Product Owners

Job description

Position Summary:

The GTP is a data-centric platform supporting EY Tax services. Our data strategy is to accept client data from any source, organize it, and deliver planning, accounting for income taxes, compliance and controversy services across the globe. 

The purpose of the role, and the combined contributions of the roles of this team, is to serve the aggregate technology needs of a Tax Service Line and its products including building relationships with assigned practice areas and the various product sponsors within them, technical tax professionals, internal technology professionals, external clients and third party software vendors.  This position will typically support a larger proportion of more complex, more costly, more risk sensitive applications providing functional support including product management, operations management and business analysis. The Senior Manager will typically be assigned responsibilities for broadly used enterprise tools, but may also be responsible for an additional volume of smaller anchor or service line wide products.

The immediate role is to serve as the Product Owner for the ‘Gather’ capability for GTP. The Gather capability will:

1.    Efficiently gather client data in the platform via:

a.    Manual file upload 
b.    Automated file transfer 
c.    Web-based forms (e.g., survey/questionnaire) 
d.    Direct client system query

2.    Align the data that is collected with other key capabilities with GTP, including:

a.    Information Request Management 
b.    Common Data Model
c.    Master Data Management 
d.    Reporting & Analytics

Essential Functions of the Job:

•    Assist in managing applications & products throughout their lifecycle, ensuring business relevance, adoption & continuous improvement. Partially responsible for annual planning based on roadmaps and the development of business cases in support of the governance process
•    Validates and prioritizes defects and enhancement requests gathered by various client service and support network inputs for complex products
•    Schedule and prioritize work with product, project, and service managers. Interpret and report status and metrics supplied by product, project, and service managers. 
•    Help coordinate activities at all levels of the organization on issues and matters related to the products, including managing relationships with Global Tax Platform (GTP) business sponsors and vendors to facilitate smooth development and implementation of products
•    Direct the continual upgrading of GTP products, procedures and operating environments to maintain currency with technological progress, economic change, and all business needs  Constantly monitors customer satisfaction
•    Develop annual budgets and manage expenditures in order to operate within approved budget guidelines
•    Provides field communications regarding planned or unplanned production issues
•    Coordinates or delivers of training to Product Support Services (PSS) team members on all new releases and updates to the application
•    Formulates test plans and strategies to coordinate/execute user acceptance testing 
•    Provides the necessary leadership and guidance to help team members understand focus area strategies and knowledge needs 
•    Defines, builds, implements, and assists in operations of GTP support model for tax technology tools. Analysis based revision where indicated.
•    Serves as an escalation point in the support model.  Coordinates technology operations issue resolution with customers, and with product, project, and service managers 
•    Measures and reports on operational metrics of applications in production
•    Compiles product support documentation such as Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) lists and application training materials.
•    Completes the Service Level Agreement (SLA) for Americas IT (AIT) for all AIT hosted applications. 
•    Coordinates, leads, and distributes minutes for weekly technology support meetings with Tax Technology Services (TTS), PSS, Application Vendors and others that discuss current and outstanding action items relating to the application.   
•    Monitors compliance of vendor and AIT service level agreements. 
•    The analyst may lead and perform primary and secondary research of high complexity using general and specialty resources in addition to interviewing business owners, external clients and other stakeholders and provide leadership to colleagues in the appropriate use of these sources. 
•    Reviews colleague’s deliverables and advises on the development of a distinctive points of view for the deliverable's key findings or on bolstering key findings with more rigorous analysis. 
•    Provides the necessary leadership and guidance to help team members understand focus area strategies and knowledge needs.  
•    Networks with EY tax practitioners to better understand and meet customer needs and to raise awareness of how research and analysis can support those needs.

 

Analytical/Decision Making Responsibilities: 

•    Ability to clearly articulate both problems and proposed solutions
•    Proactive approach to identifying issues and presenting solutions and options, and where appropriate, leading to resolution

o    Product Management Function - Decisions are made around the provision of leadership and vision that guides the service lines in tax product selection,   strategic direction, and operation while making certain the best use of limited financial and human resources. 
o    Operations Management Function - Decisions focus on appropriate support levels and investments based on tool complexity and user community needs.  
o    Business Analysis Function - Reconciles unstructured input from the business into a tangible set of requirements that leads to optimized business solutions. Reconciles varied inputs and makes a single requirement that optimizes the benefit for all, (all business users and technology).

•    Ability to prioritize personal and team workloads to best meet organizational objectives
•    Empowered to make decisions and recommend approach based on the results from quality reviews.

 

Knowledge and Skills Requirements:

•    An understanding of ERP and Tax systems, data, and processes.  (i.e. record to report, order to cash, purchase to pay, tax accounting, tax compliance).  
•    Areas of knowledge may include, but not limited to:

o    Current versions of ERP systems such as SAP and/or Oracle and/or tax systems such as OneSource Tax Provision, Longview etc.
o    Design implications, interface implications with ERP and Tax systems
o    Configuration implications and processes
o    Testing and go-live considerations
o    ERP and Tax system interactions - modules utilized in Order-to-Cash, purchase-to-pay, forecasting and budgeting
o    Tax experiences, relationship to business processes, bolt-on-modules, OneSource Tax Provision, Vertex etc. 
o    Reporting experiences, Data Warehouse, ERP reporting considerations

•    Strong analytical and problem solving skills 
•    Extraordinary interpersonal, communication skills, and client service attitude
•    In depth Tax Domain knowledge, it’s business, processes, and policies
•    Deep knowledge of the software development lifecycle 
•    Knowledge of EY support, training and operating models and processes
•    Ability to understand and learn tax law and technology implications at a high level
•    Excellent organizational and project management skills as well as the ability to multitask on various projects in a fast-paced environment 
•    Ability to work and team effectively with clients and high level leadership personnel as well as influence all team members
•    Knowledge of procurement policies driven by Independence
•    Solid presentation and facilitator skills
•    Ability to work on multiple projects, simultaneously, in a fast-paced environment 
•    Ability to influence 
•    Ability to develop a budget and manage expenditure to that budget

 

Supervision Responsibilities:

•    Provide supervision and direction to team members and staff
•    Delegate, coach, coordinate and lead co-workers and project team members.
•    Leads a functional team with responsibility for utilization, assignments, and reports to a pillar leader
•    Responsible for training and standards for functional team performance
•    Has direct responsibility for supervising personnel, (i.e., sets goals, assigns work, reviews performance, and conducts career development discussions)

 

Other Requirements:
.
•    Occasional overnight travel may be required

 

Job Requirements:

Education:

•    A bachelor's degree (computer science, engineering, accounting, finance preferred) or equivalent work experience. 
•    Master's degree preferred•    

Experience:

•    10-15 years of experience managing aspects of Technology applications or Service products Depending in Service Line requirements, experience in any or all of the following  are beneficial:

o    Business Analysis, Sales and Marketing, Business Development, Project Systems Management. Relationship Management, Technical Help Desk, Desktop Support, IT Project Management and Tax Technical,  Project Planning, Financial analysis, or Business Process Re-engineering

•    3+ years of SAFe Agile experience
•    2+ years of Product Owner experience
•    Management experience a plus

 

Certification Requirements:

•    Certified Public Account (CPA) designation preferred but not required

EY provides equal employment opportunities to applicants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, protected veteran status, disability status, or any other legally protected basis, in accordance with applicable law.