Senior Product Owner, Events Technology

Company Description

At Informa, we love knowledge, expert information and the power of networks and connections. We are dedicated to connecting specialists with knowledge so they can learn more, know more and do more in their roles and businesses, and we’re doing this in ever smarter ways. We’re passionate about our customers and the markets they operate in. And because our colleagues are our greatest assets, we do everything we can to make work life at Informa supportive, rewarding and enjoyable. 

We are a FTSE 100 company with 10,000 colleagues working in over 30 countries. Within Informa's Group Technology team, the Platforms teams design, build, and operate shared platforms that drive customer value at scale, optimizing the platforms and related technology assets to provide greatest customer and commercial value at the lowest cost. 

Job Description

Informa is seeking an accomplished Senior Product Owner to play a leading role in the evolution of our technology-enabled, data driven, customer-centric event delivery capability.

Job Summary:

The Senior Product Manager will be a trusted technology partner to brand leadership, helping them clarify business requirements, prioritize the backlog, estimate and coordinate effort with external vendors and internal operations teams, and coordinate product delivery.  You’ll help to drive a change to a more customer-centric delivery model, thinking in ‘products’ not ‘projects’ and always focused on delivering incremental chunks of business and customer value. You’ll have great communication skills and be quick to build strong relationships with key stakeholders internally and externally. Keen to take accountability and ownership for the success of digital platforms, you enjoy working under pressure and meeting deadlines with excellent organizational skills. Having a strong mix of professional and emotional intelligence is critical to success. You will enjoy driving meaningful change and innovation and have a track record of bringing people along the journey with you. 

Key Responsibilities:

The Senior Product Owner is responsible for working with the divisional market leads to clarify requirements for virtual event platforms, ensuring the requirements are fully identified, prioritised, and agreed and documented using the agreed delivery method. They will then have responsibility for overseeing the successful delivery of those platforms/platform changes.

Primary Responsibilities

• Oversee the strategic and operational engagement with Informa’s two primary platform partners.
• Act as liaison between Event Operations, Digital Delivery, and the vendors.
• Collaborate with divisional market leaders, and cross-functional teams to understand the event strategy and clarify requirements.
• Be the SME for the event delivery platforms & Lead training and demonstrations as part of a new team member’s onboarding process and showcasing new features.
• Develop and maintain platform resources and engagement documentation, ensuring those are made available to the necessary business partners (divisional leads, delivery teams, etc.).
• Ensure proposed changes are sufficiently defined, including acceptance criteria and KPIs.
• Facilitate architectural, technology, privacy, legal, data, and operational reviews of proposed changes with internal teams.
• Work with the vendor to estimate the cost, time, and resources of requested changes, challenging them when appropriate for justification and/or more attractive terms. 
• Regularly groom the backlog based on evolving business needs and ambitions.
• Be fluent in the platforms’ roadmap and Informa’s role in it.
• Collaborate and support product managers in identifying alternative solutions if requirements cannot be met through enhancement of an existing approved solution.
• Helping with the identification of potential new partners, undertaking vendor and platform analyses, supporting selection processes and the resulting change impact assessments.

Development and Delivery Planning

• Communicate prioritized roadmap to vendor, ensuring alignment between Informa’s ambitions and the platform vision.
• Maintain visibility of the external technology partners’ progress against plan to deliver change on scope, on time, and on cost.

Additional Responsibilities 

• Produce and maintain utilization KPI data on the digital event platform to support product stakeholders.
• Act as advisor and SME to additional areas of the Informa business who engage with the digital event platform.
• Support Informa data programs, including but not exclusively IIRIS as the SME for the digital event platform.
• Involvement with the commercial partnership between Informa and the platform