Associate Product Owner

As Associate Product Owner you will start by working closely with a Senior Product Owner, contributing across discovery, delivery and adoption before progressively taking full ownership of a planning module as your domain and platform expertise deepens.

Once you own a module, you will drive it end-to-end from identifying capability gaps through design, build, UAT and go-live, to sustained adoption. You will work shoulder-to-shoulder with engineering and business planning teams to deliver measurable improvement in planning capability and commercial outcomes.

You will be accountable for metrics that matter to your users, not a task list. You will be expected to have a point of view on what best-in-class looks like for your module and to argue for it.

Key Responsibilities

You will be expected to take end-to-end ownership of one planning module. This includes:

Drive discovery and design with business

• Run discovery with planners, buyers and planning centre of excellence to translate planning into clear product requirements.
• Write crisp PRDs, process flows and acceptance criteria that engineering can build from without a second round of interpretation.
• Work with solution architects and engineering on solution fitment; make explicit build-vs-configure-vs-defer calls and phase them sensibly.

Drive delivery with engineering

• Run the squad's backlog with the engineering leads — groom, refine, unblock, and protect the sprint from scope drift.
• Work with data engineering on the pipelines, integrations and data models your module depends on.
• Own UAT planning and execution with business users; drive defect triage, cutover, training material and go-live readiness.
• Partner with QA on test coverage for planning calculations — where a wrong number is a commercial decision gone wrong, not a cosmetic bug.

Drive adoption and outcomes

• Track and move your module's metrics
• Run post-go-live adoption: spend time with planners, find where the workflows are inadequateand close those gaps.
• Report module performance and business impact to leadership on a regular cadence.

Build intelligence in, not on

• Work with data scientists to identify and specify intelligence use cases for your module.
• Define how recommendations surface inside the planner's workflow, what the planner can override, and how model output is validated.
• Use AI natively in your own work. We expect you to be materially faster because of it.

Knowledge, Skills & Experience

Experience

• 3–6 years of experience in Product Owner / Associate Product Owner / Business Analyst / Consultant roles, with at least 2 years in a product ownership capacity.
• Planning domain or planning product experience is essential — one or more of:
• Worked in a retail planning, merchandising, buying or supply planning team
• or
• Worked on an enterprise retail planning product or implementation — Board, Anaplan, o9, Blue Yonder, Oracle Retail, SAP IBP or equivalent.
• AI-native. Demonstrable, hands-on use of AI across the product lifecycle — not curiosity, but working practice. Bonus if you have shipped a product feature where an ML/AI model drove the user-facing decision.
• Experience owning a product or module end-to-end through a full delivery cycle, including a go-live.
• Comfortable working directly with engineering teams, solution architects and data engineers; able to hold a credible conversation about data models, integrations and calculation logic.
• Experience working with cross-functional teams across geographies and time zones.
• Experience in enterprise or platform products (as opposed to consumer apps) is preferred.
• Retail or e-commerce background strongly preferred.
• MBA preferred, not mandatory. A strong domain and delivery track record counts for more.

Skills & Attributes

• Structured thinker; can take an ambiguous business complaint and turn it into a prioritised, sequenced roadmap.
• Analytical; you should be comfortable interrogating planning data, variance, forecast accuracy and stock cover yourself rather than waiting for an analyst.
• Outstanding written and verbal communication; can write a document that a head of planning and a backend engineer both find useful.
• Strong stakeholder management; you will be saying "not this quarter" to senior people, and keeping them on side while you do it.
• Bias to action and high ownership; Things you ship go live and get used the same week.
• Excellent organisational and time management skills; able to run multiple parallel workstreams to deadline.
• Attention to detail;precision and accuracy are your strong suit.