Unum

Snr Product Business Analyst

Carlow, Carlow, IRE Full time

Our Story
Unum Technology Centre in Carlow serves as a strategic software development and IT services centre supporting Unum, a leading provider of income protection in the US. Our team of IT professionals build solutions and critical business applications to digitally transform the way we do business.

The Product Business Analyst will work closely with the assigned team to deliver high quality standards by defining and documenting acceptance criteria and continuous documentation with limited oversight and exhibit a mastery of their functional area subject matter expertise and analytical skillset. The Product Business Analyst will play an integral part in ensuring the solutions delivered are of high quality by collaborating with their team members and by leveraging/using appropriate elicitation/documentation practices for the team. They use innovative and critical thinking skills applied to business process and needs to ensure solutions meet business value.

Principal Duties and Responsibilities:

  • Collaborates with the Team (Product Owner, Lead Architect, Lead Software Engineer, Test Engineer, etc.) to ensure that the team defines, builds, and produces features and solutions that meet or exceed what the product leader is expecting
  • Exhibits the technical acumen necessary to be a contributing member of solution design discussion
  • Maintains holistic understanding of product roadmap and tracks any changes
  • Maintains holistic understanding of relevant user and customer personas and uses these personas to refine work items to develop shared understanding across the key stakeholders. Gather requirements for persona of specific user experiences
  • Maintains holistic understanding of product features, information architecture, and builds knowledge of the backend configuration
  • Ensures integrity of work items as they are broken down and refined throughout hierarchy of work items in the product backlog. Identify where intent may be lost or overlooked during the work breakdown and refinement processes. i.e., Descoping or need for supplementary requirement gathering
  • Ensures that key information needed to support the product team prioritization is current, accurate and available in a usable format to drive high quality decisions
  • Ensures functional and non-functional requirement’s, with appropriate documentation, are represented effectively in the product backlog
  • Collaborates with the product owner and relevant subject matter experts to define the detailed design and acceptance criteria for user stories. Responsible for defining concise and effective user stories with precise and accurate acceptance criteria on a just‐in‐time/just‐enough basis that will be used by the team and product owner to ensure that stakeholder and product owner intent is effectively captured and developed
  • Leads story decomposition to enable planning at the appropriate level of granularity that supports the just‐in‐time nature of agile approaches and takes the lead in process mapping and decomposition
  • Reviews the acceptance criteria, as appropriate, with the Product Owner, Lead Software Engineer, and Test Engineer to ensure agreement on testability and to define, coordinate, and at times, execute acceptance testing
  • Determines and uses the most appropriate means of representing business requirements in the context of a specific change initiative, ensuring traceability back to the source 
  • Develops, evaluates, adds, and continuously improves tools to the BA Discipline Toolbox
  • Educate peers around business analysis best practices
  • Ensures documentation is in place for the production deployment activities and transition to production support technical team


Job Specifications

  • Bachelor’s Degree preferred, or equivalent experience
  • Has 4+ years’ experience working as part of an agile team  
  • Passionate about the product, vision, priorities, results, and customer experience
  • Clearly demonstrates analytical and critical thinking abilities
  • Takes a logical, analytical approach to problem solving and pays close attention to detail
  • Experience with Agile Development Methodologies
  • Self-motivated and results oriented
  • Demonstrates good oral and written communication skills
  • Strong written communication skills to document and communicate requirements
  • Strong team player; able to work effectively with a fully remote team and more broadly with people from a variety of backgrounds and time zones across the organization

What We Offer
Our size and successful history in Carlow means we can offer you exceptional development and progression, supported by continual learning programs, IT Certifications & third level tuition reimbursement. We offer work-life-balance with flexible working arrangements (including hybrid) and initiatives in support of your well-being. Our attractive range of benefits and reward initiatives includes competitive compensation, 25 days annual leave, paid health insurance, pension scheme, annual performance-based bonus, paid maternity/paternity/adoptive leave, reward programs, and an opportunity to engage with charity and community activities.

Company:

Unum