Technical Product Owner

Technical Product Owner – Data Products (T3)

Location: Hybrid – Flexible across the UK (occasional travel to Cox Automotive Manchester & Leeds offices)

Department: Data & Analytics / Product Management
Reports to: Senior Product Manager, Data Products

About Cox Automotive UK

Cox Automotive is the world’s largest automotive services organisation, providing digital, data, and physical solutions across the entire vehicle lifecycle.

Our mission is to transform how the automotive industry buys, sells, and manages vehicles through data, technology, and insight. The Data Products team is at the heart of this mission, building scalable data platforms and products that unlock value from Cox Automotive’s extensive data ecosystem.

About the Role

As a Technical Product Owner within the Data Products team, you will play a hands-on role in shaping and delivering complex, data-intensive products and platforms. You will work day-to-day with engineering and analytics teams, owning the delivery backlog and ensuring that technical solutions align with product strategy, architectural standards, and business outcomes.

This role is suited to someone who is deeply comfortable operating at the intersection of product, data, and technology — able to translate high-level product goals into technically precise user stories, while maintaining a strong focus on value, scalability, and data quality.

Key Responsibilities

Backlog Ownership & Agile Delivery

• Own and manage the delivery backlog for assigned data platforms and products, with a strong focus on technical readiness and value delivery.
• Write detailed, unambiguous user stories with clear acceptance criteria, non-functional requirements, and data considerations.
• Prioritise backlog items by balancing business value, technical dependencies, platform health, and delivery risk.
• Work closely with engineers to ensure stories are refined, estimated, and ready for sprint delivery.
• Ensure high-quality, production-ready outputs are delivered each sprint.

Technical Product Ownership

• Act as the primary product counterpart to data engineers, analytics engineers, and platform teams.
• Shape and refine requirements relating to:
• Data pipelines and ingestion
• APIs and data services
• Data models and schemas
• Reporting, dashboards, and analytics products
• Ensure technical design decisions align with product goals, architectural principles, and long-term scalability.
• Champion data quality, observability, security, and governance requirements within the backlog.

Collaboration & Alignment

• Partner with the Senior Product Manager to translate product vision, roadmaps, and OKRs into executable delivery plans.
• Collaborate closely with architecture, data platform, and QA teams to ensure cohesive end-to-end solutions.
• Work with stakeholders across Cox Automotive brands to clarify requirements and manage expectations.

Stakeholder Communication

• Act as a trusted interface between technical teams and business stakeholders.
• Clearly communicate delivery plans, technical trade-offs, progress, risks, and outcomes.
• Support sprint reviews and demos, ensuring outcomes are framed in terms of customer and business value.

Continuous Improvement

• Use delivery metrics, platform performance data, and stakeholder feedback to continuously refine priorities.
• Identify opportunities to reduce technical debt, improve developer experience, and streamline data delivery.
• Actively contribute to agile ceremonies, retrospectives, and ways-of-working improvements.

About You

Experience

• 3–6 years’ experience as a Product Owner, Technical Product Owner, Business Analyst, or similar role within data or platform teams.
• Proven experience delivering data platforms, analytics products, or API-driven services in an agile environment.
• Experience working in SaaS, marketplace, automotive, or data-heavy organisations is advantageous.

Technical Capability

• Strong understanding of modern data architectures and platforms (e.g. AWS, Snowflake, Databricks, dbt).
• Practical knowledge of:
• Data pipelines and orchestration
• APIs and event-driven architectures
• Data modelling and analytics use cases
• Familiarity with BI and visualisation tools such as Power BI, Tableau, or Looker.
• Confident working with engineers on technical concepts, constraints, and trade-offs (without needing to code).

Agile & Delivery Skills

• Extensive experience working within Scrum or Kanban teams.
• Strong backlog management, refinement, and prioritisation skills.
• Comfortable operating in environments with multiple dependencies and stakeholders.

Soft Skills & Mindset

• Excellent communicator, able to bridge detailed technical discussions and senior stakeholder conversations.
• Highly organised, detail-oriented, and outcome-focused.
• Curious, pragmatic, and passionate about building high-quality data products that solve real problems.