Digital Product Owner

South Pole is an energetic, global company offering comprehensive sustainability solutions and services. With offices spanning all continents across the globe, we strive to create a sustainable society and economy that positively impacts our climate, ecosystems and developing communities. With our solutions, we inspire and enable our customers to create value from sustainability-related activities.

Planning & Performance, Certificates team is at the forefront of developing and managing climate mitigation activities. By working closely with project owners and developers as well as their local communities, we manage the complete registration, verification and evaluation of carbon projects to enable the issuance of emission-reduction certificates, in line with official carbon standards. If you are a smart, ambitious and dynamic sustainability professional with a strong passion to make a real difference in the fight against climate change, the below position may be right for you!

Job summary:

As the Digital Product Owner you will sit at the intersection of business strategy, digital transformation, and agile execution within the Certificates Business Line. You will own ProjectOS—South Pole's core internal platform for developing and delivering carbon credits—end-to-end, alongside a broader portfolio of digital innovation projects.

Your mission is to digitize, automate, and dramatically enhance the quality and time-to-delivery of carbon credits, Environmental Attribute Certificates (EACs), and complementary services. Leading cross-functional distributed teams and managing strategic external tech partners, you will turn the workflows and pain points of upstream project development into scalable digital features. You will balance long-term innovation strategy with day-to-day agile product delivery, ensuring South Pole remains a competitive market leader.

Main tasks & responsibilities:

1. Product Vision, Strategy & Roadmap Ownership

• Own ProjectOS End-to-End: Define, maintain, and champion the multi-quarter vision, strategy, and roadmap for ProjectOS, aligning it tightly with overarching company strategy and revenue streams.

• Strategic Prioritization: Make and defend critical prioritization calls, sequence releases, and manage senior stakeholder buy-in on product direction. Decide ruthlessly what not to build.

• Portfolio Management: Develop and maintain a holistic portfolio of innovation projects that support current and future product-development requirements.

2. Discovery, Backlog & Agile Delivery

• Workflow Discovery: Spend time with project development and delivery teams globally to deeply understand workflows, pain points, and unmet needs.

• Analytical Translation: Translate complex user needs and market developments into clear user epics, stories, and rigorous acceptance criteria. Act as the primary bridge between business users and engineering teams.

• Backlog Management: Own and prioritize the product backlog. Drive the agile cadence (grooming, sprint planning, scope management, and risk mitigation) in close partnership with technical dev teams and external partners.

3. Business Cases, Data Ownership & Outcomes

• Value-Driven Decisions: Tie all roadmap decisions to sound financial value cases (e.g., calculating ROI, NPV for custom or SaaS digital tech). Track investment spend (CAPEX/OPEX) against delivered value.

• Data Governance: Act as the primary Data Owner for the data domains ProjectOS touches. Partner with the Global Digital Business Services team to ensure data quality, lineage, and robust master data management.

• Metrics & Adoption: Define and instrument product KPIs. Drive real user adoption and enablement loops rather than just focusing on feature deployment.

4. Tech Partner & Line Management

• Vendor Procurement: Continuously monitor the global digital landscape for products and providers (sensors, mobile apps, remote sensing/GIS, digital MRV platforms, and AI). Evaluate build-vs-buy decisions and manage partner relationships.

• People Leadership: Formally manage and develop a global team of senior specialists within the GIS and Remote Sensing domain, integrating their specialized expertise directly into the platform ecosystem.

Experience:

• Strong Project, Program or Product Management expertise in innovation, digital or tech roles; 15+ work experience of which 10+ in project/product management.

• Proven Track Record: Experience owning a complex digital product end-to-end (e.g., B2B SaaS, internal workflow platforms, or large-scale data products) from ideation through adoption.

• Agile Expertise: Fluent in agile delivery methodologies (Scrum/Kanban) and proficient with product management tooling (Jira, Confluence, DevOps).

• Data & Financial Literacy: Strong grasp of data infrastructure/BI tools (SQL, PowerBI, Snowflake, or Databricks) and experience building financial models to justify technology investments.

• Domain Alignment: A background or strong affinity with sustainability, carbon markets, remote sensing, field data acquisition, or digital MRV (Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification) platforms is a major advantage.

Leadership & Soft Skills:

• Stakeholder Alignment: Exceptional stakeholder management skills with the ability to influence, persuade, and guide senior executives and diverse engineering teams without formal authority.

• Navigating Ambiguity: Highly independent, comfortable with uncertainty, and capable of taking decisive action to resolve ambiguity at early innovation stages.

• Storytelling & Vision: Ability to absorb complex, deeply technical or scientific topics and synthesize them into an inspirational, clear vision that teams want to rally behind.

• Organizational Sensitivity: High emotional intelligence and cultural awareness when working across cross-functional, highly distributed global teams. 

What we offer:

At South Pole, we care about our employees as much as we care about the planet. South Pole is not just an employer, we are a Team. South Pole does not just offer people a job, we offer you a career. By joining our team, you will find strong purpose and deep meaning in everything you do. You will have the chance to make a real difference for our clients and for the planet, working alongside a passionate team of like-minded colleagues, while building your knowledge/skills and developing your career in a fun, dynamic, international and fast-growing organisation. 

We’re a planet of 7.5 billion unique and different people. We all have a contribution to make; South Pole is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, national origin, marital status or disability. Our recruitment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit and business need.