Senior Product Owner

Working in a fast-paced, changing environment where every day brings something new and innovative ideas are encouraged to help our customers reach their financial dreams and aspirations. The Manulife Bank Delivery team is seeking a passionate Product Owner who can drive our digital banking transformation. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to translate business and customer needs into innovative digital banking solutions. Leverage your technical background to lead product development, ensuring alignment with our digital strategy and customer needs. The Product Owner contributes to the realization of Value Stream strategy, vision, and OKRs by aligning and prioritizing business goals with actionable results. 

Position Responsibilities:

• Define and communicate the product vision and roadmap to the squad, stakeholders, and technology partners.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to gather and prioritize product requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria.

• Work closely with the squads and FinTech partners to ensure timely delivery of product features and improvements.

• Lead PI Planning activities ensuring prioritized features are refined and sized to deliver on commitments.

• Leverage your deep technology background to lead the squad members, with a focus on leveraging technology for creative problem solving

• Possess a foundational understanding of the technologies being used by the engineering team such as APIs, front end applications and vendor integrations for effective communication and decision making, Experiences in leveraging technology to tackle business problems

• Ability to understand the tradeoffs between a technical target state and near-term deliverables

• Conduct market research and analysis to identify customer needs, market trends, and competitive landscape.

• Define and supervise key product metrics and KPIs to measure product success and identify areas for improvement.

• Lead and prioritize the product backlog, ensuring that it aligns with the product vision and business goals.

• Engage with team members to gather feedback and ensure alignment on product priorities and direction.

• Identify trade-offs to ensure alignment on priorities between the team and partners

• Lead product demonstrations, gather feedback, and iterate on product features and functionality.

Backlog Management

• Lead the squad in ensuring value creation for the business, customers, and end-users by leading the squad backlog and ensuring that the highest value work is always being implemented.

• Work with the squad to define hypotheses, run experiments (surveys, concept testing, analytics tools, A/B testing), and analyze data to make decisions on user stories that influence the direction of delivery.

• Build and groom the backlog ensuring it’s clear and understood by all squad members.

• Incorporate feedback from team member demos, interviews, user research, and engineering into the squad backlog.

• Accept completed user stories of the squad by ensuring all stories meet the definition of done.

Squad Alignment & Communication

• Provide strategic team leadership in leading delivery of business outcome-focused work.

• Encourage and empower the team and lead without direct authority. Ability to gauge how the team is doing and drive the necessary actions to improve.

• Effective communication to clearly articulate priorities to the team and stakeholders and create strong relationships with team members.

• Brings a coaching attitude to scaled agile practices and banking product knowledge.

• Encourage innovation within the team by helping establish a culture that nurtures creativity, facilitating brainstorming sessions, and rapidly prototyping innovative ideas to stay ahead of market trends.

Required Qualifications:

• 5+ years of experience as a Product Owner or Product Manager

• 5+ years of experience in the digital banking industry

• Strong knowledge of digital banking platforms, FinTech solutions, mobile/web banking apps

• Degree in computer science, information technology or business

• Solid understanding of agile methodologies, preferably in SAFe

• Experience using JIRA and Confluence

When you join our team:

• We’ll empower you to learn and grow the career you want.

• We’ll recognize and support you in a flexible environment where well-being and inclusion are more than just words.

• As part of our global team, we’ll support you in shaping the future you want to see.

#LI-Hybrid

About Manulife and John Hancock

Manulife Financial Corporation is a leading international financial services provider, helping people make their decisions easier and lives better. To learn more about us, visit https://www.manulife.com/en/about/our-story.html.

Manulife is an Equal Opportunity Employer

At Manulife/John Hancock, we embrace our diversity. We strive to attract, develop and retain a workforce that is as diverse as the customers we serve and to foster an inclusive work environment that embraces the strength of cultures and individuals. We are committed to fair recruitment, retention, advancement and compensation, and we administer all of our practices and programs without discrimination on the basis of race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, religion or religious beliefs, creed, sex (including pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions), sexual orientation, genetic characteristics, veteran status, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, family status, disability, or any other ground protected by applicable law.

It is our priority to remove barriers to provide equal access to employment. A Human Resources representative will work with applicants who request a reasonable accommodation during the application process. All information shared during the accommodation request process will be stored and used in a manner that is consistent with applicable laws and Manulife/John Hancock policies. To request a reasonable accommodation in the application process, contact [email protected].

Referenced Salary Location

Salary range is expected to be between

If you are applying for this role outside of the primary location, please contact [email protected] for the salary range for your location. The actual salary will vary depending on local market conditions, geography and relevant job-related factors such as knowledge, skills, qualifications, experience, and education/training. Employees also have the opportunity to participate in incentive programs and earn incentive compensation tied to business and individual performance.

Manulife offers eligible employees a wide array of customizable benefits, including health, dental, mental health, vision, short- and long-term disability, life and AD&D insurance coverage, adoption/surrogacy and wellness benefits, and employee/family assistance plans. We also offer eligible employees various retirement savings plans (including pension and a global share ownership plan with employer matching contributions) and financial education and counseling resources. Our generous paid time off program in Canada includes holidays, vacation, personal, and sick days, and we offer the full range of statutory leaves of absence. If you are applying for this role in the U.S., please contact [email protected] for more information about U.S.-specific paid time off provisions.