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With over 100 years of rich history and strongly positioned as a local bank with regional and international expertise, a career with our family offers the opportunity to be part of this exciting growth journey, to reset our future and shape our destiny as a proudly African group.

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Job Summary

Job Purpose
• Drive product strategies and long term vision to build best in class digital products
• Conduct user research and usability studies, collaborating with designers, developers and research teams from end to end of the process.
• Ability to craft a product vision (short to long term) and convert that into a concrete strategy
• Participate in market research, validation, and whitespace analysis to identify new opportunities for new and existing features and functionalities.
• Facilitate designing of the customer experience (CX, UI and UX)
• Partner with agile product teams to build product roadmaps that will be incorporated in to the broader company product portfolio plan
• Develop and implement data pipelines that extract, transform, and load data into an information product
• Evaluate, analyze, and understand the voice of the customer through a variety of data sourcesEnd-to-end ownership of assigned digital projects from conceptualization to project delivery and success
• Delivery of assigned digital solutions through an agile methodology, by ensuring consistency in delivery approach
• Critical evaluation of business ideas from a customer and a commercial point of view
• Drive out the real business outcomes that are required to realise the customer and business propositions
• Collaborate with internal and external partners to create new products and services
• Designing and development of various digital projects / solutions
• Gathering and generating ideas (from colleagues or other inspirations) that can solve for or has potential to solve for customer or company problems/challenges and incubate these ideas into prototypes.
• Presenting the proof of concept to get go/no go decision from various internal stakeholders.
• Testing, gathering, analysing and providing customer feedback on the customer’s perception of products, solutions, enhancements and prototypes.

Job Description

Accountability: Drive Product Strategies

• Drive product strategies and long-term vision to build best in class digital products

• Conduct user research and usability studies, collaborating with designers, developers and research teams from end to end of the process.

• Lead the agile team as product owner to deliver the product road map required to support the business growth and strategy of the bank

• Work in agile framework and be accountable for delivery of product build road map by ensuring that platform road maps prioritised against business are published regularly

• Maintain regular connect and engagement with key stakeholders periodically to refine platform; lead the team to work towards optimising the product value based on the feedback

• Collaborate with agile team members to deliver wireframes, user journeys, and product backlog, and other artifacts as needed to support technical design and development

• Investigate business issues and evaluate solutions to improve within specified functional workstream, understanding external perspectives and customer needs

• Pro-actively identify and use appropriate methods of uncovering information including interviews, document analysis, requirements workshops, surveys, site visits, business process descriptions, use cases, scenarios

• Translate the product's vision into workflows, features, user stories and requirements that represent the overall scope of the initiatives and are robust, complete and unambiguous

• Develop the solution architecture with vendors / Absa Regional Office to meet the business needs

• Establish project teams, co-ordinate staff engaged in project work and collaborate towards project delivery and success

• Identify, document, analyse and, if required, challenge internal & external customer requirements, ensuring the project meets business needs / strategic aims

Accountability: Implementation and execution

• Take full end to end responsibility for production of business requirements documentation, process analysis/design and user stories within the workstreams or functional improvement teams

• Drive out the real business outcomes that are required to realize the customer and business propositions and not simply recording requirements.

• Responsible for developing the end to end functional design of the project/s down to detailed UX and acceptance criteria

• Ensuring a cohesive design encompassing customer experience design, operations design and solution design.

• Liaise with specialist areas to ensure that they complete specification requirements for their area of accountability and identify / secure resources and expertise as required to deliver the project (including management of third party suppliers as appropriate)

• Undertake detailed project planning & documentation (defining project deliverables, success criteria, benefits management, dependencies, change control, risk management) including escalating risks & issues as required.

• Clearly define roles and responsibilities of each team member for project success

• Lead project meetings and facilitate workshops as required, producing & presenting written and oral reports/management information to Senior Management and other groups as appropriate

• Closely monitor project progress, performance and quality, including evaluation and benefits realisation

• Trouble-shooting & problem-solving, including analysis of the problem & exploration of resolution options.

Accountability: Stakeholder Management

• Work closely with BUs, internal teams and vendors to drive digital transformation projects according to defined timelines, quality standards and adherence to risk and governance policies

• Ensure that deliverables, objectives and outcomes of the project(s) are achieved as specified, within timescales, to budget and agreed quality standards

• Work with colleagues in the team to achieve excellent business results through a shared purpose, continuous people development and mentoring activities.

• Build strong and productive working relationships with business and senior stakeholders to manage objections

• Seek approvals efficiently across the range of product, channel, legal, compliance and risk stakeholders

• Responsible for closing down debate on requirements scope and detail in order to keep the delivery on track

• Deliver effective customer experience in the Digital Channels environment to enable customer acquisition, retention and cross selling

Accountability: Control and Governance

• Ensure that all activities and duties are carried out in full compliance with regulatory requirements, Enterprise Wide Risk Management Framework and internal Absa Policies and Policy Standards. Understand and manage risks and risk events (incidents) relevant to the role.

• On a monthly basis review all reported incidents or risk events together with supporting investigating documents. Identify high-risk areas and create mechanisms to address risks in future.

• Ensure that adequate controls are in place and drive a culture of proactive compliance in the function.

• Determine action plans to effectively reduce and manage risk issues related to Absa Internal Audit findings, Management Assurance findings, Compliance issues, SOX requirements and operational risk.

• Seek clearances from various stakeholders including compliance, legal, risk, IT etc. on proposed solution and adhere to the organisation’s process for project / product roll-outs

• Ensure bug free release to the production environment including application security, penetration testing and load testing standards of the Bank

Accountability: Change Management

• Review periodically existing business processes and digital projects to check if they are meeting the desired objective and are relevant in the current competitive scenario

• Create a change management program and ensure any changes go through within the approved process with the control and governance processes.

• Ensure bug free release to the production environment with necessary roll-back plan for every change

Role / Person

Specification

Education and Experience Required

• Graduate

• Atleast 5 years’ experience in Digital Project Management

• Passionate and committed to over-coming internal barriers to disruptive innovation.

• Passion for customer success and deep interest in understanding client needs.

• Be able to deal with unclear requests and high volume of requests

• Ability to work under time and target pressure

• Strong interpersonal & communication skills

• Strong relationship management skills

• Strong problem-solving skills

• Strong digital acumen

Knowledge & Skills: (Maximum of 6)

• Makes prompt clear decisions (Advanced)

• Takes responsibility for actions, projects & people (Advanced)

• Takes initiative, act confidently, works independently (Expert)

• Initiates and generates activity (Advanced)

• Keeps up to date with competitor info (Advanced)

• Relevant business and technology knowledge (Advanced)

• Displays leadership(Advanced)

• Demonstrates integrity (Advanced)required

Competencies: (Maximum of 8 competencies)

• Deciding and initiating action

• Adapting and responding to change

• Entrepreneurial and commercial thinking

• Relating and networking

• Persuading and influencing

• Creating and innovating

• Working with people

• Contract negotiation

IT Skills: Preferred

Operating Systems :

• Windows 2000/NT/XP/2003/7, Vista, MS-DOS, Linux

Technology :

• ASP, .Net, Java Script, php, Apache, AWS

Databases:

• Oracle, MS SQL, MS Access, MySQL

UX / CMS Tools :

• Figma, Adobe XD, Wordpress

Others :

• Software Project Management, Business Process Improvement, Business Analysis Techniques etc.

Education

Bachelor`s Degrees and Advanced Diplomas: Physical, Mathematical, Computer and Life Sciences (Required)