IBSS Product Business Analyst

Role Summary

This role is directly linked to the ICONICS product ‘IBSS’ (Intelligent Building Software Stack), a cloud-based software-as-a-service offering, providing workplace and office experience, operational optimisation and data insights. Its development and release to clients is common code based, and cadence of 3-4 major releases per annum.

Working under the Technical Senior Product Manager for the IBSS product, the role as ‘Business Analyst’ within this team is pivotal in driving continued product growth and client success, across the growing global software reach.

The key objective of the role, is to analyse the gap between growing client and business requirements and the current product functionality, and defining clear product objectives and scope to inform our roadmap of development planning for both functional and technical aspects of the product.

The Business Analyst shall be wholly committed to this discovery, review, and planning process for innovative and iterative product development, in what is a rapidly changing client requirement landscape caused by digital transformation in this sector, but also a high strategic growth sector for ICONICS (part of the Mitsubishi Electric Group of Companies) as a global software business.

This position offers a unique opportunity to contribute significantly to the evolution of the Intelligent Building Software Stack (IBSS), ensuring it meets the dynamic needs of our users and stays at the forefront of smart building technology innovation.

Key Responsibilities

The role of Business Analyst within the IBSS Product Team, will deliver, or support the delivery, of these key responsibilities:

• Stakeholder Engagement: Actively engage with internal and external stakeholders

to capture, document, and analyse business requirements for product improvement,

so to inform product planning against strategic feature and technical goals.

• Internal Engagement: Actively engage across internal departments such as product management, product development and engineering, sales, account management, marketing, projects, and customer care, so to capture internal requirements that may be identified so again to inform product planning against any identified strategic features or technical goals.

• Client / External Engagement: Engage in sessions with current and prospective clients, to listen to product requirements or wishes, so to help work through potential new features requirements that may be specific to one client and hold the ability to transform specific request into a generalised and consistent product format to suit all users. Also analysing those features against product strategies and engaging with internal stakeholders for technical alignment.

• Industry Awareness: Maintain up-to-date knowledge of the latest technology trends and market shifts in the realms of smart building and workplace management, so to foster continuous innovation and competitive market edge for a global front-runner product position.

• Documentation: Spearhead the creation and upkeep of crucial documentation, including business requirement specifications, and process flow diagrams, to support review, planning and development phases. Document features into a pack of information suitable for internal development planning and costing. Document appropriate levels of detail to support development and testing. And document insights in broader detail to inform stakeholders on upcoming release features.

• Communication Facilitator: Serve as the conduit for clear communication between business stakeholders and technical teams, ensuring a mutual understanding of feature goals, schedules, and expected outcomes.

• Pre-Launch Engagement: Pre-launch, engage with UAT testing to help verify the objectives and goals have been met, providing clear feedback to gaps feeding into final development stages.

• Product Monitoring: Post-launch, in collaboration with project, operations and support teams, evaluate the product feature alignment to development plans, and identify enhancement opportunities, issues, or missed objectives into new future development objectives.

• Roadmap Planning Support: Contribute to the planning of engineering and development estimation efforts, by presenting clear objectives for future roadmap items to the appropriate development teams, to ensure their deeper comprehension and alignment.

• Product Team Coordination: Liaise with the product management team to support regular updates of essential documents after each release, such as commercial sales feature documents.

Duties

The Business Analyst within the IBSS Product Team, will deliver against the following duties:

• Work under the Senior Technical Product Manager.

• Consult and communicate with all stakeholders.• Translate business needs into functional product specifications and user stories, closely working with the product manager and development teams.

• Create initial low-fidelity feature mock-ups and collaborate with UI designers for refined interfaces, to inform product UI development.

• Assisting the product management team, help maintain the commercial product backlog, and support prioritisation planning for consideration of product development roadmap timelines in sync with project objectives.

• Support the QA process by setting high-level acceptance criteria and validating QA inquiries to ensure alignment of QA activities with business requirements.

• Support the development and QA process in collaboration with product managers, where queries are made through development boards (Azure DevOps) by development engineers.

• Lead feature brainstorming sessions, manage client feedback surveys, and conduct market research to inform the product stack’s current and future features.

• Offer insights for feature documentation to the Technical Writer.

• Participate in Daily Stand-ups, Backlog Reviews, and internal UAT testing for each release.

• Create product preview packs, to support internal and external discussions around upcoming development plans and associated features.

• Coordinate with Technical Authors and Marketing teams, to help maintain wider documentation in step with release updates.

IBSS Suite Components

The role supports the full IBSS product suite, including but not limited to:

• End-User Applications: Mobile, Web, Tablet and Kiosk Apps, Outlook Add-In.

• Operational Applications: Mobile App and Web App

• Platform Administrative Portal: Web App• Backend Infrastructure: Supporting APIs, Process engines, and pre-built third-party connectors (such as IoT sensor ingestion, of Microsoft M365 calendar integrations.

• Delivery Tools: Import / Export Sheets, Map Design Templates in Figma.

The business is currently changing its market vertical sales messaging to “Smart Buildings by ICONICS” and the role will also support, in part, some additional BA functions around the templated solutions for energy analysis, sustainability reporting, and facilities management, as delivered to this market sector via our ICONICS Genesis software tool set.

Place of work

As a business, ICONICS supports hybrid working where roles allow. The product team falls into this category and expects a balance of office attendance and home working where appropriate to fulfil the daily activities required. We focus on office attendance so to support valuable in person meetings and collaboration, which will be required so to engage with team members and wider business stakeholders, and also to perform actual product testing. Ultimately, attendance to the office will be required as needed to complete the duties of the role effectively and efficiently, and likely to be higher in days in the first 6 months than in a ‘business-as-usual’ mode of working.

Typical hybrid working ratio and location for this role is:

• Hybrid Working Ratio: Home/Office (50%/50%)

• Office Location: Dudley, West Midlands.

The office has recently undergone investment to provide a variety of workspaces to facilitate varied business needs. This consists of bookable open plan office and desks, multi-purpose meeting rooms, focus rooms, a collaboration team room, and a product lab (key location for this role) which holds a bank of height adjustable desks, white boards, and AV equipment to physically allow interaction and testing with products.

Required Skills and Qualifications

• Five or more years of experience in business analytics and systems development, with proven analytical abilities.

• Experience in generating process documentation, users stories, and reports.

• Excellent verbal communication skills, able to listen to broad opinions and then steer conversations toward programmatic evaluation and clear actions.

• Excellent written communication skills, with an ability to translate complex and varied requirements, into actionable and precise product goals, feature descriptions and user storeys.

Preferred Skills and Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree (or equivalent) in information technology or computer science

• Strong working knowledge of relevant software applications, including Word, Excel, Azure Dev Ops, Figma design planning tools.

• Proven ability to manage projects and user testing

• Extensive experience with data visualization

• High proficiency in technical writing

• Experience in the smart building solutions, or workplace technologies.