Lead- Product Practice

An ASX100 business part that is owned by Australian universities, IDP is a pioneer in international education services. Our core business lines include student placement to Australia, US, UK, Canada and New Zealand institutions, English-language testing and training. 

We are on a mission to build the world's leading platform and connected community to guide students along their journey to achieve their lifelong learning and career aspirations.

As a co-owner of IELTS, we deliver the English test that is trusted by more governments, universities and organisations than any other. We also operate English language teaching schools in South East Asia. 

We are innovators, driven by the needs of our customers and deep data insights. Our 5,000 team members based around the world understand that our services change lives – not only of our customers, but their wider communities. 

By combining empathy and professional expertise with digital excellence, we create launch pads for our customers to achieve global success. 

POSITION PURPOSE

This role is part of the Product Management team within IDP Digital Campus, Chennai. This is a rewarding, high-impact role in a global business, with opportunity to create a major difference and deliver an outstanding outcome for our internal/external customers so expect to innovate and be challenged. .

You will lead a capable team of Product Owners, assisting in capability growth through practical hands-on practice leadership in Agile. Your team is critical to your success, and you will garnish deep understanding of our internal/external customer needs.

Practice: Developing the practice of product owners through strategic direction, implementing industry best practice, and building continuous improvement cultures. 

Take responsibility for stakeholder escalations and act as a point of escalation both in and out of hours as required. Drive continuous improvement.

People: Strong supporter of investing in people's development to reach their potential. Building highly engaged performing product team, through understanding motivation, capability uplift, leadership and guidance.

Hosting community of practice for product teams across globe, sharing and re-applying skills and knowledge and bringing in best practice. Act as a ‘change lead’ for PO’s with regards to Agile WOW initiatives and other projects, as and when required. 

Customer: Believer that roles only exist to serve a customer. Ensuring stakeholder management underpins everything we do, through understanding stakeholders, establishing good relationships and regularly seeking 360' feedback. 

Work with the Project Sponsor, Key Stakeholders like Customer Ambassadors, Product Manager to define the roadmap for any given product. 

To drive a culture of Customer first within the IDP technology team ensuring all staff consider the customer as the “centre of all their activities”. 

Delivery:  the successful candidate will manage DC product owners across projects and BAU enhancements, typically to deliver a specific product or transformation via a multi-disciplinary squads. 

You’ll be adept at delivering complex digital projects, breaking down barriers for your team and both planning at a higher level and getting into the detail to make things happen when needed. 

Deliver projects and products using the appropriate methodology, learning & iterating frequently

Reporting: Contribute to operational, project and management level reporting.

Key Performance Area

Key Responsibility

Practice Management

• Establish and manage the Product Practice
• Ensure alignment with organisational strategy
• Provide tooling & support
• Assess performance, capability and quality
• Regular reporting of team metrics to Senior Leaders

Embed Data Insights and customer insights

• The customer is at the centre of everything we do. This role will leverage our customer co-design way of working and will connect customer needs to the portfolio of digital and physical tools that we offer. Our customer experience is measured on NPS outcomes and counsellor adoption rates of the tools our network uses to ensure we are efficient, relevant, connected and valued by our customers. (internal and external)
• Capture and use data and insights to deliver better experiences, larger user groups or stronger productivity of our counsellors. 
• Measuring customer satisfaction, success, and optimisation

People Management

• Provide leadership, guidance and direction to a team of First time and tenured PO’s.
• Motivate and develop individuals to achieve both their professional and organisational goals
• Create training plans
• Screening and recruitment of PO’s
• On-boarding and training new hires
• Coaching, reviewing and encouraging growth

Delivery

• Co-design and co-lead the maturity of IDP ways of working (Agile frameworks/models) to ensure IDP capability increases to produce quality fast paced software enabled product outcomes. 
• Work with delivery teams to ensure rollout of products worldwide is seamless run efficiently and deliver on team goals. Plan with central and network operational leaders to ensure that the on the ground operating experience is considered with practical solutions that balance the operational reality of our business.
• Maintain and transparency product backlogs across various product streams to reflect the most recent insights and making it available to the
• Monitor performance and issues to continually improve our services.
• Resource management, linking resource capability, experience and development opportunities together to support demand as effectively as possible
• Support change sizes including Organisational transformation, Programs and Projects

Product COP

• Support the setting up and evolution of PO COP across DC.
• Performance metrics to be established for PO practice
• Standards aligned with industry best practice 

Reporting

• Prepare and deliver routine Executive Dashboards with practice updates.

