Product Owner

Rascal

Rascal is a B Corp technology studio. We build bespoke digital products and AI automation for organisations that want change they can measure.

We are a small team working on fixed-scope contracts. On fixed scope, a vague brief costs us money, so we put a lot of care into writing good ones.

The role

We are hiring a Product Owner to work between one of our clients and our delivery team. You will make sure we build the right product, and that it is properly defined before development starts.

You will spend part of the week on site with the client in Luton, working alongside their team as Rascal's day-to-day contact. The rest of the week you will work from home with our delivery team.

You will own the backlog for the engagement. That means turning the client's ambitions into user stories and acceptance criteria our engineers can build against without guessing.

We created this role because our smoothest projects started with a precise brief, and the ones that struggled almost always started with a vague one.

It is a mid-level role. It suits someone who has owned a backlog end to end and wants more client exposure and more say in how a growing studio works.

Responsibilities

• Run discovery with the client to find the problem behind each request and agree how success will be measured.
• Own and prioritise the backlog, and explain the trade-offs to the client and the team.
• Write user stories and acceptance criteria clear enough that an engineer can estimate and build without a follow-up call.
• Protect scope on fixed-price work. When a change comes up, raise it with the client early so they can decide whether to add it, swap it for something else or leave it, and the budget stays under their control.
• Run sprint planning and reviews in ClickUp with the delivery team.
• Check what we ship against the outcomes we agreed, using analytics and user feedback to plan the next release.
• Help the client adopt automation and AI, starting from their processes and data, because automating a broken process only produces bad decisions faster.
• Contribute templates and lessons from your projects to how Rascal scopes work.

Experience

• You have owned a product backlog end to end on a live digital product, as a product owner, product manager or business analyst.
• You have worked in an agency, consultancy or other client-facing role, and you are comfortable with stakeholders who want different outcomes.
• You can write a ticket an engineer thanks you for. We will ask to see one.
• You know enough about web and mobile architecture, and about how systems integrate, to talk credibly with engineers and to spot when a request described as simple is not.
• You have run Agile delivery and you adapt the process to suit the team and the client.
• You set success metrics a client will track, and you use data to make product decisions.
• You have worked with automation or AI tools such as Make.com, Zapier, or products built on large language models such as Claude or ChatGPT. If you have not, tell us how you would start.

Experience with Figma, HubSpot or Microsoft 365 is useful. Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) or Professional Scrum Product Owner (PSPO) certification is welcome, though we will be more interested in what you have shipped.

Values

• You tell clients unwelcome news early and kindly. A hard conversation in week 2 costs far less than a failed delivery in week 6.
• You can earn a client team's trust while being honest with them about what is and is not working.
• You keep the client's team and ours aligned, so neither is surprised by the other.
• You can be wrong in front of colleagues, change your mind when the evidence changes, and say so.
• You care about the people who will use what we build as much as the people who approve it.
• You share our B Corp commitment to business as a force for good, and at interview we will ask about a time you made a trade-off because of it.

Pay and location

• The salary is up to £70,000, depending on experience.
• The role is hybrid, split between our client's site in Luton and home.
• You will join a small team where your work is visible and you have a say in how the studio operates.

Applying

Apply through Wellfound with your CV and a note of up to 300 words about a project where the quality of the brief or backlog decided whether it succeeded. If you can, include an anonymised story or ticket you have written.

There are 3 stages: a 30-minute call, a short work sample based on a Rascal scoping task, and a conversation with our leadership. We give honest, specific feedback at the final stage, whatever the outcome.

We welcome applications from everyone and will make adjustments at any stage. No agencies, please.