Job Description
We're looking for an experienced Product Owner and Delivery Manager to join us on a fixed-term contract to provide a period of cover and contribute to the evolution of software delivery across the Synectics Technology Centre. This is a high-impact role where you'll combine Product Ownership, Agile leadership and delivery management to help talented engineering teams build, test and release exceptional software.
You'll drive sprint planning, backlog prioritisation and cross-team coordination, champion modern delivery practices and AI-powered development tools, and work closely with Product, Engineering, QA and DevOps to maximise quality, efficiency and delivery performance. You'll also play a key role in shaping how software is delivered across the department, supporting continuous improvement, automation initiatives and best-practice ways of working.
As a Product Owner, you will act hands-on for the QA Sprint team - prioritising and unblocking work, coordinating and communicating incoming items from across wider teams, and ensuring all stories meet Definition of Ready before entering the QA backlog.
If you're passionate about Agile delivery, enabling high-performing teams and making a tangible impact in a collaborative technology environment, we'd love to hear from you.
Duties and Responsibilities
Principal Accountabilities
1. Product Owner (QA Sprint Team) - Act as hands-on Product Owner for the QA Sprint team: prioritise and unblock work, communicate items from across the wider teams, and ensure stories meet Definition of Ready before entering the QA backlog.
2. Delivery & Sprint Orchestration – Own the sprint cadence, ceremonies and delivery calendar across all development squads. Facilitate sprint planning, reviews and retrospectives; enforce Definition of Ready and Definition of Done to ensure consistency.
3. Cross-Team Coordination – Act as Scrum-of-Scrums facilitator, surfacing cross-squad dependencies, routing escalations and ensuring the right people attend the right forums. Chase decisions and unblock delivery across Development, Product QA and Engineering.
4. Backlog Integrity – Review, challenge and shape work items from the Product team (user stories, bugs, technical tasks) for clarity, size and vertical slicing. Prevent unparented or misaligned work and maintain board hygiene, WIP limits and carryover discipline in Azure DevOps.
5. Delivery Reporting & Stakeholder Communication – Gather and present sprint and departmental KPIs to the Senior Leadership Team. Build delivery narratives that translate progress, risks and trade-offs into clear, actionable language for non-technical stakeholders.
6. AI Tooling Implementation (Development) – support the evaluation, risk assessment and rollout of AI-assisted development and documentation tools (e.g. Claude Code, GitHub Copilot). Define acceptable-use policies, manage licensing and token usage commercially, run retrospectives to capture learning, and champion productive adoption across the department.
7. DevOps Pipeline Oversight – Work closely with DevOps and jointly own the internal CI/CD pipeline, development-to-test-environment provisioning and delivery automation. Oversee Azure DevOps administration including iterations, teams, permissions and board configuration.
8. Security & Vulnerability Oversight – With the senior developers, triage and prioritisation of CVEs surfaced by Mend, Sonar and other scanning tools. Coordinate remediation across squads and communicate risk pragmatically to leadership.
9. Azure DevOps Wiki & Knowledge Management – Own and champion the Azure DevOps wiki as the single source of truth for processes, architecture diagrams and onboarding material. Encourage the team to document systems, architectural diagrams and decision records.
10. Architecture Practice Support – Contribute to establishing a shared architecture discipline, promoting cross-skilling, reducing single-person dependencies and ensuring architecture artefacts are maintained for major components and new roadmap epics.
Key Skills and Requirements
Key Personal Attributes
11. Hands-on Product Owner expertise - able to define and prioritise a product backlog, write clear user stories with well-formed acceptance criteria, and enforce Definition of Ready and Definition of Done.
12. Strong stakeholder management and value-based prioritisation - able to balance competing demands from development, QA and product, make trade-off decisions, and translate business goals into clear deliverables.
13. Demonstrable experience with Agile/Scrum delivery at scale, including sprint planning, backlog management and delivery reporting across multiple concurrent squads.
14. Scrum Master or equivalent Agile certification (e.g. PSM, CSM, SAFe).
15. Strong working knowledge of Azure DevOps - boards, repos, pipelines, wikis, dashboards and query-based reporting.
16. Understanding of CI/CD pipelines, build automation and dev-to-test environment provisioning (Desirable).
17. Practical knowledge of AI-assisted development (e.g. Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) including risk assessment, policy governance and commercial management of token/licensing costs (Desirable).
18. Familiarity with software security practices - CVE triage, vulnerability scanning tools (e.g. Mend, SonarQube) and remediation prioritisation.
19. Understanding of software architecture concepts sufficient to facilitate architecture reviews, promote documentation and reduce single-person dependencies.
20. Experience with delivery metrics, KPI frameworks and data-driven reporting to senior leadership.
21. Awareness of compliance and certification frameworks relevant to software delivery (e.g. ISO 27001, Cyber Essentials, CAPSS or equivalent).
22. Experience with CCTV, surveillance, security or IoT product environments (Desirable).
23. Delivery-focused mindset with the discipline to enforce policy, challenge scope creep and say 'not ready' when standards are not met.
24. Collaborative, building productive relationships across Development, Product, QA and senior stakeholders, fostering a culture of accountability and continuous improvement.
25. Comfortable operating across multiple disciplines (delivery, process, tooling, people) and switching between wide-ranging and operational detail.
26. Resilient and adaptable - able to manage competing priorities across multiple squads and release cycles in a fast-paced environment.
27. Ownership mindset - takes personal accountability for delivery outcomes and departmental effectiveness.
28. Curious about emerging technology, particularly AI tooling, with the drive to evaluate, pilot and embed new practices.
Qualifications and Experience
Experience
29. Demonstrable experience of Agile Product Owner role(s) with delivering software products.
30. Demonstrable experience in software delivery management, Scrum Mastery or a comparable delivery leadership role within a product-led technology organisation.
31. Demonstrable experience influencing cross-functional teams and people (direct and indirect).
32. Degree (or equivalent professional experience) in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Business or a related discipline (Desirable).
33. Experience with on-premises and/or hybrid (on-prem + cloud) product delivery (Desirable).
Eligibility for Employment in the UK
In accordance with current legislative requirements within the UK, any successful applicant must produce verification of their eligibility to live and work in the UK. Such verification should be taken in advance of the employment start date and the applicant will be unable to start in their role until this has been received by Synectics.
Our Commitment to Equality and Diversity
Synectics plc and its subsidiaries are committed to promoting equal opportunities in employment and in our employment policies for recruitment, selection, training, development and promotion. Such policies are in place to ensure that both job applicants and employees of Synectics receive equal treatment regardless of age, disability, gender reassignment, marital or civil partnership status, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex or sexual orientation.