Senior Product Owner

This is a consultancy mission delivered by Keystone Solutions. As a Keystone Solutions consultant, you will work closely with the client to own the functional and business direction of a Smart Parking Controller product. You will gather needs from multiple countries and operational stakeholders, convert local problems into coherent and reusable product capabilities, define expected functional behavior, and maintain a roadmap aligned with business value, market timing, and realistic delivery capacity. All responsibilities and requirements below will be performed under Keystone Solutions' consultancy model at the client site or in a hybrid setup, depending on project needs.

As a Keystone Solutions consultant, you will operate in a model comparable to that of a software vendor, collaborating on-site or in hybrid mode with client stakeholders across countries. You will embed with client teams while benefiting from Keystone Solutions' consulting community, applying best practices and ensuring product coherence, scalability, and reusability across multiple markets.

Working through Keystone Solutions, you will tackle diverse challenges across multiple client contexts, from product discovery and demand management to capability shaping, roadmap prioritization, delivery collaboration, and stakeholder governance. You will engage with a variety of operational experts, user groups, architects, and delivery teams across different countries.

Keystone Solutions supports your professional growth with exposure to complex, multi-country product environments and software-vendor-like operating models. You will deepen your product management and senior functional analysis skills through real-world engagements, peer knowledge-sharing, and continuous learning opportunities.

By rotating across engagements and owning critical product responsibilities, you will accelerate your career trajectory. Keystone Solutions provides a platform for consultants to make product-level choices, contribute to strategic roadmaps, and influence multi-stakeholder decisions in high-impact domains.

Being a K-Stone means bringing integrity, client-centricity, collaboration, and pragmatic excellence to every engagement. You will champion reusable value, coherent product evolution, and constructive stakeholder relationships, ensuring measurable outcomes on each client project.

The Products & Services tribe develops a Smart Parking Controller as an internal product for countries. Although the customers are internal, the operating model is comparable to that of a software vendor: multiple markets express different needs, while the product must remain coherent, scalable and reusable. The role sits between country stakeholders, customer service and parking operations, product experts, architecture, security, legal and delivery teams. It combines product management with senior functional analysis. It is broader than a conventional Business Analyst role and more strategic than a sprint-level Scrum Product Owner role.

• SPC product development, with assessment of country requests and potential reuse across the group.
• Define the right product capabilities, their functional intent, detailed functional analysis, priority and market-facing roadmap.
• Provide an agreed, sufficiently defined and prioritised release scope to the Product Delivery Manager.

Own the functional and business direction of the Smart Parking Controller product. The consultant gathers needs from countries and operational stakeholders, converts local problems into coherent and reusable product capabilities, defines the expected functional behaviour, and maintains a roadmap aligned with business value, market timing and realistic delivery capacity.

Product discovery and demand management

• →Build and maintain an active network of country representatives, operational experts, user groups and other stakeholders.
• →Collect, clarify and structure business problems, operational pain points, regulatory needs and product opportunities.
• →Distinguish the underlying business problem from a stakeholder's proposed solution.
• →Consolidate similar requests from different countries and identify common patterns, variants and conflicts.
• →Assess whether a request should become a reusable SPC capability, remain country-specific custom development, or be addressed through process or configuration changes.

Capability shaping and functional definition

• →Translate validated needs into reusable business capabilities, features, user stories and functional outcomes.
• →Define functional behaviour, business rules, user interactions, exception handling and expected system responses at the level needed for estimation and delivery preparation.
• →Work with architects, technical leads, domain experts and test engineers to test feasibility and preserve product coherence.
• →Identify assumptions, open questions, dependencies, data implications, operational impacts and non-functional considerations.
• →Define acceptance principles and business outcomes without prescribing unnecessary technical implementation details.

Prioritisation and product roadmap

• →Evaluate requests using transparent criteria such as business value, number of countries served, urgency, strategic fit, risk reduction, compliance and implementation effort.
• →Maintain a business-oriented product roadmap covering expected capability availability and major release themes.
• →Balance short-term country needs with long-term product sustainability and reduction of local variants.
• →Prepare priority and scope recommendations for the relevant product governance or decision forum.
• →Adjust priorities when assumptions, market needs, capacity or dependencies change, and communicate the consequences clearly.

