Technical Product Owner [MyFreddyAI]

Digital & Technology Team (D&T) is an integral division of HEINEKEN Global Shared Services Center. We are committed to making Heineken the most connected brewery. That includes digitalizing and integrating our processes, ensuring best-in-class technology, and embedding a data-driven culture. By joining us you will work in one of the most dynamic and innovative teams and have a direct impact on building the future of Heineken!

Would you like to meet the Team, see our office and much more? Visit our website: Heineken (heineken-dt.pl)

At HEINEKEN, we are on a journey to become the best‑connected brewer in the world, with Digital Commerce playing a central role in this ambition. Digital Commerce is responsible for designing, developing and scaling the IT solutions that serve our customers better, faster and smarter across the entire Route‑to‑Consumer ecosystem. After successfully building our software engineering organization, we are now entering the next stage of our evolution by accelerating the growth of Digital Commerce. We deliver digital products that directly support company revenue while elevating customer experience. Join us in shaping the technological capabilities that power HEINEKEN’s global Commerce strategy.

The Technical Product Owner (TPO) for MyFreddyAI acts as the primary interface between commercial strategy and engineering execution for HEINEKEN’s commercial AI platform. MyFreddyAI is a conversational and agentic AI product that gives marketers grounded, governed access to HEINEKEN knowledge, curated agents and tools, and trusted external models. Unlike a Business Analyst, the TPO owns the “What” and the “How” from the technical perspective of the product, ensuring the engineering team builds high-impact, scalable solutions that align with the HEINEKEN EverGreen strategy.

The TPO maximises the value of the technical product by maintaining a healthy, prioritised backlog and making critical trade-off decisions between new features and technical health. The role spans the full product evolution: from foundational platform capability, through integrated commercial insight, towards proactive, human-supervised agentic action. The TPO balances new agent and feature delivery against technical sustainability, AI governance and data readiness, and brings equal measures of technical depth and commercial acumen to translate marketer needs into product value.

Your responsibilities would include:

• Backlog Management & Prioritisation: defining and, in collaboration with the Product Owner, ranking technical user stories, agent requests and platform requirements based on business value and technical dependency, using the Roadmap Council as the alignment forum

• Stakeholder Orchestration: acting as the bridge between commercial demand (marketers, OpCos and Business Analysts) and execution (internal engineering and delivery partners) to align expectations

• Product Roadmap Ownership: defining and owning the 6 to 12 month vision for the MyFreddyAI platform, sequencing the evolution from foundational capability, through integrated insight, towards proactive agentic action

• Technical Decision Making: partnering with Architects to make trade-off decisions between speed to market and technical debt or sustainability, including platform, integration and build, buy or partner choices, and contributing to detailed design and low-level architecture

• Acceptance & Quality Control: defining the “Definition of Done” and “Acceptance Criteria”, ensuring delivered increments meet high functional and technical standards

• Value Tracking & Reporting: defining and monitoring KPIs to measure the success, adoption and performance of the technical product among the target marketer community

• Leadership: For complex products within the responsibility scope, managing a team of analysts supporting the development and maintenance of the product.

You are a good candidate if you have: 

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, IT, or Business

• Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) or equivalent is highly preferred

• Cloud platform or AI and data product certifications are an advantage

• 5+ years of experience as a Technical Product Manager or Technical Product Owner, specifically within a high-growth tech environment or a large-scale digital transformation

• hands-on experience delivering AI products is required. We are specifically looking for candidates who have worked on conversational AI, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agentic systems, and who are fluent across the major model providers (such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Mistral), including the judgement to select and route between models on capability, cost and context

• a deep understanding of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is required. We are specifically looking for candidates with a background as a Software Engineer, Technical Architect or Systems Lead. This background is essential for the TPO to validly challenge technical estimates, understand architectural trade-offs (such as monolith versus microservices, or build versus buy), and earn the respect of the engineering team

• demonstrated experience operating across cloud and enterprise AI ecosystems, such as Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and AWS, and the enterprise AI and agentic platforms built on them. Comfortable assessing platform options on their merits as the technology landscape evolves

• proven track record of delivering impactful digital solutions within a global, matrixed organisation, managing dependencies across multiple “Tribes” or Product Teams

• deep understanding of modern IT systems, modular architecture and modern data stacks, with the ability to understand how individual technical features impact the broader digital ecosystem and enterprise architecture

• practical command of retrieval-augmented generation, embedding model selection and trade-offs (such as OpenAI, Cohere, Google and leading open-source models), vector stores (such as Azure AI Search, Qdrant, Weaviate or Pinecone), and agent orchestration and tool calling (with frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, Semantic Kernel or LlamaIndex, and integration patterns such as the Model Context Protocol)

• able to evaluate and integrate across cloud and enterprise AI platforms, and to make sound build, buy and partner trade-off decisions as the AI technology landscape matures

• familiarity with guardrails and content safety, and with observability and evaluation tooling, to keep the product safe, measurable and compliant

• analytical mindset with sharp problem-solving skills and a history of structured thinking to resolve complex technical blockers

• expert-level proficiency in Agile / Scrum methodologies and lifecycle management tools like Jira or Azure DevOps

• proven experience in product performance optimisation, utilising product experimentation and data-driven insights to measure success

• ability to take full ownership of the product lifecycle from ideation to launch, ensuring every technical increment aligns with the overall product roadmap and value proposition

• skilled in defining and ranking technical user stories and requirements based on a balance of business value, technical dependency and long-term product health

• ability to connect and translate commercial strategy and high-level capabilities into actionable technical tools that drive business growth and user productivity

• experience working with design systems and UX / UI design principles to ensure technical products remain user-centric

• proven track record of building and maintaining strong collaborative relationships with stakeholders and leaders across a global, matrixed organisation

• ability to manage the “Push-Pull” between demand (Business Analysts) and execution (Tech Specialists), using negotiation to defend the roadmap and manage expectations

• a connector who can inspire and align cross-functional, dependent product teams or tribes around a unified vision

• excellent verbal and written English skills with the ability to translate complex technical concepts into business-impact language for diverse audiences

• strong business acumen, with the ability to understand marketers’ workflows and commercial priorities and translate them into clear product value

• understanding of route to market typologies, specifically within the FMCG sector or the HEINEKEN landscape

• specialist understanding of how digital solutions drive commercial success in consumer engagement and acquisition portfolios

• comfortable working in high-ambiguity environments and driving clarity and direction for engineering teams.

You are an excellent match if you also have:

• proven experience transitioning from a BA or Senior Technical role into a leadership or ownership position

• experience in the FMCG sector or a comparable consumer-facing industry. 

What we offer:

• Private Medical Healthcare

• Performance bonus

• Pluxee card

• Life insurance

• Referral program

• Development opportunities

• Local and global job opportunities within HEINEKEN

• Hybrid work model

   

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