MetLife

Job Title: Transformation Lead & Product Manager/Product Owner
 

Location: Madrid (Hybrid working model)
Business Area: Transformation

Role Purpose

MetLife in Spain and Portugal is seeking a Transformation Lead & Program Manager/Product Owner to drive the end‑to‑end transformation, orchestration, and delivery of distribution capabilities across multiple models, including partner distribution, direct‑to‑consumer, and embedded insurance.

This is a senior, high‑impact role combining:

• Program‑level leadership over multiple interdependent initiatives
• End‑to‑end Product Ownership within an Agile delivery model
• Strategic transformation responsibility across business, technology, and operating models

The role acts as a single point of accountability for aligning B2B strategy, execution, and value realization, serving as a trusted partner to senior leadership and a key bridge between business strategy, customer needs, and technology delivery across Spain and Portugal.

Key Responsibilities

Program & Transformation Leadership

• Own and lead transformation programs, coordinating multiple strategic initiatives, products, and delivery teams under a unified vision and roadmap.
• Define and maintain an integrated program roadmap, managing dependencies, sequencing, risks, and trade‑offs across initiatives.
• Ensure alignment between strategic priorities, business outcomes, and execution plans.
• Establish and maintain program governance, including executive reporting, progress tracking, risk management, and benefits realization.
• Drive consistency in ways of working, delivery standards, and decision‑making across B2B initiatives.

Product Ownership & Agile Delivery

• Act as Lead Product Owner for strategic platforms and capabilities, owning product vision, roadmap, outcomes, and prioritization.
• Translate business strategy, market opportunities, regulatory requirements, and partner needs into clear product goals, epics, and user stories.
• Lead and coordinate backlog prioritization across initiatives, balancing short‑term delivery with long‑term platform scalability and sustainability.
• Partner closely with Agile delivery teams to guide sprint planning, reviews, and value‑based prioritization.
• Ensure solutions deliver measurable business value, customer impact, operational efficiency, and compliance.

B2B Strategy & Capability Development

• Actively shape and evolve MetLife’s distribution strategy, including partner enablement, embedded insurance propositions, and digital journeys.
• Identify and drive opportunities to modernize business capabilities, operating models, and end‑to‑end processes.
• Support definition of target‑state architectures, business capabilities, and customer journeys in close collaboration with IT, Digital, and Data teams.
• Champion reuse, standardization, and scalability across Spain and Portugal, aligned with enterprise and EMEA guidelines where applicable.

Stakeholder Management & Senior Leadership Engagement

• Serve as a senior integrator across Distribution, Sales, Underwriting, Operations, IT, Digital, Data, Finance, Risk, Compliance, and external partners.
• Facilitate executive decision‑making by clearly articulating options, impacts, risks, and recommendations.
• Align priorities across countries, functions, and delivery teams, resolving conflicts and dependencies at program level.
• Act as a visible change leader, driving engagement, adoption, and cultural alignment with new ways of working.

Value Realization & Performance Management

• Define and track success metrics and KPIs for initiatives, ensuring value realization and transparency.
• Monitor delivery health, financials, and benefits realization, proactively addressing risks and deviations.
• Ensure regulatory, operational risk, and data considerations are embedded throughout program execution.

Required Experience & Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in insurance and/or financial services, with significant exposure to distribution models, including partnerships and embedded insurance.
• Proven experience leading complex, cross‑functional programs or portfolios with multiple workstreams and senior stakeholders.
• Strong track record as a Product Owner / Lead Product Owner within Agile or Scaled Agile delivery environments.
• Demonstrated ability to operate at both strategic and execution levels, translating vision into tangible outcomes.
• Solid understanding of insurance products, value chains, and regulatory environments.
• Experience working closely with technology, digital platforms, and data‑enabled solutions.

Skills & Competencies

• Strong program and product leadership mindset with a focus on value delivery.
• Excellent stakeholder management, communication, and executive influencing skills.
• Ability to lead through complexity, ambiguity, and organizational change.
• Strategic thinker with strong delivery discipline and outcome orientation.
• Comfortable leading without formal authority in a matrix organization.
• Fluency in Spanish and English; Portuguese is a strong plus.

AI: Ability to understand, assess, and apply Artificial Intelligence systems (e.g., M365 Copilot, generative and analytical models) in day‑to‑day tasks and business processes, maximizing impact and efficiency while adhering to security, ethical, and privacy standards. This includes crafting effective prompts, validating outputs, automating workflows, and measuring the value generated.

Responsible scaling 

• Defines prompting standards and reusable templates.
• Orchestrates automations (e.g., Copilot + Power Automate + data).
• Leads quality and security reviews and manages risks (hallucinations, bias).

Critical Thinking: Ability to analyse information objectively, identify assumptions and biases, assess the quality of evidence and the implications of different options, and formulate sound judgments and decisions that maximize business impact while minimizing risk. This includes structuring problems, generating hypotheses, validating them with data, and learning from outcomes to continuously improve decision quality.

Strategic reference 

• Defines organisational standards and best practices for critical thinking (templates, guidelines, playbooks).
• Integrates critical thinking with a data‑driven and AI‑enabled approach to strategic decision‑making (hypothesis → experiment → evidence → go/no‑go).
• Trains and coaches leaders in decision‑making under uncertainty; builds communities of practice.
• Measures decision quality (speed, hit rate, impact, cost of error) and adjusts governance accordingly.
• Link to New Frontier: institutionalises Think Ahead and Prioritize for Impact at enterprise level, accelerating execution with discipline.

Change Agility – Foundational level 

• Accepts change and maintains a positive attitude when receiving guidance.
• Shows willingness to adjust ways of working when the rationale is explained.
• Cooperates with process changes, even when support is needed to fully understand them.
• Follows change-related instructions with a collaborative mindset.
• Identifies personal challenges related to change and seeks help to overcome them.

Change Agility – Strategic / Leadership level

Leads transformations, inspires, mobilises, and creates conditions for continuous adaptation. 

• Drives structural or cultural change within their area, acting as a transformation agent.
• Inspires trust and provides a clear vision, even in uncertain or high‑pressure environments.
• Designs change adoption strategies (communication, training, stakeholder engagement).
• Builds change capabilities in others through coaching, role modelling, and ongoing support.
• Monitors and measures the impact of change, adjusting actions based on results

Agile Mindset 

Agile Mindset is the way of thinking and acting that enables individuals to learn, adapt, and respond to change continuously, prioritising value, collaboration, and experimentation. It is not just about applying agile practices, but about being agile: adopting beliefs, behaviours, and principles that drive continuous improvement, critical thinking, and incremental value delivery.

Agile Mindset – Strategic / Leadership level

Demonstrates an integrated Agile Mindset and acts as a driver of organizational transformation. 

• Leads the adoption of Lean‑Agile principles across the organisation.
• Inspires others to embrace new ways of working and continuous improvement.
• Promotes a culture of experimentation, transparency, and collaboration.
• Identifies systemic risks and acts proactively.
• Connects people, teams, and functions to enable end‑to‑end flow.
• Practices servant leadership and serves as a visible role model of an agile mindset.

What MetLife Offers

• Opportunity to lead and shape transformation agenda in a global, purpose‑driven organization.
• High‑visibility senior role with exposure to executive leadership and regional stakeholders.
• Collaborative, Agile‑oriented environment with meaningful autonomy and accountability.
• Competitive compensation, benefits, and strong professional development opportunities.