Product Owner

Senior Product Owner - AI-Accelerated Software Delivery

• Fully Remote
• £750 - £800 Outside IR35

Our client is seeking a Senior Product Owner to join a small, high-performing software delivery team operating within a complex, regulated environment. Their engineering teams are heavily AI-enabled and use AI tools throughout the software development lifecycle to accelerate analysis, implementation, testing, documentation, and QA. As delivery velocity increases, the quality, structure, and precision of product requirements become critical to ensuring successful outcomes. This role is central to enabling effective AI-accelerated delivery. You’ll be responsible for ensuring engineering teams always have clear, prioritised, testable work with well-defined business intent, acceptance criteria, edge cases, examples, and verification guidance.

This is not a passive backlog administration role. The successful candidate will play a hands-on role in shaping requirements, reducing ambiguity, improving story quality, coordinating sprint delivery, and helping evolve AI-assisted product and delivery practices across the team. You’ll work closely with engineers, testers, SMEs, and stakeholders to ensure requirements are implementation-ready for both human developers and AI-assisted workflows.

Role & Responsibilities

• Own and manage a prioritised product backlog aligned to delivery goals
• Translate complex business requirements into structured, testable user stories
• Define acceptance criteria, business rules, assumptions, examples, and edge cases
• Ensure stories are sufficiently refined before sprint commitment
• Lead sprint planning, backlog refinement, reviews, and delivery coordination
• Track delivery progress, blockers, dependencies, and risks
• Work closely with engineering and QA teams to ensure work is buildable, testable, and clearly understood
• Use AI tools to accelerate analysis, refinement, documentation, and scenario generation
• Critically review AI-generated outputs to ensure depth, accuracy, and domain quality
• Help define standards and readiness practices for AI-assisted delivery workflows
• Support stakeholder communication, demos, and delivery reporting

Skills & Experience

Essential

• Experience as a Product Owner, Business Analyst, Product Manager, Delivery Lead, or similar role within software delivery
• Strong experience working with software engineering and QA teams
• Excellent backlog management and requirements analysis skills
• Ability to write clear, precise, and testable user stories and acceptance criteria
• Strong stakeholder communication and facilitation skills
• Comfortable operating in complex, rules-driven, or regulated environments
• Pragmatic understanding of agile delivery practices
• Experience using AI tools to support product ownership, analysis, delivery, or documentation workflows
• Ability to challenge ambiguity and drive clarity across stakeholders and teams

Desirable

• Experience within pensions, financial services, insurance, or other regulated sectors
• Experience with rules-based, workflow-driven, or calculation-heavy systems
• Familiarity with BDD, Gherkin, specification-by-example, or structured acceptance testing
• Experience with Jira, Azure DevOps, GitHub Issues, Linear, Confluence, or Notion
• Exposure to AI coding assistants, AI-assisted QA, or agentic software delivery workflows
• Understanding of auditability, traceability, and high-consequence business logic