Job Title: Data Product Owner
Department: Technology
Salary: Up to £85,000 + Benefits
Location: Burton Upon Trent (2 Office Days per wk essential)
Job Type: Full Time Permanent
With respect please no recruitment agencies
About Riviera Travel
Riviera Travel is one of the UK’s leading escorted tour and river cruise companies, proudly creating high quality, carefully curated travel experiences for almost forty years. We are passionate about exceptional customer experiences and are recognised for our award-winning service. As a growing business, we combine our love of travel with a strong focus on innovation, continuous improvement and modernising how we work. It is a friendly and collaborative place to build your career, where people care deeply about what they do and take real pride in delivering unforgettable holidays for our guests.
At Riviera Travel, we’re on an exciting journey to transform how data powers decision‑making across our business. As we continue to enhance our digital, analytics, and customer experience capabilities, we’re looking for a Data Product Owner to shape the enterprise data products that fuel insight, reporting, and innovation across the organisation.
This is a fantastic opportunity for someone who combines product leadership, modern data platform expertise, and strong stakeholder engagement skills, someone who wants to make a meaningful impact in a growing, insight‑driven business.
About the Role
As the Data Product Owner, you will own the vision, roadmap, and delivery of data products across Riviera’s priority domains, including Product, Marketing, Finance, Operations, and HR. Acting as the voice of the business within the Data Platform team, you’ll ensure our Azure Data Factory and Databricks and Power BI data assets are governed, trusted, scalable, and designed to maximise value.
You will lead multi‑disciplinary squads across data engineering, analytics engineering, and business analysis overseeing the build of our bronze/silver/gold Lakehouse layers, certified semantic models, and shared data assets that enable self‑service analytics and enterprise insight.
Working closely with our Insights & Analytics team, Data Governance Lead, and business stakeholders, you’ll ensure our data products support the right decisions at the right time, with clarity, efficiency, and quality at the core.
Key Responsibilities
Data Product Strategy & Road mapping
- Own and communicate the strategy, roadmap, and backlog for enterprise data products.
- Translate business goals into clear epics, features, and acceptance criteria.
- Align priorities with senior data and business leaders through the Data Board.
- Champion reuse, standardisation, and scalable design across all data products.
Delivery Leadership (Azure & Databricks Lakehouse)
- Lead cross‑functional squads building ingestion pipelines, Delta Lake tables, and Power BI semantic models.
- Drive Agile delivery, manage backlogs, and lead sprint ceremonies.
- Ensure reliability, observability, performance, and smooth handover into Data Platform Operations.
- Uphold design standards covering schema, naming, partitioning, SCD, data quality rules, and security patterns.
Stakeholder Engagement & Business Partnership
- Act as the primary interface between business stakeholders and the Data Platform team.
- Understand decision‑making needs and translate them into data product specifications.
- Provide clear communication on priorities, trade‑offs, and delivery timelines.
- Promote adoption of certified datasets and support the safe decommissioning of legacy assets.
Data Governance & Quality
- Partner with governance teams to ensure every product has defined ownership, lineage, metadata, and quality processes.
- Embed governance‑aligned KPIs, definitions, and privacy classification within all semantic models.
- Maintain consistent and accurate documentation in the data catalogue.
Value Realisation & Continuous Improvement
- Monitor usage and performance of data products to ensure they deliver business value.
- Identify opportunities to reduce compute cost, optimise refresh windows, and enhance efficiency.
- Support the growth of self‑service analytics through well‑modelled and well‑documented assets.
- Embed data products into business forums and decision‑making rhythms.
Skills & Experience
Technical Expertise
- Strong understanding of Azure data services (e.g., ADF, Synapse pipelines, EventHub/ServiceBus, Key Vault).
- Hands‑on experience with Databricks (Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, workflows, notebooks).
- Knowledge of Power BI modelling, semantic layers, DAX fundamentals, RLS/OLS.
- Familiarity with CI/CD (ideally Jenkins) and broader DevOps practices.
Product Ownership & Delivery
- Proven experience owning a product roadmap, backlog, and Agile ceremonies.
- Skilled in writing clear user stories, acceptance criteria, and prioritising competing business demands.
Business & Stakeholder Engagement
- Capable of translating business requirements into sound technical design.
- Strong communicator who can influence, clarify, and challenge constructively.
Governance & Data Quality
- Understanding of data governance principles, metadata, privacy, and quality rules.
- Experience working with Data Owners and Stewards.
Behaviours You’ll Thrive With
- Outcome‑focused – you solve business problems, not just deliver features.
- Collaborative – you unite people across teams and disciplines.
- Structured – you bring clarity through planning and crisp communication.
- Decisive – you make informed trade‑offs transparently.
- Quality‑driven – you set and uphold high standards.
- Resilient – you remain composed and effective in change.
Why Join Riviera Travel?
You’ll join a modernising data function at a pivotal moment playing a key role in shaping our enterprise data ecosystem as we evolve our digital and analytics capabilities. You’ll work with talented data and insight professionals, have ownership of truly impactful products, and help fuel better decisions across the entire organisation. At Riviera Travel, we’re on an exciting journey to transform how data powers decision‑making across our business. As we continue to enhance our digital, analytics, and customer experience capabilities, we’re looking for a Data Product Owner to shape the enterprise data products that fuel insight, reporting, and innovation across the organisation.