(Senior) Product Owner

About Kiron

Kiron Open Higher Education gGmbH is a non-profit organisation founded in 2015 with the mission to enable access to high-quality education for refugees and underserved communities through digital solutions. Our team of Kironistas is international, agile and thinks out-of-the-box. We are education experts, techies, designers, project managers, communicators, grant writers, researchers, coffee-drinkers, innovators and dreamers, who work together on this mission every day.

We are looking to hire a new Product Owner to lead our diverse Engineering Team in the development, maintenance and optimization of our Kiron campus, to ensure maximum quality for our students and impact partners.

As our new Product Owner,

you will be responsible for maximizing our product’s value from a strategic, tactical, and operational level, by solving user problems that lead to incremental value and new capabilities in our platform.

Tasks

**In this role, you will**:

- Define and drive a clear product vision towards further improvement and a better customer experience for the Kiron Campus and Internal Backend.
- Define and maintain the product roadmap for Kiron Campus and the internal backend product.
- Use the product vision and strategy to define and evolve objectives and key results (OKR) for the engineering and design team.
- Own, manage and prioritize the product backlog to support Kiron’s product vision with a positive “value to effort” ratio.
- Leverage your team’s and other stakeholders’ skills to collaboratively discover and iterate solutions that are valuable, usable, feasible, and viable.
- Proactively identify opportunities (problems to solve) with students, clients, and further stakeholders, and in particular with the programs team, to improve Kiron Campus.
- Lead and serve the product team along with the Scrum Master
- Combine data-driven approaches/methods, and market research & understanding of customer needs.
- Conceptualize new features, develop them with the product team, make sure features are tested, and bring them to life.
- Work closely with our educational experts, partnerships team, monitoring & evaluation/data team, and Kiron Digital

** and have the opportunity to improve/grow in**:

- Product management
- Data analytics
- Customer centricity
- Prioritization and negotiation
- Team leadership
- Agile product development
- Stakeholder management
- Market analysis

**Requirements**:
About you

**To succeed and grow in this position, you will likely be**:

- Passionate about our mission to democratise education
- Self-motivated & proactive
- A quick thinker and creative problem solver with excellent analytical skills
- An excellent communicator, motivator and stakeholder manager
- Collaborative and respectful in your approach
- A strong time manager, able to prioritise and work in a project-based environment
- Fluency in English

** and will likely have**:

- At least 4 years’ product owner/manager experience
- Led a cross-functional team with engineers, designers, product marketing, support
- Experience with consumer-facing products
- Experience working with executive level and external stakeholders (clients, partners)
- Experience of working in agile development operating models

**Ideally, you might also have**:

- Experience with technologies such as Javascript, React, GraphQL
- Familiarity with human centered design, and with design tools such as Figma, Invision etc.
- Experience with B2B product development
- Knowledge about API’s, plugins
- An understanding of the education / job skills sector and/or e-learning platforms / MOOCS
- Fluency in Arabic or German

This is what you can expect

After your first month, you will have completed product onboarding for the internal backend and campus, and have a good understanding of Kiron’s activities and processes.

After three months, you will have a good understanding of our software architecture, know our product and demo it confidently, have established a good rapport with your team, be aligned with internal stakeholders about our mission and product vision, and be able to write user stories based on user and client needs.

After six months, you will have executed on the roadmap, have introduced a continuous discovery cycle and understand our Kiron users, have a backlog ready for at least 4 weeks out, understand the strengths and weaknesses of your team and adapt your process to best complement them.

After 1 year, you will be an expert on Kiron students and their needs, have moved the needle on key metrics of the Kiron product and have a strategic product roadmap that is aligned with Kiron’s mission, vision and has buy-in from all stakeholders.

**Benefits**:
Why join Kiron?
- We are a mission-driven organization committed to making a difference for underserved communities,
- We offer a flexible, agile and entrepreneurial work environment, where purpose, enthusiasm, and your ideas are valued.
- We are a vibrant and intern