Product Owner – Processing

Who is Karta?

We’re an early stage, Aussie-born, global fintech disruptor focused on opening a world of possibilities for businesses seeking simple, seamless, all-in-one payments. What does this mean? We take the complexity out of gift cards, providing new ways to connect merchants and consumers.

Our start-up is well funded, and as we scale, we are bringing together a collective of like-minded people. Our platform is scalable globally and bolstered by a multi-year strategic partnership with Mastercard. Recognising the opportunity, CommBank formed a new strategic partnership with Karta in October 2021.

As a Product Owner - Processing in our Product Team, reporting to our Head of Product & Operations, you will help us transform payments and launch new products. We are looking for an innovative, experienced product owner with a passion for payments, ability to prioritize customer needs, and a desire to envision and launch industry-leading products.

To succeed in this role, you should be well versed in current card processing and emerging payment types. Experience with highly available platforms and architectures would be advantageous. You are a self-starter and have a blend of business and technical savvy skills, ability to explain difficult concepts to non-technical users, and a strategic vision and a commitment to owning products from ideation to post launch. You have a collaborative mindset and can demonstrate creative problem-solving skills. You have exceptional communication skills and enjoy sharing where you are up to, and what lies ahead openly and transparently, contributing to a high performing culture.

What you will lead:

Manage and prioritise the product roadmap, backlog. Create project plans, and product specifications for the core processing platform.
Be an expert on trends in everything from prepaid, scheme processing rules and emerging payments options.
Champion change and be a thought leader in the company to influence core processing platform evolution required for all new products.
Own scheme mandates, specifications, and new offerings, to define use cases and drive the ideation and development of new capabilities.

Facilitates product innovation and roadmap planning sessions. Actively offering ideas, solutions, and technical product guidance on solution feasibility, approach, and high-level scope.
Collaborates closely with our leadership, sales, and client teams to pinpoint opportunities for our strategic focus and ensures releases and product backlog are aligned to deliver the capabilities.
Carry out detailed end-to-end process analysis, provide recommendations against current vs the future state advising on business impact when making changes to business rules and logic.
Facilitates product discovery, write epics/user stories, and solution requirements for product enhancements. Actively participates in design review and product demo sessions, offering critical and insightful feedback that shapes the final product delivery.
Define metrics for success and analyse the user impact of product features.
Lead and facilitate Scrum ceremonies using Agile practices, tools, and processes.
Maintain sprint flow by minimising external disturbances, manage risks or impediments and remove blockers and hurdles. Communicating critical issues to stakeholders.
Consistently deliver, driving continuous improvement and celebrating the team’s successes.
Assist in the QA process by identifying key use cases and defining priority of identified issues in production.
Participate in UAT testing as required and contribute to ad-hoc tasks that may be required during the product implementation.
Drive effective release priority communications to ensure that all appropriate internal teams have visibility to the contents of critical commitments in the releases, as well as visibility into overall product readiness. This includes ensuring that key product decisions made within the delivery cycle are communicated and understood so that product readiness and intent are achieved. Includes driving and coordinating many aspects of go-to-market planning and execution (e.g., pricing, contracts, value proposition and messaging, etc.).
Engages with marketing, sales, operations, and support to create product documentation collateral. This includes, faqs, user guides, implementation guides, internal blogs, release notes, and various internal release communication sessions.
Deliver customer value iteratively, managing products through various launch phases and follow-on releases.

What you can demonstrate:

You are intellectually curious, execute efficiently, and are relentlessly resourceful, have excellent analytical and quantitative abilities; proficiency in product analytics, testing methodologies and data-backed decision processes.
Deep customer empathy and experience shaping product direction
Demonstrate and transfer your expert knowledge and experience of transaction processing and payment services into the team.
Strategic business acumen with the ability to think outside the box and handle multiple competing priorities.

