Expert Product Ownership

This position is responsible for maximizing the value of the product by ensuring the products are brought to life in the individual North American Operating Companies.

Primary sell of this position:

- Analytics is one of the top priorities for Nestle and the product is a key component for the enablement of analytics
- Opportunity to work across multiple operating companies within North America (Nestle in US, Pet Food, Infant Nutrition, Health Science)
- Opportunity to work at both a regional and global level to help influence and drive the Data and Analytics roadmap around the product
- Opportunity to work with various functional leaders within North America to shape their strategies with regards to product adoption

Most important job responsibilities:

- Responsible for maximizing the value of the product(s) and ensuring the products are brought to life in North America.
- Works with Operating Company Functional and IT Leaders to develop their product roadmaps and consolidate into a broader NA product roadmap.
- Influence the global product roadmaps to incorporate the NA Opco needs
- Owns the North American User Stories in the overall product backlog and is accountable for the prioritization and the overall delivery of the Product Lifecycle
- With a deep understanding of the needs within North America acts as the voice back to the global IT Product Manager as well as advocates for the product within the NA Operating Companies, working to bridge any gaps
- They will be able to work through “negotiations” as each operating company will have their list of priorities, but the priorities need to roll up into an overall NA priority list meaning some Operating Companies may not be happy that their priority isn’t the top one overall.
- They will need to be strong in Influencing without Authority as they will need to convince the global team that the NA priorities should be higher than the rest of the world.
- They will need to have a lot of initiative to figure out what steps they need to take in order to increase product adoption.
- They will at times need to say “no” and be able to do it in a manner where the other party understands and agrees (even if the other party disagrees, they need to end up in a situation where they agree to disagree and then move on)
- They need to have strong data knowledge around the products they support.

Additional expectations of the roles:

- Product Owner of means that for your product(s) you fully understand:

- The usage, the strengths of the product, pain points from the receiver point-of-view, how usage/strength/pain points from NA compare with the other regions
- The global positioning, Upcoming changes/patches/fixes, vendor roadmap, vendor strategy
- Act as the voice of NA back the global Product Managers
- Act as the voice of the global Product Managers back to the OpCos to ensure they are aware and receiving the maximum value of the products
- Act as an advocate for the products
- Bring to light success stories resulting from the products(marketing)

Typical Tasks:

- Understand the “backlog” and prioritize/assign for NA
- Take ownership of priority NA pain points and help drive to resolution (while in alignment with global Product Managers)
- Meet regularly with each IT functional stream to ensure they understand value of the products and look for additional opportunities
- Meet regularly with each FRM to ensure they understand value of the products and look for additional opportunities
- Partner with FRM to develop Opco product roadmaps and consolidate into 1 NA product roadmap, work with global Product Managers
- Perform Quarterly “NA State of the Union” for your products
- KPIs (usage, response time, etc.)
- General “health” of the product
- Enhancements/improvements in the last quarter
- Upcoming enhancements/improvements in current quarter
- Product roadmap from MS
- Key “wins” (marketing)
- NOTE: These meetings should be held with the NA Analytics team, the OpCo FRMs, and the global Product Managers
- Manage any OpCo escalations related to your products
- Oversee any product related planned outages/upgrades (can delegate the work if desired)