Associate Product Owner

At the World Bank, a member of the World Bank Group (WBG), you’ll join a diverse, global community working across cultures, disciplines, and borders to address the world’s most pressing development challenges. With 1.2 billion young people reaching working age in the decade ahead, the challenge of job creation has never been greater. Through partnerships across 145 countries and more than 182 offices worldwide, we work with governments, private sector, development partners and other stakeholders to invest in people, strengthen markets, and deliver scalable, data-driven solutions that generate more and better jobs and improve lives. For more information, visit https://www.worldbank.org/en/who-we-are/ibrd ITS Vice Presidency Context The Information and Technology Solutions (ITS) Vice Presidential Unit (VPU) enables the World Bank Group to achieve its mission of ending extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity on a livable planet by delivering transformative information and technologies to its staff working in over 150+ locations. For more information on ITS, see this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9 v=VTFGffa1Y7w Department Context ITS Operations and Country Engagement Department (ITSOE) delivers innovative products and services to frontline staff working on over 6,000 projects throughout every Region and Global Practice. Our teams support and enable Bank priorities, boost operations efficiency and effectiveness, and facilitate Operational knowledge discovery. Our delivery model leverages global expertise, design and architecture, leading technology, and robust processes to deliver business solutions that ensure value for money. Unit Context The ITS Country Engagement unit (ITSCE) delivers digital support for global and country-specific products, supports systems aligned with the new Country Engagement model, and provides geospatial solutions for geo-tagging of projects to improve spatial visibility and impact tracking. It also drives the delivery of AI-powered business solutions for regional operations. The ITSCE unit is looking for a Product Owner to work across its portfolio of country engagement and operational solutions, geospatial platforms and services, and AI-enabled solutions for regional operations. The Product Owner will help translate business priorities into clear product roadmaps and requirements, manage priorities and dependencies across initiatives, and work with cross-functional teams to deliver solutions that address operational needs and provide measurable business value. Within this context, the Product Owner plays a key role in supporting a portfolio of digital products and capabilities that serve Country Management Units, Regions, Global Practices, and operational teams across the World Bank Group. Working across the ITSCE unit, the Product Owner provides a portfolio-wide perspective, helping align priorities, manage dependencies, identify opportunities for reuse, and ensure investments deliver maximum business value. The role works closely with business stakeholders, operational teams, architects, engineers, and delivery partners to connect business needs with product strategy and execution. Operating across multiple product areas, the Product Owner is responsible for maintaining visibility across products, data, workflows, and shared capabilities to ensure solutions evolve in a coordinated, scalable, and user-centered manner. The role helps drive consistency across the portfolio, reduce duplication, strengthen alignment between initiatives, and support informed prioritization and investment decisions. Specific Responsibilities:

• Own and drive priorities, roadmaps, and delivery plans across assigned ITSCE products and capabilities and contribute to cross-unit initiatives and priorities across ITSOE.
• Partner with business stakeholders to understand priorities, confirm requirements, identify opportunities, and ensure products deliver measurable business value.
• Manage and prioritize product backlogs across multiple initiatives, balancing business demand, strategic priorities, delivery capacity, dependencies, and risks.
• Maintain visibility across products, business processes, data assets, and technology capabilities to identify overlaps, dependencies, integration opportunities, and areas for simplification within ITSCE and across related ITSOE products and capabilities.
• Define product requirements, user stories, acceptance criteria, and success measures in collaboration with business and technical teams.
• Coordinate delivery across engineering, architecture, data, security, and user experience teams on department level to ensure timely and high-quality execution.
• Drive roadmap planning and release prioritization, ensuring alignment with business objectives and portfolio priorities in alignment with other teams.
• Support unit-level planning and governance by providing recommendations on priorities, trade-offs, dependencies, risks, and investment decisions.
• Work with peers from across ITSOE units to identify and advance opportunities for integration, reuse, and alignment across products, platforms, data, and workflows.
• Facilitate stakeholder engagement, communications, demonstrations, and feedback sessions throughout the product lifecycle.
• Identify opportunities to improve operational effectiveness through process simplification, automation, shared capabilities, and better use of technology.