Technical Product Owner - Boots - India

Department: Product Management

Reports To: Head of Product / Director of Engineering

About the Role

As the Technical Product Owner (TPO) for the Boots Mobile App, you will be the driving force behind the health, stability, and scalability of our mobile platform (iOS and Android). Millions of customers rely on the Boots app daily for their health, pharmacy, and beauty needs. You will own the mobile platform end-to-end, acting as the bridge between engineering, operations, and business stakeholders.

Unlike a feature-focused Product Owner, this role is heavily focused on platform reliability, technical maintenance, and proactive scaling. You will lead our maintenance squads, ensuring the app is always up and running, anticipating future technical needs, establishing robust monitoring, and continuously prioritizing the technical roadmap to minimize technical debt and maximize performance.

Key Responsibilities End-to-End Platform Ownership & Uptime

• Take full accountability for the overall technical health, stability, and uptime of the Boots Mobile App platform.
• Define, monitor, and maintain Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for app performance, crash rates, and API response times.
• Act as the primary escalation point for critical mobile platform incidents, guiding the maintenance squad through root-cause analysis and swift resolution.

Proactive Monitoring & Forecasting

• Establish and oversee comprehensive monitoring, alerting, and observability frameworks using industry-standard tools (e.g., Firebase, Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, or AppDynamics).
• Forecast future platform needs based on user growth, upcoming OS releases (iOS/Android), and broader enterprise architectural changes.
• Monitor app store vitals (ANRs, Crashlytics data, battery usage) and translate these metrics into actionable engineering tasks.

Technical Roadmap & Backlog Management

• Own, define, and prioritize the technical product roadmap for the mobile maintenance squads.
• Balance the prioritization of bug fixes, technical debt reduction, security patches, SDK updates, and infrastructure upgrades against business-driven feature requests.
• Write clear, highly technical user stories and acceptance criteria for platform engineering, DevOps, and QA teams.

Squad Leadership & Agile Delivery

• Lead the Mobile Maintenance/Platform Squads through standard Agile ceremonies (Sprint Planning, Daily Stand-ups, Backlog Refinement, and Retrospectives).
• Work closely with Mobile Architects and Lead Engineers to ensure architectural guidelines are followed and the CI/CD pipeline is optimized for seamless App Store and Google Play releases.
• Collaborate with feature-focused Product Owners to ensure new capabilities do not compromise platform stability.

What You Need to Succeed (Qualifications & Skills)

• Experience: 6+ years of experience as a Technical Product Owner, Technical Product Manager, or Engineering Lead, with a strong focus on mobile applications (B2C retail or health tech is a major plus).
• Technical Acumen: Deep understanding of mobile app development lifecycles, native architectures (Swift/iOS, Kotlin/Android), cross-platform frameworks, and mobile backend-as-a-service (MBaaS).
• Observability Expertise: Hands-on experience with mobile APM (Application Performance Monitoring) tools, crash reporting, and analytics platforms.
• Agile Mastery: Strong practical knowledge of Agile methodologies (Scrum/Kanban) and tools like Jira, Confluence, and Azure DevOps.
• Communication: Exceptional ability to translate complex technical issues into clear business impacts for non-technical stakeholders, and vice versa.
• Forward-Thinking: A proactive mindset focused on forecasting capacity, anticipating OS deprecations, and staying ahead of mobile technology trends.

Nice to Have

• Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) or SAFe PM/PO certification.
• Previous background as a mobile developer, QA automation engineer, or DevOps engineer.
• Experience navigating strict compliance and security standards (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, or equivalent healthcare/pharmacy data regulations).