Purpose of the Role
The Cloud Product Owner (CPO) is responsible for the operational ownership and continuous improvement of cloud products and services across AWS and Azure. The role ensures cloud platforms are reliable, secure, compliant, and consumable for business units—by managing the service catalogue, prioritising and refining the delivery backlog, and translating the CCoE cloud strategy and standards into executable work that improves stability, delivery throughput, and control effectiveness.
To elaborate, the CPO maintains a multi-cloud service roadmap aligned to the CCoE strategy, reference architectures, and guardrails, ensuring AWS and Azure capabilities are packaged into clear, supportable services (e.g., landing zones, connectivity, identity, logging, encryption, container platforms, and data services). In a federated business model, the CPO enables business unit teams to deliver outcomes autonomously within agreed risk and compliance boundaries by providing well-defined service offerings, onboarding paths, and operational support models. The CPO coordinates regular service reviews to assess demand, incidents and problem trends, backlog progress, and adoption, and to adjust priorities in collaboration with CCoE and operational stakeholders.
Additionally, the CPO acts as the day-to-day point of accountability for cross-functional cloud delivery and operations teams, working closely with the CCoE, platform engineers, cloud architects, SRE/operations, security, risk/compliance, FinOps, and business unit technology leaders. They drive execution through backlog refinement, clear acceptance criteria (including control requirements), dependency management, and operational readiness. The CPO champions agile ways of working and continuous improvement, ensuring delivery is aligned to standards and that services are supportable, measurable, and resilient.
The role also involves managing demand and stakeholder engagement across business units and enterprise technology teams—capturing needs, shaping service requests into deliverable backlog items, and managing expectations on timelines, risks, and trade-offs. The CPO partners closely with security, risk and compliance to ensure control requirements are embedded into cloud services (e.g., logging, encryption, identity, data residency, and auditability) and to support internal/external audit outcomes. They use data-driven insights to track performance and value, including availability/SLO attainment, incident trends, deployment and provisioning lead times, cost-to-serve, and security posture across AWS and Azure, and communicate outcomes in business terms.
Finally, the CPO owns and prioritizes the cloud product backlog for operational cloud services, balancing foundational platform work with high-value enablement for federated business unit delivery teams. They ensure backlog items are well-defined, technically feasible, and deliver measurable value through improved speed, reliability, security, and cost efficiency. The CPO collaborates with cloud operations, engineering, infrastructure, security, PMO, and vendors to ensure timely, high-quality delivery of cloud capabilities and shared controls, with appropriate parity and standards across AWS and Azure where required.
Key Responsibilities
Strategic direction and product vision:
• Maintain and communicate the cloud service roadmap and service catalogue (AWS and Azure), aligned to CCoE strategy, reference architectures, and guardrails.
• Translate CCoE standards and business unit demand into actionable AWS/Azure roadmaps and backlog outcomes (landing zones, network connectivity, identity, security controls, observability, container platforms, data services), ensuring operational feasibility and compliance-by-default.
• Run regular cloud service reviews with the CCoE and business unit stakeholders to assess demand, incidents and problem trends, adoption, spend drivers, and backlog progress; adjust priorities and manage dependencies.
Digital fusion team leadership:
• Act as the central point of accountability for CCoE cloud/platform teams and the federated cloud product community, including architecture, platform engineering, SRE/operations, security, risk/compliance, FinOps, and business unit technology leaders.
• Foster a culture of collaboration and enablement by providing standardised cloud patterns, reusable templates, and shared controls that improve reliability, security posture, cost management, and developer experience across business units.
• Champion agile ways of working and effective governance ceremonies, ensuring sprint goals and business unit priorities align to enterprise standards (security-by-design, resilience, auditability, and self-service enablement).
Stakeholder engagement and value realization:
• Engage with stakeholders across federated business units and enterprise technology teams (architecture, security, risk/compliance, finance/FinOps, product teams, operations) to gather needs, validate priorities, define guardrails, and manage expectations.
• Use data-driven insights to assess value, track KPIs, and communicate impact in business terms (cloud spend vs budget, unit cost, show back/chargeback readiness, availability/SLO attainment, security findings and time-to-remediate, deployment frequency, and time-to-provision) across AWS and Azure.
• Facilitate feedback loops with cloud service consumers (business unit delivery teams, data teams, operations) to improve onboarding, adoption, and day-2 operations through better patterns, documentation, and enablement.
Product backlog and delivery oversight
• Own and prioritise the CCoE cloud product backlog, balancing foundational capabilities (identity, connectivity, encryption, observability, FinOps, policies) with a consumable service catalogue for federated business unit delivery teams.
• Ensure backlog items are well-defined (outcomes, acceptance criteria, control requirements, and non-functional requirements), technically feasible, and deliver measurable value with clear AWS/Azure implementation intent where relevant.
