Product Owner IT Operations

Are you an inspirational Product Owner with a keen sense of what IT can mean for an organization? Do you want to drive your team to achieve the goals that enable Nationale Nederlanden Bank to fully leverage its IT capabilities? Within NN Bank we are on the lookout for an IT Product Owner who understands Technology and Business. Do you feel this describes you? Then it’s you that we are looking for!

What you are going to do

As part of NN Banks strategy we are actively seeking out opportunities within Bank to commoditize, standardize and centralize. You and your team will enable our engineers to focus on delivering business value by relying on high-quality patterns, code and internal services.

The IT operations team comprises of a group of experts of DevOps practices and Software Engineering Infrastructure. They support our engineers with monitoring solutions, compliancy tracking, Kubernetes support, CICD templates & pipelines and various tools to make the life of our engineers easier. Also, another part of your team delivers shared business services, that can be reused across NN Bank.

In your role it’s important to be aligned with our (internal) suppliers and collaborate with them for productized solutions. Always balancing between the need for speed (by our teams) versus delivering the right level of quality and robustness.

What does your team do?

The IT operations team currently has multiple solutions it takes care of. The most important of those:

• JARVIS compliancy checking framework which supports all our engineers by validating their deployed resources within AWS are safe, secure and follow the guardrails we set out for ourselves
• Stackstate (Suse Observability) – A big part of NN Bank has been enrolled to this platform to provide end to end traceability and make the life of the engineers on duty easier
• Confluent Kafka (Streaming Platform) – supporting our teams with publishing and subscribing to event driven data streams
• JMonitor – Synthetic monitoring of our applications based on Apache JMeter so that our engineers know what is broken before our customers do
• Kubernetes support – Give support for our engineers that deploy their applications on Kubernetes (provided by NN Group-IT as managed product)
• Various home-grown productized CI/CD pipelines

Upcoming Challenges

Some of the solutions the team created or supports, are now comparable with managed solutions provided by our suppliers. An emerging need is a solution to standardize scaffolding of application infrastructure using AWS CDK. Lastly, we see more and more internal (business) services getting created which are used across multiple teams – These need a central space to be hosted and maintained. Together with the Manager Platforms you will define a strategy to address these challenges!

Responsibilities in this role

• Work with stakeholders to define long-term vison for the IT operations and Business Services team and set clear, measurable goals for development of its solutions
• Convey the product vision and product strategy to the members of the teams, inspiring them to create extraordinary results
• Constantly analyze emerging trends in the market and within NN Bank in partnership with the Manager Platforms and our biggest supplier (NN Group-IT) to see where your team can add the most value
• Represent NN Bank in supplier meetings when this affects your portfolio
• Act as a bridge between your teams and stakeholders, suppliers, gathering feedback and ensuring needs are understood
• Develop and maintain a prioritized product backlog, making decisions based on business value and technical feasibility and plan implementation accordingly
• Ensures that the user stories are well formed and aligned with the product strategy
• Define acceptance criteria for user stories to validate that they meet the business requirements
• Identify and mitigate risk related to the solutions provided by the teams including technical challenges, data quality issues and regulatory compliance
• Manages expectations of stakeholders continuously through negotiation and influencing
• Play a key role in the Product Increment (SYNC) planning, ensuring realistic goals for each quarter

What we offer you
NN invests in an inclusive, inspiring work environment and in skills and competences for the future. We match this with employee benefits that are in line with what is needed today and in the future. This way, we offer our employees the opportunity to get the best out of themselves.

We offer you:

• A unique opportunity to help unlock the value locked in the data at NN Bank
• Salary between €5,597,- and €7,996,- depending on your knowledge and experience (based on 36 hours/week) depending on your knowledge and experience. It is also possible to work 38 or 40 hours
• 13th month and holiday allowance are paid with your monthly salary
• 27 vacation days (based on 36 hours/week) and one Diversity Day
• A modern pension administered by BeFrank
• NS Business Card 2nd class, which gives you unlimited travel, also privately. Do you prefer to travel with your own transport? Then you can expense the kilometers travelled
• Allowances for setting up your home office and for internet use

It is important to us that you continue to develop yourself. We give you the space and the confidence to grow in your career as well as a person. We help you with: 

• Plenty of training and learning opportunities in our Learning & Development Centre 
• A large (international) network of colleagues who are keen to share their knowledge with you through the NN Product Owners Guild
• The autonomy to steer your own development path 

Who you are

We are looking for colleagues that are good at what they do and are also nice to work with. You bring a positive mindset and energy, which makes you an inspiration to collaborate with. You always have new ideas, you see possibilities and learn from situations. Furthermore, you recognize yourself in (multiple) of the following skills and experiences:

• Hard skills - You are good at what you do
  • Proven experience in previous roles as Product Owner
  • Experienced at shaping vision and strategy for a digital product
  • Knowing what it means to successfully build an internal IT platform of scale with multiple (internal) stakeholders
  • General understanding of the Software Engineering lifecycle, Operations and Maintenance of Applications
  • Understanding of the IT4IT framework
  • Proficiency in cloud technologies (mostly AWS)
  • Understanding of containerization (Kubernetes on AWS)
  • Understanding of event based architectures (serverless on AWS)

• Soft skills - You are nice to work with
  • Teamwork and collaboration over personal success
  • Seek first to understand, then to be understood
  • You understand what you need to deliver to enable our engineers and thus their business
  • Focus on solving important business and user problems by empathizing with the end user. You are naturally customer obsessed

With you will work with?

The Technology & Transformation (T&T) domain is responsible for the (tech) transformation of NN Bank. The Platform Services team is part of the Platforms department and reports to the Manager Platforms alongside the teams responsible for Advanced Business Analytics (Data & AI) and the Integration Layer team. Although their targets are very different, they all serve the same shared mission:

• Help our colleagues focus on their teams unique selling point
• Promote re-use by standardization & centralization of solutions
• Build what makes sense, delegate what should be commodities

There is no relocation budget available for this role and we are looking for someone currently living in The Netherlands.

Any questions?

If you have any questions, you can reach out to Renske Timmerman (Talent Acquisition Specialist) via [email protected].