Product Owner

Product Owner  

About us

Pythia Sports is a fast-growing technology company, delivering innovative solutions to the gaming industry since 2014.

Our business is all about predictive sports modelling and risk management, underpinned by extensive use of a wide and ever-expanding array of real-time feeds and inputs. 

We pride ourselves on hiring talented individuals who challenge the status quo and help us build exceptional, high‑performing teams. Based in London Victoria, we operate a hybrid work‑from‑home/office model but will consider sizable remote working for the right candidate.

We offer private health and dental insurance, a cycle to work scheme, enhanced parental leave, enhanced sick pay, increased holiday allowance, and plenty of career development opportunities.

At Pythia, you will find a relaxed atmosphere, regular social events and remarkable colleagues looking to push technology boundaries - come and join us!

The Role

As our first dedicated Product Owner, you will support the Chief Product Officer by taking responsibility for some key day‑to‑day project execution, taking full ownership of high‑impact initiatives already in development, as well as supporting iterative enhancements to our fully managed trading service. 

You will work with two agile dev squads (~3 developers + 1 back‑end each), ensuring the projects are driven over the line with high quality and a consistent pace. 

You’ll translate well‑defined specs into actionable tickets, run key ceremonies, keep velocity transparent, and join client calls from week one to ensure you’re exposed to our clients’ needs and wants.

This is not a blank‑sheet strategic role; instead you’ll thrive on execution and delivery, with room to influence processes, UX, and feature prioritisation as you develop.

Key Responsibilities

• Own a subset of our project delivery from hand‑over to go‑live—scope clarification, backlog grooming, sprint admin, acceptance testing, and release coordination.

• Author detailed Jira tickets and maintain a healthy backlog; ensure devs understand requirements and edge cases.
• Run stand‑ups (5 min, three times a week), story‑point estimation, and create/close sprints; produce velocity and burndown reports.
• Verify solutions against spec, flagging deviations early and driving fixes.
• Weekly checkpoint with the CPO to surface risks and propose course corrections.
• Participate in client calls from week one; over time, own selected client relationships end‑to‑end.
• Support continuous improvement of our agile processes; bring an eye for metrics and an appetite for tweaking ceremonies.
• Champion UX quality—provide quick wireframes or prototypes (Figma, V0, etc.) or brief designers appropriately.

Measures of Success

In the first three months, you will have:

• 1 Week: Shadow project calls, join client calls, get a grounding in what we do, and how we do it.
• 1 Month: Run all stand‑ups & sprint admin independently; take ownership of your own projects, and drive noticeable delivery improvements on them; understand and report on the team’s velocity.
• 3 Months: First projects signed off for production; first client managed solo.

What You’ll Need For This Role

• Prior experience as a Product Owner/Manager.
• Sports‑betting experience.
• Proven agile toolkit—running stand‑ups, estimation, sprint planning, and retrospectives; ideally using Jira.
• Excellent communication skills; comfortable holding developers to account and pushing back diplomatically; comfortable representing the product team to external clients and internal stakeholders.
• Good grasp of modern engineering concepts and ability to converse with technical teams.
• Willingness to travel to London HQ roughly every few weeks (or one day per week if London‑based).
  

Nice to have, any of:

• Keen eye for UX; able to create quick wireframes/prototypes or brief designers effectively.
• Trading, maths, or software‑engineering background.
• Previous client account‑management exposure.