The posting
About FWD Group
FWD Group (1828.HK) is a pan-Asian life and health insurance business that serves over 40 million customers across 10 markets, including BRI Life in Indonesia. FWD’s customer-led and tech-enabled approach aims to deliver innovative propositions, easy-to-understand products and a simpler insurance experience. Established in 2013, the company operates in some of the fastest-growing insurance markets in the world with a vision of changing the way people feel about insurance. FWD Group is listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under the stock code 1828. For more information, please visit www.fwd.com
PURPOSE
The Group Platforms team is responsible for identifying, defining, and managing digital product platforms and technologies to fulfil business objectives.
The Group Platforms team operates across FWD Group to:
- Collaborate with functions to drive the design conceptualisation and development of new business platforms, provide digital product platform management and distribution partner digital solutions.
- Evolve digital product platform development roadmaps and collaborate on solution design to achieve optimal business outcomes.
- The Product Owner, OPUS Purchasing (new business) owns the product direction and delivery backlog for the new business / purchasing journey within OPUS, FWD’s operations workflow and management platform.
KEY ACCOUNTABILITIES
- Own the product vision, roadmap and prioritised backlog for OPUS Purchasing, aligned with Group platform strategy and market implementation plans.
- Define the end-to-end purchasing scope, including case creation, workflow and task management, document and information management, pending management, Customer 360, assessment, approvals, quality control, correspondence, reporting and audit trail.
- Lead current-state and target operating model reviews to simplify and re-engineer purchasing processes, increasing standardisation, reuse, automation and straight-through processing.
- Lead the product management and execution of the digital platform through extracting business priorities and fulfilling business needs at the regional level
- Facilitate discovery, business refinement, design walkthroughs, backlog refinement, sprint planning, showcases and retrospectives with business and technology stakeholders
- Prioritise features using customer and operational value, new business volume, regulatory and control needs, cross-market reuse, delivery readiness, dependencies and implementation effort
- Develop storyboards, personas, journey maps, process flows, epics, user stories and testable acceptance criteria. Keep JIRA and the supporting document repository complete and current.
- Partner with market Product Owners, distribution teams, NB Admins, UWers, compliance, legal, risk, finance and technology teams to identify requirements and distinguish reusable Group capabilities from justified local variations
- Demonstrate good and relevant application of design thinking methodologies towards the insights gathering of the platform, working effectively with assigned digital platform UX/UI team members.
- Lead appropriate decisions to ensure digital platforms are planned to support scalability, reliability and efficiency in maintenance across the regional markets.
- Lead and coach Agile practices through design and execution efforts of the specific digital platform initiative
- Collaborate with technical BAs, architects, developers, QA and integration teams to clarify business rules, data needs, interfaces and non-functional requirements.
- Technically savvy to work closely with developers, understanding their technical capabilities and constraints
- Generate high value from user feedback that strongly influence platform direction and roadmap
- Ensure co-ordination design, development and deployment plans with business functions and technology solutions delivery teams.
- Assess CX feedback and analyse, prioritize quick fix optimizations and longer-term strategic fixes
- Develop, create and maintain a digital roadmap for the assigned digital platform
- Strongly oriented towards results and delivering a high standard of digital platforms. Shares an inner drive that overcomes obstacles and appropriately leverages work-around solutions in order to remove impediments to the digital platform delivery
- Able to mentor colleagues and team members on the Scrum environment and processes via the conduct of platform initiative.
- Embed emerging technologies and techniques to optimize business benefits and improve operational efficiency
- Articulate business logic to technical partners in clear written and oral communication to large and higher stakes audiences
- Able to communicate with Group/Country stakeholders effectively and influence them for their buy-in
QUALIFICATIONS / EXPERIENCE
- University degree in Business, Insurance or Information Technology or equivalent area
- 8+ years' working experience in Life and health insurance with exposure to new business operations and digital or workflow transformation.
- Demonstrated experience as a Product Owner, Product Manager or senior Business Analyst delivering complex digital platforms through Agile teams.
- Experience and proven results in product management and delivery of a digital platform
- Proven experience in successful rollouts at either country or regional levels (preferably within the Asia Pacific markets)
KNOWLEDGE & TECHNICAL SKILLS
Business Knowledge
- Broad understanding of the insurance and technology industry, including current and emerging financial services, lifestyle, operations, and technology trends
- Ability to translate complex processes, regulations and business rules into simple, scalable product capabilities.
- Strong stakeholder management, facilitation, influencing, negotiation and executive communication skills across cultures and markets.
- Commercial judgement and the ability to balance customer value, operational benefit, risk, delivery cost and platform reuse
Technical Skills
- Skilled in Agile Software delivery (Scrum or similar)
- Proven record of Product Backlog management (using JIRA, Confluence or something similar). Working knowledge of Miro, Visio, Figma.
- Strong understanding of technology concepts and developer languages, ability to understand APIs, data flows, integrations, microservices, cloud concepts.
- Good in facilitating user centric design thinking, strong analytical, problem-solving skills, with attention to detail and excellent business judgement
- Build prototypes with UX/UI designers with data driven approach using analytics expertly
- Ability to work independently, manage competing priorities and maintain delivery quality in a fast-paced regional environment