Delivery preparation and collaboration

• →Maintain a structured capability and feature backlog that is sufficiently clear for estimation and refinement.
• →Work jointly with the Product Delivery Manager and development leads on estimation, sequencing, release options and trade-offs.
• →Strong alignment with suppliers / vendors on intake new requirements, backlog priorities and functional analysis peer reviews.
• →Ensure that the rationale, functional intent and expected value of approved items are understood by delivery teams.
• →Remain available during development to clarify requirements, resolve functional questions, review defects and arbitrate scope within the approved product intent.
• →Validate that delivered functionality addresses the agreed business problem and is suitable for broader product use.

Stakeholder communication and product governance

• →Facilitate workshops, user groups, product reviews and roadmap alignment sessions across countries.
• →Communicate roadmap status, planned availability, scope changes and decision points in clear business language.
• →Produce business-facing release information comparable to vendor release notes, explaining new capabilities, target users, expected value and availability.
• →Manage expectations when requests cannot be accepted, must be generalised, or require a later release.
• →Maintain traceability from stakeholder need to capability, roadmap decision and delivered outcome.

Product learning and adoption

• →Collect feedback after releases and identify gaps, adoption barriers and further improvement opportunities.
• →Use operational evidence and stakeholder feedback to refine future priorities.
• →Promote reuse of standard SPC capabilities and discourage avoidable local divergence.
• →Contribute to product documentation and knowledge transfer for countries, support teams and deployment teams.
• →Training and coaching towards business groups and end-users.

• This is not a conventional Business Analyst or sprint-only Product Owner role. The consultant is expected to own product-level choices and roadmap recommendations, not merely document requests or administer a sprint backlog.
• Does not own the detailed integrated delivery plan, day-to-day development tracking or delivery status reporting.
• Does not act as line manager for developers or assign individual development tasks.
• Does not accept country requests at face value; the role must challenge, generalise and prioritise them.
• Does not define technical architecture alone, but must collaborate closely with architecture and engineering.
• Does not commit release dates independently of delivery estimates, capacity and dependency analysis.

Required

• At least 5 years of experience in product ownership, senior business analysis or functional product leadership for software products.
• Demonstrated ownership of product roadmaps, prioritisation and stakeholder demand across multiple business units, customers or countries.
• Strong functional analysis skills: business rules, processes, user interactions, exceptions and acceptance outcomes.
• Ability to abstract local requests into reusable capabilities and product variants.
• Experience collaborating with software engineering, architecture, QA and delivery management.
• Strong facilitation, negotiation and written communication skills in English.
• Ability to operate independently in a complex international stakeholder environment.

Strong advantages

• Experience with B2B, operational, industrial or hardware-integrated software products.
• Knowledge of parking management, access control, mobility, payment, ticketing or similar transactional domains.
• Experience with multi-country product governance and internal product customers.
• Working knowledge of APIs, relational databases, integrations, devices and distributed systems from a functional perspective.
• Experience with Azure DevOps, Jira, Confluence or comparable product-management tooling.
• French and/or Dutch in addition to fluent English.

• Product-minded: seeks reusable value and coherent evolution rather than isolated feature delivery.
• Analytical and curious: investigates the real problem before proposing a capability.
• Decisive but collaborative: can recommend priorities while making trade-offs explicit.
• Structured communicator: explains complex product choices in language suitable for business and technical audiences.
• Pragmatic: balances ideal product design with market timing, capacity and operational constraints.
• Comfortable challenging senior stakeholders while preserving constructive relationships.

Candidates whose experience is limited to writing user stories or facilitating sprint backlog refinement are unlikely to cover the full assignment. Prior evidence of roadmap ownership, product generalisation and multi-stakeholder prioritisation should be treated as essential.

As a Keystone Solutions consultant in this Senior Product Owner role, you will apply product management and senior functional analysis across multiple country contexts, ensuring reusable capabilities and coherent product evolution while collaborating closely with architecture, engineering, QA, legal, security, and operations.

This position is delivered through Keystone Solutions' consultancy model. You will perform all responsibilities above as a Keystone Solutions consultant working with the client's stakeholders across countries.

If you are ready to tackle technical and strategic challenges in a dynamic consultancy environment, apply today at Keystone Solutions Career Portal.