Junior Product Owner

Want to play a role in battling the global Corona pandemic? Help us assist our customers in the pharmaceutical and logistics industry deliver vaccines and other sensitive medicines in a timely and efficient manner.

With Validaide we help to ensure that healthcare products can be delivered to patients around the world in good quality. Pharmaceutical manufacturers and forwarders use Validaide to assess transportation risk and optimize their transportation and packaging decisions. We enable this by providing a new level of transparency into the services and capabilities across the global logistics industry using our so-called Capabilities Platform and data-driven digital Lane Assessments and collaborative Lane SOPs. Our mission is to increase transparency in pharmaceutical logistics, and shorten the time needed to qualify transportation routes (that typically take anywhere from 3 to 12 months) whilst preventing loss and thus waste of potentially life-saving products.

As Junior Product Owner you have an exciting opportunity to contribute to the mission of Validaide and facilitate the further growth and development of the Validaide platform. The Product Owner is – without a doubt – a key role in our Agile/Scrum development approach: you are literally ‘feeding’ the software development team with features and the higher the quality of the input to the development team, the higher the quality of the output, the higher the value we create for our customers.

As Junior Product Owner you work closely with our CEO and Product Manager and be the bridge between the business and our development team. We have a small Product Management team consisting of yourself, the Product Manager and stakeholders from support and development. You participate in and organize the Product Management team. You work together with the Product Manager and all stakeholders in defining the Product Roadmap and Release Planning.

As Junior Product Owner you become an expert of our application and business domain. You use this expertise to clarify and analyze business requirements, identify areas for product improvement, create product specifications, and ensure with the development team that our software is enhanced according to these specifications. Your end-goal is to maximize customer value!

As Junior Product Owner you participate in frequent customer sessions focusing on continued feature development. With some of our key accounts, these are weekly or bi-weekly recurring meetings. You also engage with internal stakeholders from support and operations to make sure that their requirements also find their way into the product, thereby increasing the quality of our support activities, and improving the efficiency of our operations.

Your Activities:

• Working closely with the business and customers to create and maintain a product backlog according to business value;

• Analyzing and creating functional specifications for items in the Product Backlog, ensuring that features are developed into well-defined User Stories and acceptance criteria in our software tools;

• Analyzing the user journey, including User Experience and User Interface (UX/UI), and suggesting areas for improvement;

• Being a power-user of all software tools used internally, such as Pivotal Tracker and ProdPad;

• Creating prototypes, screen mockups and flow diagrams as part of feature specifications;

• Communicating and clarifying features and their user stories with the development team, during meetings and as go-to person in case of clarification;

• Engaging with key stakeholders and with the Product Manager to ensure that all relevant inputs to the Product Backlog have been collected and prioritized, which may include activities like conducting requirements meetings, application analysis or user surveys to better understand processes and pain points;

• Coordinating with the Support and Development team in troubleshooting bugs and quick resolution of end-user issues;

• Participating in scrum meetings, including Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, Refinement, and Sprint Retrospective;

  
  

Your Profile

• Strong interest in our business domain (healthcare logistics);

• Passionate about digitization (in our market);

• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills;

• Outstanding communication and consensus building skills;

• Comfortable taking ownership of projects and making decisions;

• Ability to see the big picture and have an abstract discussion, while also being able to pay attention to details;

• Fast learner, with a strong desire to develop new skills and knowledge;

• Ability to make things happen, results-oriented;

• Preferably, you have prior knowledge about software applications and software development of web-based applications;

  
  

Your Qualifications

In this role you combine business skills with an understanding of software development, and we expect this to be reflected in your education. You have a MSc degree in a technical domain (e.g. Computer Science) or a business field (Business Economics / Business Administration) or another field that is relevant for this position. Either way, for this role it is critical that your profile and education demonstrate a combination of business skills and software knowledge.

Other qualifications:

• You are based in the Netherlands;

• Qualified to work in the European Union;

• Excellent English language skills, both written and verbal;

• Preferably some experience working as a (Junior) Product Owner or similar position;

• Working knowledge about Agile/Scrum;

  
  

What we offer:

• Startup mentality, flat hierarchy, cooperative and supportive team, growth market;

• Highly international work environment, with a diverse and international team and a global customer base;

• Market conform salary + pension + expenses (home office, travel) + bonus scheme;

• Excellent environment for professional development and growth;

• Generous training budget and time allocation in Agile/Scrum, UX/UI design, or any other relevant field and support to become a (more) Certified Product Owner;

• Validaide aims to become net-zero and we plant trees to compensate CO2 emissions resulting from our work, see: https://ecologi.com/validaide;

  
  

At the moment we work mostly remote with regular (~once a week) meetings in the center of Utrecht. We plan to move towards a hybrid approach by re-instating an office in Utrecht. When we do, team members are expected to be present at least once a week to safeguard social cohesion as a team and engage in certain activities we feel are better performed in-person, such as brainstorming and refinement sessions. You receive a 50 EUR per month reimbursement for your home office, and Validaide can provide office equipment where needed.