ONS Digital

At the moment ONS is having something of a hiring blitz in the digital and technology space — there are currently a bunch of brilliant roles being advertised (I’d particularly like to draw attention to the UX and User Research jobs that are still open) but the vacancy closest to my heart is the Product Owner position that will work with my former team.

Now I recommend you rush over to the job description and check that out then come back if you are still interested..

…welcome back.

We are looking for someone experienced who won’t be put off joining an established, but expanding, team with a challenging roadmap ahead — including some specific major improvements to the publishing platform and front-end that will add capability to properly support ‘small area’ statistics and generally better support ONS geospatial operations.

You’ll work in a truly multidisciplinary team alongside software engineers, interaction & content designers, user researchers, subject matter experts and delivery support. The team will be a mix of civil servants and third-party suppliers and every effort is made to operate as a single team without silos or cliques. A lot of effort has gone in to nurturing a positive culture and hopefully this is something that is quickly noticeable.

The team works in a pretty self organising manner, using agile approaches — without getting hung up on any specific flavour of ‘Agile’ — and have an open approach to improving the approach so there will be a real opportunity to stamp your own personality on the way things work.

Given my own predilections I tend to think that Product Owner/Manager roles are extremely important to the success of any digital undertaking and the fact that by their very nature the roles require you to have your fingers in many pies means the person doing the job often finds themselves with a uniquely broad perspective of the work. That is going to be vital here — launching the new ONS website and publishing platform was barely the start of what needs to be done and there is much to do — thankfully a lot of it is truly interesting.

The commitment to being user driven is obvious in everything the team does and you’ll be supported by two user researchers from the very start — with considerable discovery work already available and significant technical lessons learned to contribute to any future thinking.

So hopefully that has piqued your interest — if you have any questions please do ask — either here in the comments or tweet @ONSdigital , me at @jukesie (my DMs are open if you want to be discreet!) or the Service Manager for ONS.GOV.UK Andy who is @mr_dudders.

Andy is going to being sharing details about the future roadmap in the near future so keep an eye out for that (subscribe to this blog or follow @ONSdigital to be sure) if you want to know what you could be getting yourself in to!