Central 1 cooperatively empowers credit unions and other financial institutions to deliver banking choice to Canadians.  Central 1 provides critical services at scale to enable a thriving credit union system. We do this by collaborating with our clients, developing strategies, products and services to support the financial well-being of their more than 5 million diverse customers in communities across Canada. For more information, visit www.central1.com

We are the credit union system's financial institution connection point to Payments Canada and responsible for delivering payments safely, efficiently, and cost-effectively. This means we are well-positioned to anticipate the afoot changes and advise the credit union system on the steps it must take now to prepare. Central 1 is dedicated to providing technologies and partnerships that meet or exceed Payments Canada and Interac requirements and allow our members and clients to innovate safely and efficiently.

What you'll be doing:

 As the Product Owner, you will be responsible for the business intelligence portfolio within the Payments Modernization program, you will be accountable for:

• Roadmap design that defines and prioritizes business capabilities and features for Business Intelligence, including ISO data.
• Strategies and Plans for Requirements Management, Change Management, Business Testing & Quality Assurance, and ensuring enterprise security & compliance standards are met as part of key initiatives.
• Successful on-schedule and on-budget delivery of initiatives that meets business needs in alignment with business capability requirements.
• Managing initiative-wide risks, including vendor delivery risks, assumptions, constraints, dependencies, and status reporting.
• Provide oversight of product quality for business capabilities and features through effective planning, assurance, and control.
• As part of portfolio management, engaging Management and Key Stakeholders for key decisions and approvals, influencing outcomes, identifying and flagging risks, and early warning of scope/delivery/budget deviations.
• As part of business change management, planning and prioritizing the orderly transition of business functions from the complex and highly fragmented current state to new platforms minimizing the impact on servicing customers and day-to-day operations.
•  Organizing and structuring the portfolio in partnership with business and technology stakeholders as well as strategic vendor partners.

Data Strategy and Governance

• Operationalize and evolve the data strategy to ensure that data is valued as a strategic asset.
• Be a thought leader on how data and analytics can be leveraged.
• Inform data or system procurement decisions to enhance future analytical capabilities.
• Work closely with different business functions and identify new analytics opportunities or use cases.
• Prioritize and coordinate data or information requests.
• Drive Data Governance activities within the organization to ensure that data is available and reliable to support Business objectives.
• Educate and train business users with adopting the appropriate report or data product in meeting their needs.

Support the Technology Team to:

• Build, improve and maintain the existing business intelligence (BI) environment that includes the existing suite of Power BI reports
• Drive the design and development of reports and dashboards to support recurring business needs.

Data Engineering

· Support the Technology Team to:

• Build and maintain complex dataflows to create large datasets from multiple data sources.
• Critically evaluate information gathered from multiple data sources, reconcile conflicts or data quality issues, and present them within the correct business context.
• Clean and validate raw data to make it usable for business intelligence and reporting.
• Leverage external or publicly available data sources alongside internal datasets to adequately baseline findings.

Data Science

Support the Technology Team to:

• Apply a variety of data science techniques and algorithms to build out complex models and data-driven solutions.
• Perform exploratory data analysis (EDA) and present results back to the business clearly and concisely.
• Select features, building and optimizing classifiers or regression models using machine learning techniques.
• Process, clean, and verify the integrity of data used for ad-hoc analysis.
• Various other duties as required.

Data Engineering

Support the Technology Team to:

• Build and maintain complex dataflows to create large datasets from multiple data sources.
• Critically evaluate information gathered from multiple data sources, reconcile conflicts or data quality issues, and present them within the correct business context.
• Clean and validate raw data to make it usable for business intelligence and reporting.
• Leverage external or publicly available data sources alongside internal datasets to adequately baseline findings.

Data Science

Support the Technology Team to:

• Apply a variety of data science techniques and algorithms to build out complex models and data driven solutions.
• Perform exploratory data analysis (EDA) and present results back to the business in a clear and concise manner.
• Select features, building and optimizing classifiers or regression models using machine learning techniques.
• Process, clean, and verify the integrity of data used for ad-hoc analysis.
  Various other duties as required.

What you'll have:

• 7+ years of related experience in product management, preferably in financial services, credit unions, or banks
• Strong understanding of the payments landscape
• Understanding and experience within the business intelligence, data science  data strategy and governance and data engineering 
• Data driven
• Experience working in a complex product development environment with Agile software methodology.
• Experience as a Product Owner / Product Manager with software products, strong skills in maintaining and prioritizing a backlog.
• Deep understanding of industry trends and client needs, creating a value proposition for the client and the product vision and applying critical thinking to assess risks and opportunities effectively.
• Strong relationship building, negotiation, and leadership skills; ability to persuade and lead a squad of diverse stakeholders
• Excellent communication and presentation skills with a high degree of comfort in speaking with senior leaders
• Demonstrated ability to think both strategically and tactically
• Brings a high-energy and passionate outlook to the job and can influence those around them
• Strong self-starter who can work in a collaborative team environment but isn't afraid to tell it like it is
• Passion for innovation and a "can do" attitude
• Willing to temporarily take on special assignments as needed
• Work hard and play hard—our happy team interacts with each other a lot, so you need to be fun to work with!

As much as we believe in working hard, we also believe in personal growth and taking time for ourselves. Accordingly, our total rewards philosophy amounts to one of the best compensation and benefits packages in the industry – from performance-based incentives and extended benefits, to training and education reimbursements and ample vacation time.

Central 1 is committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce by creating an environment where everyone feels like they belong and has the opportunity to be successful. We are welcoming of all applicants and we will provide an accessible candidate experience.

Reporting to: Product Director, Payments Modernization
Grade: E
Date Posted: September 28, 2021 
Location: Vancouver, BC, Mississauga, ON, and Toronto, ON