Product owner

Can you help Dutch educational institutions find SURF's services and products? Can you help institutions make the most of them? Would you like to put SURF's innovative services and products in the spotlight? Can you quickly and clearly communicate with educational institutions about the services? Can you ensure smart and consistent collaboration between departments through good ICT architecture? Can you help departments translate their further development into ICT goals? Then we are looking for you!

Where you will work

SURF is the ICT cooperative for Dutch educational and research institutions. Together with them, we work on digital services and complex innovation challenges to enhance the quality of education and research. As product owner for ‘Business Management Applications’ and ‘Data Platform,’ you will make a significant contribution to the collaboration between these institutions and the provision of SURF's services and products.

The team you will join

You will be working in the Information Management team, which is part of Internal Services. Your colleagues are three information managers and nine product owners who offer applications in various domains. Information Management is a curious, informal and results-oriented team that works with all departments at SURF. We are usually based in Utrecht and meet monthly for team lunches organised by SURF. You will definitely find us at the games evenings, but also at the running events organised by SURF and at every party!

Working at SURF means working for a unique and open organisation. You can see this in everything: the structure of the organisation, the set-up of the project teams, the culture in our offices and the atmosphere among colleagues. SURF offers excellent terms of employment and is flexible when it comes to work/life balance. Employees enjoy working independently. In addition, everyone is given the space and freedom to use and develop their talents as effectively and broadly as possible.

What you will do

As product owner for ‘Business Operations Applications’ and ‘Data Platform,’ you are functionally and financially responsible for the associated services. You work together with business owners who determine the budget. SURF's business operations architecture is “Best of Breed”: we manage multiple modules and integrations between them. These services are: financial system, portfolio management, HRM system, project management and time registration system. Each has its own business owner.
In addition, you will manage the ‘Data Platform’ service, managing and developing SURF's internal data integrations between systems and for BI reports. You will manage this service together with a technical solution architect and two engineers.

Other tasks you will handle:

• Together with colleagues from SURF, you will develop features and refine existing interfaces. You will also encourage them to get started with these.
• You will create business models, business cases and roadmaps for the services and implement them.
• You will ensure good service management and coordination with users, as well as incident management and change management.
• You will draw up budgets and report on them. In addition, you will ensure that the services and developments fit in with the target architecture and the standards frameworks for sustainability, privacy and security.
• You will actively consult and advise stakeholders and interact just as easily with engineers as with ICT management.

Your skills and experience

• You have higher professional education (HBO) or university education (WO) working and thinking level and have experience or affinity with product owner and business management systems such as Finance, HRM or ERP systems.
• You have experience with Agile working methods. In addition, you have an affinity with designing and safeguarding service management processes.
• You have experience in representing the interests of various stakeholders and providing ICT services, and you distinguish yourself through your service- and customer-oriented attitude, combined with a keen sense of political relations.
• You have good verbal and written communication skills in Dutch and English.
• An affinity with Snowflake and Azure Data Factory is an advantage.

SURF takes pleasure in doing its recruitment itself; acquisition is therefore not appreciated.