Product Owner

**About Beeks**:
Beeks Group is a leading managed cloud provider exclusively within the agile and fast-moving financial services and capital markets sector. Our Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IAAS) model is optimised for low-latency private cloud compute, connectivity and analytics, providing the flexibility to deploy and connect to Exchanges, trading venues and public cloud for a true hybrid cloud experience.

Founded in 2011, Beeks Group is listed on the London AIM Stock Exchange and has enjoyed continued growth each year. Beeks Group now employs over 100 team members across the globe and has an international network of over thirty data centres.

We have a fantastic opportunity for a Product Owner to join us at our unique Head Office in Renfrew, which includes our state-of-the-art gym with weekly circuit training, a personal trainer and yoga classes as well as the Beeks Bar or weekly masseuse to help you unwind

**About the Role**:
We seek a motivated Product Owner with deep expertise in infrastructure and automation to join our Glasgow team. Our Beeks Infrastructure as a Service aims to evolve our cloud-style service, combining cloud flexibility with the high performance of co-located hardware to meet the needs of demanding financial clients.

The role of Product Owner offers an exciting opportunity for the right person to work alongside our existing teams to use your skills, experiences and industry knowledge to develop a unique, innovative and successful product offering.

You will have a strong interest in infrastructure technologies and an ability to motivate teams to improve it through software changes and changes in methods of working.

You will work closely with our established Product Owner to break down large initiatives into smaller pieces of work, and to work with internal stakeholders to gather requirements and to understand their priorities. You will work with the existing Product Owner to ensure that the product roadmap, list of priorities product backlog are continually updated based on evolving customer and strategic needs. You will be a key stakeholder in the future vision of the product.

Prior experience in a ‘product manager’ or ‘product owner’ role is not a requirement.

**Key Responsibilities**:

- Lead the discovery, definition, development and launch of new Infrastructure as a Service features.
- Develop _appropriately_ _detailed_ specifications for the product features so they are clearly understood by the development team. Note that Beeks follows an Agile development methodology.
- Anticipate and address stakeholder needs to drive product definition and positioning.
- Work closely with the Beeks network and design teams (including the 24x7 Network Operations Centre) to ensure that they are kept up-to-date about new features, and to ensure their feedback is considered when prioritizing development work.
- Stay updated with industry trends, particularly in Infrastructure as Code and Cloud.
- Structure and prioritize Epics for the team, working with the development team to ensure high-quality Story writing.
- Influence senior technology managers to ensure agreed priorities are consistently prioritized across the company.
- Participate in Sprint planning and solve product-related problems to keep initiatives on track.
- Foster continuous improvement through process enhancements and automation.

**Required Experiences and Skills**:

- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
- Experience relating to networking, infrastructure, financial services or cloud products and market or demonstrable success in product definition activities, including Agile requirements management experience, or equivalent.
- Ability to conduct independent research and share findings with the team.
- Experience defining development team backlog items (epics/features/user stories), or an eagerness to learn these skills with demonstrable interest and aptitude from previous roles.
- Ability to quickly learn complex infrastructure. Able to understand the ‘as is’ state well enough to act as the voice of our customers to the development team, while still keeping a clear vision of the strategic ‘to be’ to inform prioritization of stories.
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills with the confidence to pitch your ideas to the team.
- Able to build relationships with technical teams and the existing product team.
- Able to simplify multiple viewpoints into a single coherent product deliverable.
- Ability to manage workload to meet deadlines and report status proactively.

**Desired Experiences and Skills**:

- Experience in product management within the infrastructure domain.
- Strong background in infrastructure technologies (servers, networking, storage, virtualization etc.) and infrastructure automation tools (e.g., Terraform, Ansible). They may understand technologies like Kubernetes at a high-level or have worked with them in the past. Networking understanding (OSI communication model