Technical Product Owner [Freddy.Innovate & Digital Commerce Innovation]

The Technical Product Owner (TPO) for Innovation & Commercial AI acts as the primary interface between commercial strategy and engineering execution for Freddy.Innovate, the digital and AI-enabled execution engine of the HEINEKEN Way of Innovation (HWoI). It digitises the Green Flame journey (Spark, Ignite, Fuel) and the gates of the Global Innovation Process (GIPNext), building on FlamePPM as today’s system of record. Commerce leads the process design. Unlike a Business Analyst, the TPO owns the “What” and the “How” from the technical perspective of the product, ensuring the engineering team builds high-impact, scalable solutions that align with the HEINEKEN EverGreen strategy. 

The TPO maximises the value of the technical product through a healthy, prioritised backlog and critical trade-off decisions between new features and technical health. The role spans run and transformation: keeping FlamePPM and its OpCo rollout on track while evolving the product from accelerating HWoI execution, through connected orchestration, towards an always-on, human-supervised innovation system. The TPO balances workflow, integration and AI-enabled delivery against technical sustainability, governance and data readiness, and brings equal measures of technical depth and commercial acumen to translate innovation team needs into product value. 

Your responsibilities would include:

• translating the innovation process designed by Commerce (HWoI, Green Flame, GIPNext gates and Hot Questions) into simple digital workflows, data models and integrations
• owning the 6 to 12 month roadmap from today’s FlamePPM footprint across the Green Flame journey and, with the Product Owner, rank the backlog on business value and technical dependency
• acting as the bridge between commercial demand (Global Innovation, OpCo innovation teams, GIPNext workstreams) and execution (engineering, delivery partners, MyFreddyAI) to align expectations
• partnering with Architects on trade-offs between speed to market and technical debt, including workflow platform, integration, and build, buy or partner choices, and where AI adds value over plain automation
• planning and steering releases and OpCo rollout with delivery partners, safeguarding the live service, and defining the “Definition of Done” and “Acceptance Criteria”
• co-designing with OpCo innovation teams, and defining and monitoring adoption, performance and business impact KPIs.
• for complex products within the responsibility scope, managing a team of analysts supporting the development and maintenance of the product.

You are a good candidate if you:

• 5+ years of experience as a Technical Product Manager or Technical Product Owner in large-scale digital or business transformation within a global, matrixed organisation
• proven experience redesigning and digitising end-to-end business processes into workflow products, from process design (L3 / L4) through implementation to rollout, run and adoption across markets
• experience with stage-gate innovation, new product development or portfolio management processes. The TPO must master HWoI, Green Flame and GIPNext deeply enough to design technology that supports and accelerates every stage of the innovation funnel
• a deep understanding of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), with a background as a Software Engineer, Technical Architect or Systems Lead and experience of enterprise workflow and low-code platforms. This is essential to challenge technical estimates, weigh architectural trade-offs and earn the engineering team’s respect
• hands-on experience bringing AI into business workflows (conversational assistants, retrieval-augmented generation or agentic features) across the current Microsoft Azure landscape and the wider market (Google Cloud, AWS, OpenAI, Anthropic)
• System & Architectural Thinking: Deep understanding of modern IT systems, modular architecture and modern data stacks, with the ability to understand how individual technical features impact the broader digital ecosystem and enterprise architecture.
• Workflow & Platform Literacy: Practical command of enterprise workflow, low-code and portfolio management platforms. Familiarity with FlamePPM (Projectum xPM by Context&) and Microsoft Power Platform is strongly preferred, alongside comparable platforms such as Adobe Workfront
• Integration & Data Readiness: Able to connect insight, validation and performance data from internal and licensed external sources into one innovation record
• AI & Agentic Literacy: Working command of conversational AI, retrieval-augmented generation and agent orchestration (such as Azure AI Foundry, Copilot Studio, Google Vertex AI, AWS Bedrock and the Model Context Protocol) to specify and integrate AI capabilities with the MyFreddyAI team
• Platform Evaluation & Sourcing Judgement: Able to evaluate workflow, cloud and enterprise AI platforms on their merits and make sound build, buy and partner decisions as the landscape matures
• Backlog & SDLC Tooling: Expert-level proficiency in Agile / Scrum methodologies and lifecycle management tools like Jira or Azure DevOps
• Technical Problem Solving: Structured, analytical thinking to resolve complex technical blockers, using data-driven insights to optimise product performance.
• End-to-End Ownership: Ability to take full ownership of the product lifecycle from ideation to launch, ensuring every technical increment aligns with the overall product roadmap and value proposition
• Strategic Prioritisation: Skilled in defining and ranking technical user stories and requirements based on a balance of business value, technical dependency and long-term product health
• Process Design & Simplification: Ability to map, challenge and simplify business processes and workflows into intuitive digital experiences that drive user productivity
• UX & Design Integration: Experience working with design systems, UX / UI principles and co-design with users to keep technical products user-centric
• Stakeholder Orchestration: Proven track record of building and maintaining strong collaborative relationships with stakeholders and leaders across a global, matrixed organisation
• Strategic Influence & Negotiation: Ability to manage the “Push-Pull” between demand (Business Analysts) and execution (Tech Specialists), using negotiation to defend the roadmap and manage expectations
• Change & Adoption Leadership: A connector who aligns cross-functional teams and OpCos around new ways of working through to lasting adoption
• Effective Communication: Excellent verbal and written English skills with the ability to translate complex technical concepts into business-impact language for diverse audiences
• Commercial & Innovation Acumen: Strong business acumen, able to turn innovation teams’ workflows, business cases and commercial priorities into clear product value
• Innovation Process Knowledge: Understanding of stage-gate innovation from insight to scale, within FMCG or the HEINEKEN landscape (HWoI, Green Flame, GIPNext)
• Project & Portfolio Management: Specialist understanding of how portfolio governance and reporting drive speed to market and better investment decisions
• Ambiguity Management: Comfortable working in high-ambiguity environments and driving clarity and direction for engineering teams.

You are a perfect match if you also have:

• Hands-on experience with FlamePPM, Projectum xPM or the Microsoft Power Platform
• Experience in FMCG or a comparable consumer-facing industry, or direct exposure to HWoI and GIPNext. 

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