2018 – 2020 Lead Technique Customer Service Innovation (aka Product Owner / Product Manager)
My first job at bol.com was interesting and challenging. I became product owner of a huge product team (>14 people) that built software used at the heart of bol.com’s customer service.
When I started I found a group of professionals who did not know how to keep their heads above water. The daily flow of thousands of emails, phone calls, and chats from customers had led to a big backlog of work, at a time when the team wanted to work on innovation. In short:
How could we find a balance between backlog and innovation, and how could we become more relevant to stakeholders?
Together we explored and tried several solutions until we came up with the setup ‘act like a sports team’.
We made a line-up with the engineers in which they became defender, midfielder or striker. Each engineer ‘played’ their position for six weeks. Each position had its own tasks, focus, and responsibilities. Of course, in spite of everone having their own ‘positions’ in the end we remained responsible as a team (for the release and major issues etc).
We reduced the twice-daily standup to three short preliminary meetings per week. On Tuesdays, we shared knowledge and on Thursdays we looked back on the week (retro). On top of that teams were free to organize their day, and plan their own standups and market places (refinement sessions).
As ‘coach’, I oversaw the process and checked whether we were still doing well in line with the OKRs (Objective & Key Results).
Later, in multidisciplinary projects we adopted the sports metaphor once again and came up with the ‘Bolympics’. Once every six weeks, the whole department was updated on the bigger projects in a fun way.