Passion for delivering high-quality products and a scalable platform with urgency.

execution.
A clear communicator, active listener, and cross-organizational relationship builder who can drive results cross-functionally and influence others within the company to determine acceptable solutions.
Ability to work and thrive in a fast-paced environment, learn rapidly, and deliver projects in a limited time frame.
Sharp analytical, problem-solving skills and troubleshooting skills.
Excellent communication, planning, organisational and time management skills
Embrace change, able to flex and adapt to the changing needs of our dynamic business.
Being an advocate. For Karta, for our product, for our people and for our values
Commitment to whatever it takes to make our product and team successful.

Your Technical Expertise:

Understanding of technologies and products required to bring global payments solutions to market at scale, including experience with ISO 8583 specifications.
Knowledge of card scheme regulations
Experience with reconciliation systems and money moment; billing and pricing processes

Experience in the implementation of solutions processing 100M+ transactions per day.

Strong written and verbal communication skills, articulating customer problems
Ability to communicate clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
Excellent technical acumen, curiosity, and familiarity with new technologies, API’s, programming languages, and databases
Familiarity in Microsoft Office 365 & Atlassian Confluence, Jira Software is preferred.
A degree or equivalent experience in Product management, Information Technology or similar.

Your qualifications:

5+ years in Product management roles designing and shipping world class payment solutions that have delighted customers and driven business growth.
Experience is agile software development methodologies.
Proven track record of successfully launching and managing complex financial products or platforms.
Proven experience working in a fast moving, fast paced environment, fintech start up would be advantageous.
You are self-motivated, high performing and goal oriented.
You inspire those around you with your positive mindset.
You have a contagious energy, and engaging style
You are a structured thinker, able to bring clarity of thought
You apply structured problem solving to any issue
You use sound judgement using data combined with your intuition
You are comfortable with ambiguity whilst working in an evolving environment
You are perceptive and enjoy the ‘hustle’ required to get things done
You take accountability, living up to your commitments
You know it’s not just what you deliver, it is how - you do things the right way, every time
Enjoy your onboarding experience and become familiar with our strategic vision

About you:

For the first 3 months you will:

Build positive relationships, with your peers and the broader team, making the time to understand our tech stack and our ways of working
Review the product roadmap, where we are in the journey, and what we need to do, to keep delivering innovation that disrupts the market
Complete competitor research to understand the prepaid, gift card & rewards market and learn our products

Prepare and refine Epics & Stories for Q1 FY24 Deliverables and have gained alignment on the product backlog for Q2 FY24
Hit the ground running, delivering high-quality user stories and acceptance criteria for functional and non-functional requirements.
Delivering on critical requirements from across the business, and executing more efficient processes, the team knows what to expect and have integrated your working style and approach.
You have built credibility, demonstrating you are an expert of your craft, sharing your expertise.
You will continue to influence your squad capability, delivery standards and knowledge in payments.
You are taking the lead gathering requirements on key projects and supporting the tech lead on all delivery requirements.
You have created a healthy backlog of User Stories for our Core products and international expansion.
Your team squads’ backlogs are groomed with priority in line with strategic road map.
There has been team success and celebrations in line with the achievement of our Company strategy and our milestone plans

For the following 3 months and onwards:

Why is working with Karta so special?

We are a growing team, with the customer at the heart of all that we do. We are a welcoming and friendly bunch, on the cusp of something special! Inspired by the journey ahead and our supportive leadership team, we are all in. We are building our Company culture together to ensure we can achieve our goals and have fun along the way. We are a true start up, figuring everything out as we go, making progress as we face the usual growing pains. We are excited about our products, the tech stack, and our suit free, open mike no ‘bs’ work style and approach. We are a truly flexible organisation, with the option of remote or hybrid work styles that reflect your role and your personal circumstances.

Diverse Perspectives:

We know that innovation thrives where diverse points of view come together to solve hard problems in ways that are just now possible. As such, we explicitly seek people that bring diverse life experiences, diverse educational backgrounds, diverse cultures, and diverse work experiences. Please be prepared to share with us how your perspective will bring something unique and valuable to our engineering teams.