Lead Associate - Product Owner

Description

The Lead Associate - Product Owner is a critical contributor to Davies’ product‑led transformation, responsible for leading the definition, prioritisation, and delivery of high‑value digital and technology products across the UK&I division. This role owns one or more product backlogs and works closely with cross‑functional Scrum teams, stakeholders, and customers to understand needs, define problems, and deliver innovative solutions that create measurable impact.
The Lead Associate - Product Owner ensures product development is user‑centred, outcome‑driven, and aligned with the broader product strategy. They collaborate with engineering teams, business functions, and client stakeholders to translate complex requirements into actionable user stories, shaping features from ideation through design, build, and release. As a senior member of the Product function, the role provides guidance and mentorship to Associate Product Owners, supports internal communities of practice, and helps mature product ways of working across teams. The Lead Associate - Product Owner acts as the voice of the customer, ensuring product decisions are grounded in insight, data, and a deep understanding of user needs and business value

Key Responsibilities

Product Management & Vision

• Contribute to defining and evolving the product vision, strategy, and multi‑year roadmap.
• Own one or more product backlogs, ensuring all items are well‑defined, prioritised, and aligned to customer and business goals.
• Shape product features and articulate clear user stories, acceptance criteria, and design intent to guide development.
• Balance customer value, technical feasibility, operational impact, and strategic alignment when prioritising.
• Support product lifecycle management from discovery through delivery, optimisation, and benefits realisation.

Customer Insight & Value Delivery

• Deeply understand customer roles, needs, pressures, and success measures across internal and external users.
• Facilitate discovery activities such as interviews, workshops, process observations, and shadowing.
• Translate customer needs into actionable user stories and problem statements.
• Act as the voice of the customer in Scrum teams, ensuring outputs translate into meaningful outcomes.
• Ensure product solutions deliver measurable value and contribute to continuous improvement.

Agile Delivery & Collaboration

• Work within one or more Scrum teams to deliver high‑quality increments that support the product vision.
• Participate in and guide Agile ceremonies including backlog refinement, sprint planning, stand‑ups, and retrospectives.
• Provide clarity, direction, and context to developers, UX designers, and QA engineers throughout the delivery cycle.
• Support UI/UX prototyping efforts, ensuring user‑centred design principles are applied.
• Maintain a strong presence throughout development, ensuring alignment and resolving blockers related to requirements.

Mentoring, Leadership & Community Contribution

• Mentor Associate Product Owners, assisting with skill development, prioritisation, writing stories, and stakeholder engagement.
• Support training, coaching, and the development of best practices across the Product Owner Community of Practice.
• Model product‑led behaviours and encourage a culture of experimentation, data‑driven decisions, and customer‑centricity.
• Contribute to improving product frameworks, templates, and ways of working across the organisation.

Continuous Improvement & Product Quality

• Monitor product performance using feedback, analytics, and operational metrics to identify opportunities for enhancement.
• Drive quality through rigorous acceptance criteria, definition‑of‑ready/definition‑of‑done standards, and collaboration with QA teams.
• Support product warranty activities including audits, refinements, and continuous optimisation.
• Seek out improvements in processes, documentation, communication, and feature delivery workflows.

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise

• Experience supporting delivery of AI, digital transformation, or modernisation programmes.
• Familiarity with DevOps practices, engineering workflows, and cloud delivery environments.
• Understanding of product management, business analysis, and architectural practices.
• Proven experience as a Product Owner or Lead Associate - Product Owner within Agile environments.
• Strong understanding of Agile Scrum methodologies and product management principles.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills—able to articulate complex ideas to all audiences.
• Ability to translate customer needs into well‑defined user stories, requirements, and acceptance criteria.
• Strong problem‑solving skills with the ability to break down complexity into deliverable increments.
• Demonstrated leadership capabilities and ability to mentor junior product roles.
• Data‑driven mindset with experience using insights to support prioritisation and feature decisions.
• Experience with user‑centred design, UI/UX collaboration, and wireframing/prototyping.
• Strong client focus and ability to build trusted relationships across business and technology teams.
• Exposure to software engineering concepts or technologies (e.g., .NET, Python, Java).
• Familiarity with cloud computing fundamentals (Azure/AWS).

About Davies

We are a specialist professional services and technology firm, working in partnership with leading insurance, highly regulated and global businesses.

We help our clients to manage risk, operate their core business processes, transform and grow. We deliver professional services and technology solutions across the risk and insurance value chain, including excellence in claims, underwriting, distribution, regulation & risk, customer experience, human capital, digital transformation & change management.

Our global team of more than 8,000 professionals operate across ten countries, including the UK & the U.S. Over the past ten years Davies has grown its annual revenues more than 20-fold, investing heavily in research & development, innovation & automation, colleague development, and client service. Today the group serves more than 1,500 insurance, financial services, public sector, and other highly regulated clients.