Product Owner

Closing Date

Job Title: PRODUCT OWNER

Department: Aspire Product Team

Location: Durrington or Falmer (Hybrid working)

Salary: @£55,000 depending on skillset and experience

HELP SHAPE THE FUTURE OF SPILL COMPLIANCE AT SOUTHERN WATER

At Southern Water, we're investing in products that improve environmental stewardship, strengthen regulatory outcomes and increase confidence in how environmental performance is measured, reported and understood.

We're looking for a Product Owner to join the Aspire Product Team and help shape the future of one of Southern Water's most strategically important products.

Aspire is Southern Water's spill compliance platform. It helps colleagues manage regulatory obligations, improve confidence in environmental data, streamline reporting processes and provide transparent insight that supports efficient operations and customer confidence.

As Product Owner, you'll play a key role in ensuring Aspire continues to evolve to meet changing user needs, business priorities and regulatory requirements, whilst delivering measurable value to both the organisation and its stakeholders.

ABOUT THE ROLE

This role sits at the intersection of product ownership, business analysis, process improvement and stakeholder management.

We're looking for someone who enjoys understanding complex problems, challenging assumptions and working collaboratively with others to deliver meaningful improvements.

You'll work closely with the Senior Product Manager to translate strategic priorities into practical outcomes, helping ensure Aspire continues to deliver value for its users and stakeholders.

Whilst this is a Product Owner role, we expect it will strongly appeal to candidates from Business Analysis, Systems Analysis, Process Improvement or similar backgrounds. A significant part of the role involves understanding how regulatory, operational and environmental processes work, identifying opportunities for improvement, and translating those opportunities into clearly defined solutions that can be delivered by the product team.

You'll be embedded within an established Agile product team, working alongside Developers, QA Testers, UX professionals and technical specialists to investigate problems, conduct discovery, prioritise improvements and continuously enhance the service.

This is not a consumer-facing product role.

It's an opportunity to help solve complex compliance, reporting, workflow and data challenges that directly influence how Southern Water manages environmental performance and regulatory obligations.

WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING

Understand problems and identify opportunities

• Build a deep understanding of the operational, environmental and regulatory processes supported by Aspire.
• Lead investigations, discovery activities and problem-solving initiatives.
• Engage regularly with users and stakeholders to understand pain points, risks and opportunities.
• Analyse workflows, business processes, data and system dependencies to identify opportunities for improvement.
• Help the team focus on solving the most valuable problems.

Own and manage the product backlog

• Work with the Senior Product Manager to translate strategic goals and roadmaps into actionable product backlog items.
• Write clear user stories and acceptance criteria.
• Maintain a healthy, prioritised and valuable backlog.
• Balance operational needs, technical improvements and longer-term product objectives.
• Support release planning and delivery activities.

Lead stakeholder engagement

• Act as a key day-to-day contact point for Aspire stakeholders.
• Build strong relationships across operational, environmental, regulatory, digital and technology teams.
• Facilitate workshops, discovery sessions, backlog refinement and collaborative planning activities.
• Respond to stakeholder feedback, questions and emerging requirements.
• Ensure user needs remain at the centre of product decisions.

Support Agile delivery

• Collaborate closely with Developers, QA Testers, UX professionals and technical specialists throughout delivery.
• Participate in Sprint Planning, Backlog Refinement, Sprint Reviews and Retrospectives.
• Provide clarity, context and prioritisation support to the delivery team.
• Ensure product increments align with strategic objectives and user needs.
• Champion a culture of continuous improvement, innovation and experimentation.
• Help deliver meaningful outcomes

You'll help the team tackle challenges such as:

• Improving efficiency and confidence in spill verification processes.
• Increasing confidence in environmental data and how it is used.
• Streamlining regulatory reporting processes and reducing manual effort.
• Improving transparency and trust in environmental information.
• Providing better insight to support operational and regulatory decision-making.
• Identifying opportunities to improve user experiences, workflows and business processes.
• Supporting the continued evolution of Aspire in response to changing user and regulatory needs.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

Essential

• Experience as a Product Owner, Business Analyst, Systems Analyst or similar role.
• Strong experience gathering, analysing and documenting business requirements.
• Experience writing user stories and acceptance criteria.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Excellent stakeholder engagement, communication and facilitation skills.
• Ability to translate strategic objectives and ideas into practical, deliverable solutions.
• Experience working within Agile delivery environments.
• Experience prioritising competing demands and managing a product backlog.
• Comfortable dealing with complexity, ambiguity and high expectations.

Desirable

• Experience working with compliance, regulatory, operational or data-intensive systems.
• Experience conducting discovery, investigations or process improvement activities.
• Knowledge of environmental, utility or water industry processes.
• Product Owner certification.
• Business Analysis certification.
• Strong numerical and data analysis skills.
• Experience using Jira, Jira Product Discovery, Miro or similar tools.

WHY JOIN US?

Aspire sits at the heart of Southern Water's ambition to improve environmental stewardship, strengthen regulatory confidence and deliver more efficient compliance processes.

This role offers a unique opportunity to combine the structured thinking of business analysis with the ownership and influence of product management.

The work you do will directly contribute to improving spill verification processes, increasing confidence in environmental data, streamlining regulatory reporting and providing transparent insight that supports efficient operations and customer confidence.

You'll work alongside passionate product, engineering, operational, environmental and data professionals while helping shape a product that is critical to Southern Water's future.

We're particularly interested in hearing from people who enjoy understanding complex systems, solving challenging problems and using technology to deliver meaningful improvements.

If you're motivated by improving processes, influencing product direction and contributing to better environmental outcomes, we'd love to hear from you.