Product Owner Custom Solutions (60-100%)

VSHN empowers developers, SaaS providers, and businesses by automating and managing cloud and on-premises application workloads.

VSHN, pronounced like “vision,” is Switzerland's leading Managed Service Provider for enabling DevOps, cloud-native development, and agile IT operations. We empower software teams with self-service products like APPUiO and Application Catalog, alongside tailored solutions built on our Managed OpenShift and standardized building blocks leveraging GitOps, CI/CD, and VM-based services and various support and operations subscriptions. Most of these services are provided as managed services by VSHN, ensuring applications are testable, deployable, scalable, and operable in any cloud or on-premise environment.

Your new role: Product Owner Custom Solutions

VSHN offers products for platforms (Kubernetes and managed servers), automation, and abstraction layers to run services on top of that platform - AppCat to run databases and other services. Through a personal sales process, requirements engineering, and solution design, we build and operate custom solutions based on standardized platform and managed services products, solution building blocks, or custom-engineered components.

You will be a Product Owner in a Scrum-like workflow for 2-3 solution teams and work closely with POs of 2-3 product teams. Your job is to ensure backlog prioritization for the solution teams that balances project work, maintenance and improvement work, and customer support/changes - while also balancing the team's capacity between such plannable work and the daily operational work of incident handling and support requests. Additionally, you will oversee and drive continuous improvement of customer project processes across VSHN.

Responsibilities summarized

• Own and drive a successful customer project business processes across teams and involved roles at VSHN

• Backlog prioritization, stakeholder management, and sprint planning as a member of 2-3 technical solution teams

• Be the business owner, representing business strategy and goals within the teams

• Ensure capacity balance between product work, customer work, and unplanned daily operational work

• Work closely with the Product Manager to ensure alignment of offerings with actual customer and market needs

• Drive resolution of major blockers for teams, customers and projects

• Ensure tracking, analysis, and measures on business targets

This job is for you if

You have

• A business background in IT, preferably in managed service provider and/or customer project business

• Solid experience as a (Scrum) Product Owner ensuring sprint plannings, stakeholder management, task refinements, and participating in retrospectives to drive improvement

• A concise and clear communication style

• A natural, inclusive leadership style

• Business fluency in German and English

• Hands-on experience developing and/or running web applications and backend services on Linux or in containers, ideally on Kubernetes.

You are

• Excited to work in an organization with self-managed teams and roles, where reasoned arguments replace hierarchical thinking and where your own work has a direct impact.

• Focused on delivering results iteratively and early, with an organized and structured working style.

• Quickly grasping situations, and can explain the context and needs to propose possible solutions. You provide clarity through structure and love to drive change.

• Self-organized: you get yourself the information you need, you plan your work, and you get things done

• Passionate about digging into both technical and business aspects to get things done pragmatically

• Willing to be in our Zürich office approximately 2 times per week to meet with the teams - while the rest can be fully remote.

Company culture

As an organization, we thrive on diversity and self-management, orienting ourselves on Agile and Sociocracy 3.0 principles. We emphasize transparency, collaboration, and common goals, valuing Scrum-like workflows in our tech teams. Decisions at VSHN are made collaboratively, valuing reasoned arguments over hierarchical positions - we trust in self-responsibility in everyone, in people who share the responsibility of their team, and that decisions happen with the subject-matter experts, in our teams where we face the day-to-day challenges while getting the best possible support from the wider organization.

Read more about how VSHN is unique in our handbook - one example of how much we value Transparency and live open source as an organization.

What we offer

• VSHN offers awesome benefits and great colleagues.

• If you’re interested, you can grow into new roles by taking on additional responsibilities, working within other roles, or even changing teams over time.

• We live in a culture that enables working remotely and from home (even before COVID-19), we have mandatory on-site events a few times a year, and in general, we also enjoy meeting at the office to connect and socialize.

• Like all VSHNeers, you’ll receive a fixed monthly salary and phantom stock options in the company in a fully transparent salary system.

Does this sound interesting? Then apply now, and let’s meet for a casual (virtual) cup of coffee soon!

Please note: we don’t work with recruitment agencies, and we’re looking for people with permission to work in Switzerland (Swiss/EU citizens and Swiss residents/work visa holders).