Workday Product Owner

Purpose of the Role

The Product Owner role is focused on ensuring that the HR technology products and solutions align with the strategic goals and is responsible for translating stakeholder needs into a well-defined and prioritized product backlog.

Product owner acts as the conduit between Business Stakeholders, System Development Teams, and Product providers, and owns the product to drive its success globally.

Key Responsibilities

HR Systems Product Ownership:

• Develop and articulate a clear product vision aligned with organizational objectives.
• Actively engaging with stakeholders, including HRBPs, employees, and leadership, to understand their needs, priorities, and challenges.
• Guide development efforts to ensure they contribute to the long-term vision and success of the product.
• Facilitate ongoing communication between development teams and stakeholders.
• Maintain a well-defined and prioritized product backlog, based on business value, user feedback, and strategic goals, through tools identified (e.g. JIRA)
• Break down complex features into actionable tasks, understand the associated functional and technical implications, ensuring a clear understanding of development expectations.
• Review and own Licensing for the product.
• Own Partner Service Reviews on a Quarterly basis to drive improvement.
• Review Market trends and benchmark practices.
• Review and maximise the value addition of annual planned developments, publish on a quarterly basis Feature Adoption Health Scorecard.

Project Management

• Liaise on all projects, creating, actively managing, and tracking project initiatives and deliverables.
• Working with Project and Service Delivery teams to support Project phase and Business as Usual
• Review Capacity vs Project demands for project deliveries planned; Forecast and plan project activities and involvement of the Service Delivery teams.
• Work in partnership with the CPO Technology team to optimise resource management.
• Actively resolve bottle necks, provide guidance and SME knowledge for project initiatives.
• Provide regular updates on project progress, address queries, and manage expectations.
• Transition system development activities seamlessly to business-as-usual.

Risks and Audits

• First point of contact for any product related risks identified.
• Support and work closely with Service Delivery teams to resolve any Product related issues/escalations.
• Act as a point of escalation to resolve Product related issues with Providers.
• Ensure continuous risk mitigation and process improvement.

Experience and Qualifications

• Overall, 10-12 years of experience as Product Owner role or similar in HRIS/HRIT; 5+ Years of demonstrable experience with Workday HCM.
• Minimum bachelor's degree in from any stream.
• Strong understanding of Agile methodologies and experience with Scrum or Kanban; Certifications such as PMP, CSM, SAFe are a plus.
• Extensive expertise in Stakeholder management.
• Excellent communications and Interpersonal Skills; Ability to address diverse audiences with the right level of complexity, language, and refinement.
• Initiative in keeping abreast of changing industry practices, analytical and design methods, system tools and techniques.
• Demonstrated capability to support data governance & protection models.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills; ability to make data driven decisions.