Morningstar - Product Owner - Strategy & Roadmap (5-8 yrs)

The Group :

At Morningstar, we strive to Empower Investor Success. We tirelessly pursue new ways to combine our data and research with design and technology to help solve investors' needs. Our solutions pave the way for investors to achieve their goals with confidence.

The Morningstar Wealth Platform allows investors and advisers to collaborate through their financial journey with seamless and enjoyable digital experiences. By learning through data and engagement, we build products and offer services that connect people to the financial information and tools they need. Our mission is to enhance the education, engagement, and experience for the investor.

The Role :

We are looking for a technically strong Product Owner to work within our Trade Optimisation team. This role is ideal for a candidate who has a passion for technical product ownership and the skills to go with it..

The role will involve managing and prioritising the backlog , focusing on automating manual trading processes and reducing dependency on third-party vendors. You will have a strong understanding and demonstrable experience of working on back-end solutions and services that power great experiences, with a passion in designing and delivering high quality, performant and scalable workflows.

Strong judgment and communication skills, technical design, and continuous focus on product and operational excellence are essential for the success in this role. You understand the criticality of a highly performant, scalable and resilient core platform and are skilled and able to help bring business and technical context to complex problems.

You will work as part of a cross-functional scrum team, working in an Agile environment. Whilst coming from a technical background, you understand business value and are able to make priority decisions based upon a number of different lenses. You have worked in environments where re-architecting a core platform was your mission, you understand API and micro-service standards and patterns that deliver to global/local models and put emphasis on improved security, scalability, reusability and cost optimisation

You will build a high level of rapport and trust with business and operational leads, all members of the platform teams, sales and account management and our implementation teams around the business, to ensure the change is adopted fluidly and with minimum disruption to both internal colleagues and our external customers

Key Responsibilities :

- Own the prioritization of the Platform Data team's backlog, making value-based decisions in collaboration with other product stakeholders.

- Work closely with cross-functional teams to improve data quality, speed, and operational efficiency across the product.

- Manage vendor relationships for third-party data sources, driving cost-saving initiatives and exploring opportunities to bring capabilities in-house.

- Develop and execute a strategy to automate trading processes, reducing manual intervention and improving overall platform efficiency.

- Draft key objectives and results, strategies and apply the data for the product to make business decisions.

- Possess a advanced understanding of cloud-native architecture, with proven experience in large scale service componentisation.

- Collaborate with stakeholders during the visioning and concept development of a product.

- Assess value, develops cases, and prioritize themes to ensure work focuses on those with a maximum value that are aligned with product strategy

What We're Looking For :

- 5-7 years' experience in a combination of Product Owner / BA roles.

- Technical Expertise : Strong experience in technical product owners, particularly in data-driven environments (e.g., SQL & database management). SaaS or financial technology experience is preferred.

- Strong Product Owner skills, with proven ability working within an agile scrum team environment is an absolute must.

- Strategic Thinker : Ability to lead long-term automation initiatives while balancing the day-to-day backlog management of technical product teams.

- Vendor Management : Experience managing third-party vendors and negotiating for cost-saving opportunities, especially in relation to data sourcing and delivery.

- Strong Communication Skills : Ability to collaborate with stakeholders across the business, translating complex technical requirements into clear, actionable roadmaps.

- Experience in building products leveraging APIs, micro-services design and an event driven architecture

- A background in digital transformation, ideally within investment platforms, fintech, or financial services.

- In this role sounds aligned with your skills, experience and ambitions then we'd love to hear from you.