Change Management

• Participation in the Change Management process

Stakeholder Management

• Build highly collaborative professional relationships with key internal stakeholders. Become an extension of their teams.
• Maintain effective communication and stakeholder expectation management through any project, support event or initiative ensuring the stakeholders are fully informed as required.

Leadership and Management

• Responsible for the supervising of the product knowledge tasks for all product owners including tasks involving product knowledge, product presentations, product documentation, and training.
• Use Agile methodologies to maintain a strong focus on delivery priorities, holding others to account for delivery, and swiftly responding to changing requirements.
• Responsible for acquisition and management of talent within team, ensuring appropriate blend and breadth of skills aligned to current and future technology roadmaps.
• Motivate team and find ways to encourage them to do their jobs better
• Provide mentoring, guidance and training to team as required
• Conduct performance reviews of team members including feedback into the annual remuneration review cycle
• Assist in planning, estimating and operating to budgets to organisational standards
• Communicate effectively with subordinates as well as senior management and bridge the gap between various functional teams at IDP

Privacy & Security

• Ensure that the privacy and security of IDP Customers and Staff is protected at all times

Personal Specification

Essential Requirements

•Education: Holds a bachelor’s in engineering qualification with major in information technology computer science, information science, computer systems analysis, networking, or a related field. And master’s degree in engineering or business administration.

•Experience: Product Manager/ Product owner for 5+ years with overall 12-15 years’ experience across several industries. Passionate advocate of Product as a profession.

•Critical thinking and analytic orientation: They must be able to undertake research, analyze data, and apply results in problem solving and decision making, taking a long term perspective

•Strong business judgment: The business analyst manager must be a tenacious decision maker, with strong business acumen and ability to bring a sound, aggressive, and responsible approach to business

•Quantitative skills: They require the ability to utilize numeric data and metrics to back up assumptions and develop business cases

•Problem solving skills: They must be naturally curious and result-oriented individuals who exhibits a proactive approach to staff and management, to quickly identify problems and implement improvements

•Teamwork abilities: They must be able to work with a cross-functional team in handling cross functional initiatives and bridging the gap between the business/operations and technology. 

•Communication skills: They require exceptional verbal and written communications skills to effectively work with teams, vendors, and clients from diverse backgrounds. Have excellent written and verbal communication skills in English, influencing and customer management skills

•Self- starter: They must be experts with strong business acumen and ability to undertake analyses and deliver projects independently in a fast-paced business environment.

•Project Management skills: They require this skill to effectively get projects completed through others. They must be able to coach, mentor, and drive their team to be their best individually as well contribute optimally to group projects, and complete projects within required time frames

•Leadership skills: One of the job requirements of the manager is to lead and train a team of business analysts; hence they must be able to build and leverage on the capabilities of their team, as well as business partners across the organization. They must be able to foster innovation, drive critical decisions, and to consistently deliver results.

•Competency: Has developed and implemented a strong product competency across various industries and project portfolios ensuring delivery excellence. Adapting to the latest approaches and tools.

•Multitasking: Proven experience balancing multiple priorities and dealing with ambiguity. Experienced working under pressure and organising work priorities

•Customer orientation and  Interpersonal skills:  particularly negotiation and facilitation, to recognise requirements and ways to satisfy them and maintain good relations with IDP staff and suppliers.

•Mandatory Certification: Any Product management/ owner certification like CSPO, APM etc.

Desirable Requirements

•Experience in education, digital transformation or with SAP Cloud technologies would be a strong advantage.

•Knowledge and experience in effectively working with the ITIL framework.