Zurich, Zurich, CH
Underwriting Handbook Product Owner (Hybrid; m/f/x/d; 80-100%)
Are you a product-minded professional who thrives at the intersection of business strategy and digital delivery? Do you want to shape how underwriting governance comes to life across a global reinsurance leader? This is your opportunity to own a platform that touches underwriters across Swiss Re's entire organization — and make governance something people actually want to use.
About the Role
As the Underwriting Handbook Product Owner, you will be the driving force behind one of Swiss Re's most strategically important digital governance platforms. The Underwriting Handbook is a digital, user-centric tool that makes underwriting governance easier to find, understand, apply, and maintain — across Swiss Re's global underwriting teams.
You will own the product vision and roadmap, bridge the gap between business and technology, and champion adoption across underwriting communities and Business Units worldwide. This role sits at a fascinating crossroads: part strategist, part translator, part delivery lead — and entirely focused on making a real difference to how underwriters work every day.
Key Responsibilities:
Product Ownership & Roadmap
-
Own the business product vision, priorities, and roadmap for the Underwriting Handbook, ensuring it remains aligned with Swiss Re's strategic underwriting governance objectives
-
Proactively identify and resolve inconsistencies or implementation challenges across the Group, acting as the go-to person for product direction
-
Translate underwriting governance needs, user feedback, and business priorities into clear requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria
-
Prioritize enhancements and fixes based on business impact and delivery feasibility, maintaining a well-groomed and outcome-focused backlog
Business–IT Translation
-
Act as the key interface between Underwriting Governance, Business Units, and IT delivery teams, ensuring nothing gets lost in translation
-
Ensure technology solutions accurately reflect underwriting workflows, governance needs, and user expectations
-
Facilitate alignment on priorities, trade-offs, and design decisions — bringing the business perspective and constructively challenging unnecessary complexity
-
Coordinate testing, validation, release readiness, and business sign-off for new capabilities, ensuring smooth and confident launches
Handbook Delivery & Adoption
-
Drive delivery of the Underwriting Handbook as a practical, intuitive, and trusted source of underwriting governance content
-
Collaborate with governance owners and subject-matter experts to structure content in a user-centric, accessible way
-
Champion user adoption through targeted communication, training materials, feedback loops, and a culture of continuous improvement
-
Support migration, maintenance, and lifecycle management of handbook content, keeping the platform current and reliable
About the Team
You will join the Underwriting Governance and Transformation team within Group Underwriting — a team at the heart of Swiss Re's ambition to continuously improve underwriting discipline, outcomes, and productivity across both P&C and L&H.
The team plays a critical role in shaping underwriting governance modernization, enabling AI-powered underwriting capabilities, and setting enterprise underwriting standards across Swiss Re's global organization. Working closely with underwriting governance and transformation leadership, this is a team where your contributions will have visible, lasting impact at scale.
About You
You are a pragmatic, product-minded professional who genuinely enjoys working where business strategy meets digital delivery. You have enough underwriting and governance fluency to earn credibility with subject-matter experts, and enough technology savvy to work confidently with agile delivery teams. You are structured and delivery-focused, but also curious and adaptable — comfortable navigating ambiguity and aligning diverse stakeholders around a shared vision.
You communicate with clarity and confidence: able to explain business needs to technical teams, and technology constraints to business stakeholders — without losing either audience.
We are looking for candidates who meet these requirements:
-
8+ years of experience in a product ownership, digital transformation, underwriting, or governance-related role, with a demonstrable track record of delivering digital products or platforms
-
Proven ability to translate business needs into requirements, user stories, prioritized backlogs, and acceptance criteria in an agile or hybrid delivery environment
-
Good understanding of underwriting workflows and the day-to-day needs of underwriters, sufficient to engage credibly with underwriting stakeholders and governance owners
-
Hands-on experience working with IT / Data & Technology teams, ideally in a Product Owner, Business Owner, Business Analyst, or transformation delivery capacity
-
Strong stakeholder management skills across business, governance, and technology functions — including the ability to facilitate alignment and navigate competing priorities
These are additional nice to haves:
-
Experience with underwriting governance frameworks, including standards, referral processes, or authority frameworks
-
Exposure to AI-enabled underwriting or digital transformation initiatives within financial services or reinsurance
-
Formal agile or product management certification (e.g., CSPO, SAFe, or equivalent)
For Switzerland, the base salary range for this position is between 125'000 CHF and 188'000 CHF for a full-time role.
The specific salary offered considers:
-
The requirements, scope, complexity and responsibilities of the role
-
The applicant's own profile including education/qualifications, expertise, specialisation, skills and experience
In the situation where you do not meet all the requirements or you significantly exceed these, the offered salary may be below or above the advertised range. In addition to your base salary, you may be eligible for additional rewards and benefits including an attractive performance-based annual bonus.
Our company has a hybrid work model where the expectation is that you will be in the office at least three days per week.
About Swiss Re
Swiss Re is one of the world’s leading providers of reinsurance, insurance and other forms of insurance-based risk transfer, working to make the world more resilient. We anticipate and manage a wide variety of risks, from natural catastrophes and climate change to cybercrime. Combining experience with creative thinking and cutting-edge expertise, we create new opportunities and solutions for our clients. This is possible thanks to the collaboration of more than 15,000 employees across the world.
Our success depends on our ability to build an inclusive culture encouraging fresh perspectives and innovative thinking. We embrace a workplace where everyone has equal opportunities to thrive and develop professionally regardless of their age, gender, race, ethnicity, gender identity and/or expression, sexual orientation, physical or mental ability, skillset, thought or other characteristics. In our inclusive and flexible environment everyone can bring their authentic selves to work and their passion for sustainability.
If you are an experienced professional returning to the workforce after a career break, we encourage you to apply for open positions that match your skills and experience.
We may use AI-powered tools to support the review and evaluation of applications for this position. These tools provide additional insights to our recruitment teams, but all hiring decisions are carefully reviewed and made by people. To learn more about how we use AI in recruitment and how we handle your personal data, please review our Data Privacy Statement before applying.
Reference Code: 138608
Job Segment:
Underwriter, Product Manager, Insurance, Operations