Product Owner

Description

Hozah is a tech-led, award-winning company driving change in the parking industry and reimagining urban mobility. Our mission is simple but powerful: to transform parking into a seamless, automated experience, paving the way for smarter, more sustainable cities.

With recent recognition as PayTech Company of the Year, a place among Deloitte’s Top 50 Fastest Growing Tech Companies in the UK, and significant VC/PE investment, we’re one of the fastest scaling companies in the country.

Role Overview

You will be the product owner for one of our product teams. You own that team’s backlog, the discovery work behind it, the acceptance of what the team builds, and the conversations with the customers it is built for. You report to the CTO, and our product manager, who owns product strategy and the roadmap across the teams, supervises your work day to day.

This is a product role first and a coding role second. You also generate code with AI tools, mostly on the front end, at roughly the level of a junior to mid-level engineer. We expect you to build working prototypes and small features that an engineer then takes over. We do not expect back-end work, architecture or being on call.

Our teams are formed from the people we have at the time, so you are not being hired into a named team. You will work with the engineers in your team, the product manager, the CTO and our customer-facing colleagues.

In your first year, you will get a team running on your backlog without the CTO or the product manager stepping in, and you will have personally shipped front-end changes and prototypes that engineers took forward.

Responsibilities

• Own your team’s backlog: decide what goes in, what stays out and what comes next, and keep it in order.
• Run discovery with customers, so that what the team builds is something customers need and will use.
• Turn messy requests, rules and processes into small slices of work with precise acceptance criteria that an engineer can build and a customer can recognise.
• Accept the team’s work against the acceptance criteria.
• Say no, or reshape the request, when a customer asks for something that does not fit, and agree a next step with them.
• Build prototypes and small front-end features with AI tools, check what the tools produce, and hand the work to an engineer to take forward.
• Work with the product manager so that your backlog fits the roadmap, and tell them early when it does not.
• Who we’re looking for
• You have owned a team’s backlog. You decided what was built next and what was not, you accepted the work, and you can say what you decided and why.
• You have told a customer no, or changed what they asked for. You can say what they wanted, what you said and what happened next.
• You find out what customers need before building. You can show us a time you did discovery and what it changed.
• You turn messy requests, rules and processes into small slices with precise acceptance criteria. You can show us a time you did it, how you knew you had it right, and what you got wrong.
• You build working front-end prototypes or small features with AI tools, in the last 12 months, and an engineer took them forward. You can say what you built and what the engineer changed.
• You check what AI tools produce. You can describe a time the output was wrong and how you caught it.
• You work well with engineers: you hand work over clearly and accept the finished work against what you agreed.
• Knowledge of parking or of any one industry is welcome, but none of it is required.

Conditions

Hybrid: 3 days in office, 2 days from home

Reports to: CTO

Benefits

• Hybrid working, 3 days in the office and 2 days from home.
• Real ownership of a team’s backlog and its customer conversations, with a product manager alongside you.
• A small team and real influence over what we build.
• A strong, high performing culture, with genuine influence over how that culture develops as Hozah grows.
• A fully refurbished, modern office, right next to East Croydon Station (with a fully stocked kitchen, offering free breakfast, lunch and drinks!).