Position Overview:
The Lead Data Product Owner – D&A, Corporate Functions is responsible for defining, prioritizing, and delivering data products that enable better decision-making, process efficiency, and measurable business outcomes across Corporate Functions such as Finance, HR, Legal, Procurement, Risk, and Communications. This role acts as the bridge between business stakeholders and D&A delivery teams, translating strategic priorities into a clear product roadmap, well-defined requirements, and an outcome-based backlog.
The role owns the end-to-end lifecycle of assigned data products—from opportunity identification and use-case prioritization through design, build, release, adoption, and value realization. The Lead Data Product Owner ensures that data products are business-relevant, scalable, governed, and aligned to enterprise data standards, architecture principles, and digital transformation priorities.
Responsibilities：
Product Strategy & Roadmap Ownership
• Own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for data products supporting Corporate Functions.
• Identify and prioritize high-value business use cases that improve decision-making, transparency, automation, compliance, and performance management.
• Translate business strategy and functional priorities into a sequenced data product roadmap with clear value cases and delivery milestones.
• Ensure alignment between data product roadmaps and broader enterprise D&A, digital, and platform strategies.
Business Partnership & Demand Shaping
• Serve as the primary D&A product interface for Corporate Function stakeholders.
• Partner with functional leaders, process owners, and SMEs to understand business pain points, decisions to be enabled, and process improvement opportunities.
• Facilitate structured intake, requirement workshops, and prioritization sessions.
• Challenge and refine business requests to ensure clarity, feasibility, reusability, and value creation.
Backlog Management & Requirement Definition
• Convert business requirements into epics, features, user stories, and acceptance criteria.
• Maintain a healthy, prioritized product backlog aligned to business value, dependencies, and delivery capacity.
• Define MVP scope and phased releases to accelerate value delivery while managing risk and complexity.
• Ensure stories are sufficiently detailed and ready for design, engineering, testing, and deployment.
Cross-Functional Delivery Leadership
• Work closely with data engineers, analytics engineers, BI developers, architects, data governance teams, and program leads to deliver high-quality data products.
• Drive alignment across business, technology, and external partners where applicable.
• Support sprint planning, solution reviews, UAT readiness, and release decision-making.
• Proactively identify, escalate, and resolve blockers, risks, and dependency issues.
Data Product Governance & Quality
• Ensure data products adhere to enterprise standards for data quality, security, privacy, stewardship, and lifecycle management.
• Partner with governance and architecture teams to align definitions, business rules, metrics, lineage, and semantic models.
• Promote standardization and reuse of data assets, KPIs, and reporting logic across Corporate Functions.
• Ensure appropriate controls are embedded for sensitive corporate data domains.
Adoption, Change Management & Value Realization
• Drive business adoption of delivered data products through strong stakeholder engagement, communication, training, and feedback loops.
• Define success metrics and track product performance, adoption, business outcomes, and benefit realization.
• Continuously gather user feedback and convert insights into product improvements and future releases.
• Publish outcomes, lessons learned, and impact stories to sustain stakeholder engagement and investment.
Leadership & Team Enablement
• Provide product ownership leadership across the assigned portfolio of Corporate Function data products.
• Coach junior product owners, analysts, or delivery partners on backlog management, value framing, and business requirement quality.
• Foster a culture of collaboration, accountability, continuous improvement, and customer-centric thinking.
• Help establish best practices for data product management within D&A.
Mandatory Requirements:
Education:
Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Systems, or a related field. Advanced degree or relevant certification is a plus.
Experience:
• 7+ years of experience in data, analytics, product ownership, business analysis, or digital transformation roles.
• Strong experience partnering with Corporate Functions such as Finance, HR, Procurement, Legal, Risk, or Communications.
• Proven track record in defining and delivering data products, dashboards, analytics solutions, or decision-support capabilities.
• Experience working in cross-functional, matrixed environments with business and technology teams.
• Experience in agile delivery, product backlog management, and phased release planning.
• Experience driving adoption and benefit realization, not just technical delivery.
Business & Functional Knowledge
• Strong understanding of Corporate Function processes, KPIs, and decision-making needs.
• Ability to connect business priorities with data, analytics, and digital enablement opportunities.
• Understanding of governance, risk, privacy, and control expectations relevant to corporate data domains.
Technical / Data Competencies:
• Strong understanding of data product concepts, data modeling principles, KPI design, and semantic layer thinking.
• Familiarity with modern analytics ecosystems such as Power BI, Azure data platforms, enterprise data warehouses/lakes, and workflow/integration tooling.
• Ability to work effectively with engineering, architecture, and governance teams without needing to be the hands-on builder.
• Understanding of data quality, metadata, lineage, access control, and stewardship practices.
Behavioral Competencies:
• Excellent stakeholder management and influencing skills
• Strong problem-solving and structured thinking
• Ability to prioritize effectively in a complex, multi-stakeholder environment
• Strong communication and facilitation skills
• High ownership mindset with strong attention to value realization
• Ability to lead through ambiguity and drive alignment across differing priorities
Preferred / Nice-to-have requirements:
• This role may support a portfolio of data products across multiple Corporate Functions.
• The role requires close collaboration with D&A platform, governance, architecture, and business change teams.
• Experience in FMCG / consumer goods / large enterprise transformation environments is preferred.
• Strong executive communication capability is important, as the role may regularly engage senior functional stakeholders.
Required Language Capabilities:
- Japanese – fluent
- English – business
Other special remarks to note:
KPIs to build and monitor:
• Adoption rate of delivered data products across target business users
• Business value delivered through automation, productivity improvement, risk reduction, or decision acceleration
• Backlog health and roadmap predictability
• Delivery of MVP and release milestones on time and to expected quality
• Stakeholder satisfaction and engagement across Corporate Functions
• Standardization and reuse of common KPIs, semantic models, and governed data assets
• Reduction in manual reporting and fragmented data definitions
• Measurable improvement in decision quality, visibility, and business process performance