• Collaborate with engineering leads, architects, business unit teams, and operations to ensure timely, high-quality delivery of cloud services, including reliability engineering, automation, and operational readiness (runbooks, monitoring, access models, and support processes).
Innovation and continuous improvement:
• Identify opportunities for cloud innovation and simplification across AWS and Azure (standardisation, reusable reference architectures, continuous compliance, and self-service provisioning).
• Promote experimentation and rapid prototyping (POCs/pilots) to validate cloud services and patterns for regulated workloads, reduce time-to-value, and de-risk adoption.
• Stay abreast of AWS/Azure roadmaps, emerging cloud technologies (containers, serverless, managed data platforms), and regulatory/security changes impacting cloud delivery in financial services.
Key competencies:
• Operational Execution & Service Ownership (run/operate mindset)
• Agile Product Management (platform-as-a-product, service catalogue mindset)
• Stakeholder Influence & Communication (including influencing without authority)
• Data-Driven Decision Making (SLOs, DORA, cloud cost/usage, adoption)
• Cloud Governance & Risk Awareness (regulated financial services, auditability, policy)
• Technical Fluency (AWS/Azure, landing zones, IaC, CI/CD, observability, FinOps)
Qualifications and experience:
• Bachelor’s degree in business, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field
• 8+ years in digital product ownership/management with significant experience delivering cloud platforms or cloud-enabled products (AWS and/or Azure)
• Proven experience leading cross-functional teams in cloud/platform environments within a large enterprise (preferably financial services), bridging business outcomes and engineering delivery.
• Experience with cloud capabilities such as landing zones, networking, identity and access management, containers/Kubernetes, serverless, managed databases, and integration platforms.
• Strong understanding of cloud security, governance, and operational practices (SRE/ITIL concepts, incident/problem management, DR, and resilience)
• Strong practical experience in Agile practices and modern delivery (DevOps/CI/CD)
• Track record of having functioned as a cloud product owner/platform product owner or similar role; relevant AWS and/or Azure certifications are advantageous (e.g., AWS Solutions Architect, Azure Solutions Architect Expert, AWS/Azure security, or DevOps certifications)
Success measures:
• Achievement of cloud OKRs and KPIs (e.g., SLO attainment, deployment frequency, lead time for change, time-to-provision, and cloud unit cost) across AWS and Azure.
• Stakeholder satisfaction and adoption of CCoE cloud services across federated business units and enterprise technology teams.
• Delivery of the AWS/Azure cloud service roadmap and shared controls aligned to CCoE strategy, on time and within budget, with clear management of dependencies and risks.
• Demonstrated impact on delivery speed, reliability, security/compliance posture (including audit outcomes), and cost efficiency for cloud-hosted products and services.
What is a cloud product/service?
Definition and Purpose: A cloud product or service is a reusable, governed capability delivered via AWS and Azure that enables teams to build, run, and scale digital solutions. In a large financial services enterprise, these products/services are designed with security, risk, and compliance embedded by default (guardrails and shared controls) so federated business unit teams can move fast within safe boundaries. Cloud products/services may be customer-facing (digital features delivered using cloud) or internal-facing (platform services such as networking, identity, data platforms, and CI/CD). They are defined by the outcomes they enable—speed, reliability, security, scalability, and cost efficiency—and by the standards that ensure consistent adoption at scale.
Cloud capabilities are often grouped into the following service areas:
• Foundation and landing zone: Standardised account/subscription structure, network segmentation, identity integration, baseline policies, and secure connectivity.
• Platform and developer enablement: Self-service provisioning, CI/CD toolchains, container platforms (e.g., Kubernetes), artifact management, and golden paths.
• Security, governance, and compliance: Policy-as-code, vulnerability and configuration management, logging/auditability, data protection controls, and regulatory alignment.
• Operations, reliability, and cost management: Observability, SRE practices, backup/DR, incident management, capacity management, and FinOps (cost allocation, optimisation, and forecasting).
• Performance measurement: Cloud leaders should measure products and services by business and engineering outcomes, including service reliability (SLOs), delivery performance (DORA metrics), security posture (findings and time-to-remediate), and financial efficiency (unit cost, budget adherence, optimisation savings), linking cloud performance to tangible business outcomes.
• Support and collaboration: Cloud products and services should support both IT and business delivery teams in a federated model, with the CCoE establishing reusable, governed capabilities that business units consume through clear onboarding, documentation, and support pathways. This includes multidisciplinary platform teams—combining engineers, security, operations, and finance—plus defined decision rights and engagement models (e.g., standards forums, enablement clinics, and escalation paths) so teams can adopt AWS/Azure services safely and efficiently.