Pierre, Product Owner at Peaks
Can you present your job as a Product Owner in a few words?
Un Product Owner works with a team usually made up of developers and in pairs with a Lead Developer, around a Agile methodology.
He embodies the product on which the team is working and defends its interests. A first part consists of build and à maintain a product vision. It must represent and synthesize the essence of the product while setting the course to follow. Of the objectives: and The roadmap are to be built, which induces a strong management of priorities. Also, a second part consists of build a backlog, which details the work to be done by the team to achieve the product vision, in the form of scenarios written from the user's point of view (user story). He works closely with his team, both to federate them and to communicate to them the clearest elements so that they can deliver what is expected of them.
A Product Owner must feed his work by collecting as much information as possible (qualitative and quantitative), and must know how to manage the needs and expectations of stakeholders around his product.
What is your background so far?
Graduated with a Master II in Digital Marketing, I started my career at Agence France-Presse (AFP) for 7 years. First as New Media & Innovation Project Manager, then as Platform & API Product Owner.
I had the pleasure of joining Peaks in early 2020 as Digital & Data Consulting. I am currently on assignment with a client in the media, as Product Owner Data API.
What do you like about your job?
Être Product Owner, means being at the crossroads of a multitude of professions, teams and interlocutors.
The days are never alike, the topics discussed and dealt with are vast and varied, and the issues always different.
Learning and enriching one's knowledge are daily and continuous exercises, which is an excellent source of motivation.
What qualities should you have?
A good Product Owner must be curious and question everything. It is on this basis that we build our decision-making and that we establish a vision and priorities. You also have to be able to invest in depth on specific and profound subjects, while being able to take a step back and analyze and synthesise. On the human side, it is crucial to be conciliatory and to know how to skillfully convey one's arguments or positions. Deciphering the behaviors and personalities of your interlocutors is a quality that pays off enormously.
What is the main professional challenge that you took up as Product Owner?
The creation and launch of the mobile version of the AFP e-commerce platform was a huge challenge that I was able to achieve. We were starting from afar because nothing existed and expectations were very high both internally and externally. We also wanted to set up a iterative and completely agile development strategy, so as to regularly offer new versions while collecting and exploiting user feedback, with different release phases spread over different populations. It will have been necessary to tackle a good number of technical subjects (creation of a common API between web and mobile, synchronization of accounts and user actions) and product topics (declination of functionalities designed for the web on mobile, mobile use). All the teams involved came out stronger and the project was a success.
What did you learn at Peaks?
One of the great strengths of Peaks is its notion of community. Many different professions are part of the agency and the interactions pushed by the community with such different profiles allowed me to learn about areas very far from mine. It is a strong concept and also carried by the customer. The idea is to disseminate and carry this approach both in the agency and on mission.
