Description

Education exists to Inform, Engage, Empower, Every day. Our job is to help make this happen.
As the largest provider of education management software in the UK, we influence the lives of over one million people every day. Our aim is to empower educators, parents and learners to deliver the best school and learning outcomes possible. We do this with a range of web and mobile (iOS, Android) products which are built on the SIMS management information system.
What we want
We are looking for an experienced Product Owner who is passionate about building products that customers love and take full accountability for the discovery, definition, delivery and performance of products and services in the ParentPay engagement portfolio.
You will be responsible for understanding and meeting the needs of your users and driving the commercial success of your products through creative thinking, an evidence-based approach and a keen focus on user and business value. You will create buy-in for the product vision internally and externally, working effectively with your Agile delivery teams and wider business stakeholders.
To do this, you?ll build a deep understanding of the Education market and your product area - SIMS Parent and student engagement and communication services.
We are looking for a strong all-rounder who has experience as a storyteller, technical liaison, user experience development, data analytics, sales and marketing

Key Responsibilities

• Contribute towards the vision, product strategy and roadmap for SIMS engagement and related services.
• Develop a deep understanding of the needs of your users and the problems they have in meeting those needs based on market and user research as well as product analytics data
• Gather and share insights about the market and the competitive landscape.
• Develop product positioning, pricing and messaging that differentiates your products in the market and segment.
• Work with the wider Product and Commercial teams to build business cases to justify why ESS should invest.
• Define what success looks like for your product, how we measure success and report on progress towards success.
• Manage the full product lifecycle from idea through to launch, optimisation and maintenance.
• Build relationships with internal and external stakeholders, understanding their needs and effectively managing their expectations.
• Work as part of a product team of designers and developers to:
  
  • Address the needs of users and the problems they have meeting these needs.
• • Develop solutions to these problems by creating and testing prototypes and MVPs to prove or disprove hypotheses.
• • Build and launch world class products.
• Work across the organisation to build go to market plans for new products.

Look for new and future trends in the market and technology, to ensure that your product is leading the field

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise

Agile Methodology
Finance Domain Experience
Postgraduate in Finance
Product Owner

Benefits

the largest EdTech company in Europe with over 1000 employees and more than ?130m turnover. ESS has a portfolio of software solutions for educational establishments which serve their management, payments, and library service needs.

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ESS is the largest provider of education management software in the UK and influences the lives of over one million people every day. The aim is to empower educators, parents, and learners to deliver the best school and learning outcomes possible. This is done with a range of web and mobile products which are built on SIMS - the School Information Management System - helping teachers, administrators, and leaders to manage their school and learners through activities such as attendance, assessment, wellbeing and many more.


SIMS is at the heart of 19,000 schools, including over 700 independent and international schools in 49 countries. SIMS provides the tools to efficiently manage daily school life and drive improvements in learner outcomes.


What we are doing


ParentPay Group have recently acquired ESS and with the support of Thought works are starting a project to completely redevelop the SIMS platform and take it from the current legacy solution to a fully cloud-based solution serving the needs of all our customers.


The project will be delivering a cloud native single instance multi-tenanted application running as a suite of distributed microservices on Azure. The teams will be working using eXtreme Programming techniques, including:

• Clean Code, Test Driven Development, Pair Programming, Development on the trunk, 100% test automation, continuous delivery

Our Product Delivery teams are autonomous and working with a ?Built it, run it? philosophy and responsible for the full lifecycle of everything that they produce.


Key technologies being used are C# .net, React, Docker, Kubernetes, Microservices, Azure Service Bus. The teams are immersed in a DevSecOps culture which embeds quality and security at the heart of all the work being done.

About ParentPay Group

ParentPay Group brings together eleven brands that drive development in EdTech. As Europe's largest EdTech provider, we help primary and secondary schools streamline their cashless payments, improve their parent engagement, safely manage meals and securely store their data. Fundamentally, we create time for learning.