Product Owner Recruitment

Product owner is one of the least consistent job titles in the product job market. In some businesses, the product owner sets priorities and owns outcomes. In others, they work closer to delivery, turning an agreed direction into clear work for an engineering team.

Before starting a search, we establish what the person will own and where the role sits between product direction and delivery. Where a role is mainly about discovery, setting direction and commercial outcomes, it may be closer to a product manager hire. We would rather establish that at the outset than partway through a search.

Consortia has recruited product owners since 2010, on permanent and contract terms, for B2B and B2C technology businesses. That includes senior, digital and technical product owners.

How we recruit product owners

Most product owner CVs include the same responsibilities: backlog ownership, sprint planning, refinement and stakeholder management. The useful detail is the environment in which they did the work. We look at whether their experience is in B2B, B2C or platform businesses, the size and maturity of the teams, and how closely they worked with engineers, customers and commercial teams. Someone from a smaller company may have had far broader responsibility than their title suggests.

We ask about decisions they have made, features they chose not to build and what happened when delivery went off course. That shows whether someone has owned priorities or mainly managed work decided elsewhere.

Career history matters too. Moving between contract roles, start-ups or short-term projects can be entirely logical, but it needs context. We spend time understanding those decisions and don't make assumptions from the dates alone.

We cover the practical points early: location, office expectations, salary, notice period and what is prompting the move. A candidate may look right on paper, but a five-day commute can quickly make the role unrealistic.

Much of the search is direct. Many of the product owners we place are not applying when we first speak to them. For contract hires, speed often matters, as product owners are regularly brought in when a delivery plan is already moving. Our contractor network helps us respond quickly with people whose work and availability we already know. We recruit product owners across the UK, Europe, the US and the UAE.