Five must-know lessons for Product Owners

When building a successful digital product or service, you often look to other established players globally to see what’s worked for them, to emulate those learnings in your own product and drive success.

Working with European product companies for over a decade has given us over at 99x a unique insight into how product owners think, work and pivot their products to meet changing market requirements. Speaking to us, the heads of successful product companies across industries — from logistics to finance –shared some lessons that have helped them groom and inspire teams, and create market winning products over the years.

Lesson #1: Use drawings and pictures to engage

“I like to do drawings and pictures to convey what I have in mind. I also go over the domain and discuss it with the team to make sure they’ve understood my idea.” — Kjetil Odin Johnsen, Founder and CEO, Tackle

Kjetil saw Norwegian municipalities struggle to coordinate their responses to the rising number of COVID-19 cases. In a matter of days, ‘Tackle’ emerged to help municipalities deal with the crisis. The team worked around the clock to iterate and build the features needed. In his courage to build Tackle, Kjetil made a difference to countless lives and mitigated a national crisis.

Lesson #2: Communicate intent, not just requirements

When working with distributed teams: “Don’t just give them detailed specifications on what you’re building. Invest and focus more on making them understand what you’re trying to achieve because that saves you time when it comes to the actual specifications.” — Espen Slyngstad, CEO, Easy2You

Espen saw the need to embrace technology as its core and transform into a ‘logtech’ (logistics technology) provider. Today, Easy2You drives two lines of business. One focuses on last mile deliveries related to ecommerce and the other, B2B related transportation needs for global transportation requirements.

Lesson #3: Encourage the team to take ownership

“It is a good sign when the employees in your extended team start challenging some of the strategic decisions… to me, this shows that they have a stake in it, and that they are just as concerned as us that the right decisions are made [about the product].” — Torgeir Lyngstad , CTO, Compello

Compello enables customers to implement a completely paperless work environment, coupled with a simple and secure process for receiving, approving and distributing invoices and other documents.

Lesson #4: Be ready to respond rapidly to your customers

“We realized that our technology platform had to change… the customer is now digital, more demanding and they request more alternatives on delivery, price and flexibility.” — Jon Vidar Eidsaa , Chief Product Officer, Driw

Driw has always been in innovating logistic software solutions for the retail and wholesale industry. The product suite currently features integrated solutions for Warehouse Management, Order Management, Store Management and Transport Management.

Lesson #5: Be open. Great ideas can come from anyone.

“When you are building a product, every person on the team has the right to speak and voice their opinion to create a better solution.” — Erik Herje — Co-Founder, Parkly

Parkly is about building a reliable, cost-effective solution for parking management using the latest image recognition technologies at a price-point where Parkly can also be profitable. Paid parking should be as simple as driving-in and driving-out with the system identifying the vehicle, calculating the fee, and processing the payment invisibly!