Cover letter
I am an experienced digital product owner with a background in design, systems, and project management. What I do best is take a product area, work out what it should deliver and why, and turn that into a backlog a team can actually build against, sitting close to both the business and the build.
Agile product work has run through my career. Together with six developers I co-wrote a working process model for how we would run our projects, because a way of working only holds if everyone understands the reasoning behind it, not just the ceremony. Since then I have worked in backlog, sprint planning, and review in various forms. At my first job, Burning Man Studios, I wrote detailed delivery plans for PC and iOS game projects where features were decomposed all the way down to individual 3D assets, which is the same discipline as story breakdown and sizing.
I have owned products, not just managed projects. As Digital Product Owner at Irene Publishing I run a combined product owner and project manager function: I set priorities against business goals and hard resource limits, I gather and translate technical and editorial requirements into finished products, and I keep stakeholders aligned on what we are doing and why. At Atlas Digital I ran client projects from needs analysis to delivery, writing clear specifications and acceptance criteria, holding deadlines, and following up continuously with an internationally distributed team. Leading requirements-gathering across several functions at once, marketing, support, engineering, is the kind of coordination I am used to.
I work data-driven and customer-first. At the National Centre for Mathematics Education I used analytics to decide what to improve, bringing bounce rate down and retention up, and I grew a newsletter to 5,000 subscribers by treating it as a product with metrics rather than a task. I am comfortable giving data-driven estimates and presenting progress and data to the people who need it, from web editors to a steering group, because I did that through the CMS support organisation I ran and the seminar series I owned end to end.
I have an established background in launching software with engineering teams. Through Code and me I built iOS and Android apps from the ground up, I ran the scoping and user flows for Hair Fashion together with Sweden’s largest hair magazine, and this year I revived a decade-old mobile game, which meant root-cause debugging in legacy code I did not write, then driving the full chain through App Store compliance, localisation into fifty languages, and publishing. Prototyping and iterative development are simply how I have always worked. I have updated game codebases in Xcode myself and I write my own WordPress plugins, so I can sit in a refinement session with engineers and follow the trade-offs being discussed.
What I bring is more than fifteen years of running digital products and projects in practice, close to both the business and the build, with a way of working that is second nature rather than a set of steps.
I would want to get clear early on how the team currently defines “done” for a firmware feature, and how much of that definition is shared language versus something each person carries in their head, because that is usually where predictability in a mature Agile team is won or lost.
Please have a look at my recommendations from former colleagues and managers, mostly from the University of Gothenburg. I think they capture how I work with a team: linkedin.com/in/andreas-wieslander.
I hope we get the chance to meet and talk more about how I can contribute!