Associate Director, Innovation Execution and Product Owner

What is the Opportunity?

As part of the Group Risk management ((GRM) team, the Associate Director, Innovation Execution and Product Owner will work cross-functionally with innovative teams and individuals across our GRM risk areas, dedicated IT partners to supporting the GRM function and various RBC innovation partners and labs to guide the development of new tools, capabilities, and new ways of working across GRM.  You will connect the technical, business and risk management worlds, break down complex problems into steps that drive product development and navigate ambiguity seamlessly.

Your role will be one part Evangelist, one part Innovation Lead and one part Product Manager/Owner – you will work with partners across the Function to understand their current capabilities and help identify opportunities to enhance, streamline or transform risk practices and processes while serving as a Product Manager of our innovative sandboxing SasS platform allowing GRM Innovators to experiment with potential tools and emerging technologies.  Once opportunities are identified, your role is to champion needs, prioritize development work and drive execution.

Your stakeholders will vary from senior business executives, data and AI scientists, and the brightest technology brains in RBC and everyone in between.  You will have the opportunity to engage and collaborate with every area of Risk, Technology and Innovation across RBC, in name of bringing more innovative practice to GRM, and offering you tremendous breadth across the whole organization.

What will you do?

(a) Product Manager/Owner Duties:

• Serve as product owner of SaaS based sandboxing platform (ie: Quark) managing deployment activities of the dedicated Quark IT team.
• Find and deploy new use cases across GRM that can benefit from Quark in-line with innovation mandate
• Adopt governance for intake and prioritization process to focus Quark resources on value driven initiatives
• Effectively communicates detailed documentation of requirements, epics, and stories to ensure schedules are followed with considerations for new short-term requirements and their effects on long-term plans
• Promote product to prospective users across GRM ecosystem
• Triaging new requests from users/stakeholders/requestors (Customers) and helping build a business case with clear business benefits, materiality and urgency of requests
• Define and communicate the vision, business goals, and strategies of the product to effectively align product strategy with GRM and Innovation goals to executive audience
• Drive annual funding process to maintain or enhance product offering
• Determines metrics to measure progress and to advance team performance and product/platform success
• Develop the product roadmap, working with business/risk/technical stakeholders to come up with the feature distribution sequence. Includes researching and analyzing new features that could be added to platform to meet demand of current and future clients.

(b) Innovation Execution Duties:

As innovation execution lead you will look to accelerate active innovations through resource augmentation, funding opportunities, and connecting the right stakeholders.

• Support Growth of Innovation Capability Across GRM through contribution of leading innovation practices including GRM Innovation Expo Showcase and GRM Innovation Council
• Find and deploy use cases where technologies, infrastructure or tools built in one area can be re-leveraged across RBC
  • Identify potential uses cases and develop/pitch business cases for investment.
  • Find and deploy new technologies, infrastructure, and tools built across RBC for greater efficiency and to promote more innovation.
  • Lead scientific research tax credit and patent campaigns.
• Drive the launch of new Proof of Concepts (PoCs) that add measurable value to GRM with a viable path to deployment.
  • Maintain and report on active pipeline of innovation initiatives across GRM with eye on seed funding opportunities.
  • Support promising individual innovations through various means
• Proactively reduce risk exposure by enhancing governance, & effectiveness processes
  • Support standardized innovation intake and delivery process across GRM
  • Support CoP, Business Case Template, evaluation criteria for ideas and POC
• Strong relationship builder both within team and with external stakeholders

What do you need to succeed?

Must Have:

• 3-5 years of experience working as a Product Owner/Product Manager in a SaaS environment, or equivalent experience.
• Familiarity with emerging technology concepts (eg: data science, Gen AI, machine learning, etc.) and technology based architecture including intermediate knowledge of full-stack development (databases, APIs, web applications, cloud) and architecture
• Technical knowledge to understand the tech behind your product (if the product uses tech) so they can collaborate with your engineering team and set achievable development goals.
• Product lifecycle management and road-mapping to map out each phase of your product’s development – planning, execution, and evaluation – and continually improve it.
• Data analytics, research and interpretation using so they can spot trends and adjust your product strategy in ways that really move the needle.

Nice to have

• Computer science or technology-based background.
• MBA or similar type of master’s degree
• Certified scrum master
• 3-5 years of experience working in a risk function

Note: This is a hybrid position with minimum of three days a week of in office work.

What’s in it for you?

• This is one of the gold star teams within RBC that catapults your career forward by providing an unprecedented amount of exposure, learning and many chances to make real impact quickly
• Ownership of challenging work and opportunities to directly support mission critical projects for leadership
• Work in a dynamic, collaborative, progressive and high performing team
• A comprehensive Total Rewards Program including base salary, bonus and benefits

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Additional Job Details

Note: Applications will be accepted until 11:59 PM on the day prior to the application deadline date above

Inclusion and Equal Opportunity Employment

At RBC, we believe an inclusive workplace that has diverse perspectives is core to our continued growth as one of the largest and most successful banks in the world. Maintaining a workplace where our employees feel supported to perform at their best, effectively collaborate, drive innovation, and grow professionally helps to bring our Purpose to life and create value for our clients and communities. RBC strives to deliver this through policies and programs intended to foster a workplace based on respect, belonging and opportunity for all.