirability, technical feasibility and commercial viability (DVF model)
• Establish baseline measurements of the as-is state and document capability gaps as input to target-state design.
• Work closely with UX/UI to ensure that process flows, wireframes and content are intuitive before development commences.
• Conduct and/or oversee user acceptance testing (UAT) in staging and beta environments, providing business sign-off before release.

COACHING & CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT

• Act as a subject matter expert (SME)
• Champion team learning and the adoption of product practices, methodologies and tooling.
• Actively identify improvement opportunities in discovery, delivery, and measurement processes.
• Contribute to integrated reporting and feedback cycles, ensuring performance data informs future roadmap decisions.