Product Principal

Why this job matters

At BT, we are investing heavily in Digital Transformation to provide both great services to our customers and drive internal efficiencies for our commercial and operational areas.  To help us with this, we are looking for an experienced Product Principal Owner within the product platform team, you will collaborate with product professional, engineers and architects to develop an outstanding, user friendly, and scalable API for developers. Your role will be pivotal in identifying and seizing standards opportunities to innovate, differentiate, and expand our API while upholding top notch safety standards. Demonstrating a proven track record of engaging with developer persona, understanding their needs, and crafting products that exceed their expectations is essential.

What you will be doing – your accountabilities

•    Formulate and implement a product vision and strategy for our developer API.
•    Engage directly with developers through interview, surveys, forum participation, and more to conduct user research and comprehend their pain points and requirements.
•    Translate user insights into actionable product requirements, user stories, and product specifications.
•    Create intuitive and developer friendly API interfaces, SDKs, and documentation experiences.
•    Utilize API usage data feedback to assess product performance and identify new opportunities.
•    Advocate for the developer perspective and champion their needs across the organization.
•    Communicate the product roadmap, releases, and value proposition to developer users.
•    Stay abreast of API and developer tool trends, emerging technologies, and industry best practices.
•    Act as a subject matter expert on API design, architecture, security, and governance, providing guidance and mentorship to the team.
•    Define and track KPIs to measure the success of the API platform and integration products, including adoption, usage, revenue, and customer satisfaction.

The skills you will need to succeed

•    Strong technical aptitude to understand API architecture and to partner with engineers.
•    Excitement for engaging in cross organizational collaboration, working through trade-offs, and balancing competing priorities.
•    Strong leadership and decision-making abilities, with a results-oriented mindset and a passion for driving innovation.
•    Proactive problem-analysis and design-thinking skill and capability to offer up innovative ideas to the business and others in BT.
•    Commercial acumen to ensure engineering platforms & products are defined and delivered from a techno-economic perspective to ensure we have the right solution for the right price, considering total cost to BT – not just the IT cost.
•    Ability to collaborate, negotiate and influence disparate & varied groups Pan-BT to buy in to the engineering platforms product vision in a way that is relevant to them, their technical goals and drive the medium to long-term transformation in single direction.

Experience you would be expected to have

•    8+ years of experience as a Product Manager/Product Owner working on developer focused products.
•    Proven leadership ability across direct, virtual and peer teams.  Leading, inspiring, building trust with project and client staff and stakeholders.
•    Experience of agile product ownership, agile methodology and technical depth.
•    Understanding of integration technologies, protocols, and standards, such as REST, SOAP, GraphQL, JSON, XML
•    Experience with integration platforms, API management tools, and cloud-based integration services.

•    Nice to have Skills:
•    Prior experience with iPaaS 
•    CSPO certification
•    Experience with API gateways like Apigee or Kong
•    Understanding of event driven architecture and experience with message brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ)
•    Knowledge of integration patterns like publish-subscribe, request-reply, message transformation, and orchestration to build efficient and reliable integrations