What it Takes to be a Successful Product Owner: An Interview with Kreig from Team Ariox

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with our Lumino Product Owner Kreig Dreier, to have a conversation about what he believes it takes to be successful in his role, as well as the unique challenges of developing the Lumino Portal.

Q: What role would you say a product owner should play? 

A: Primarily you are the cat herder haha! That is essentially my job, to herd all of the cats, try and keep them corralled. Whether that be different pieces of stories, different developers, stakeholders, just everything. You’re trying to hold on to that thing, whatever it may be, and keep it moving forward as surprises come up and elements are constantly shifting. 

Q: When you joined Ariox, data integration wasn’t necessarily your background. How did you go about understanding our value proposition and problems that could potentially arise from the services that we provide to our customers? 

A: The answer would be the story of how I got here. I started out as a mechanical engineer and ended up working in manufacturing and everything snowballed from there. I have always been very data driven and wanted to understand, based on the information, what was going on. How do I improve this line? Make this cycle time better? Whatever it is. Fast forward a few years to when I started saving data from one of the projects that I worked on when I was at GE. I helped develop a system that was implemented on several hundred EDM machines, which machine parts used in jet engines. We saved all kinds of information from the manufacturing process from that machine, and we wanted to see what we could do with it. Others in GE started to become interested in exploring what could be done with the stored data and that is where I come into play. I started working with other product owners at GE, I had the idea of what we needed to do, and they built it. That really illustrated to me the power that your data hold to really illuminate the processes of a business. I then went into the data science side of things and began to consider how the data could be manipulated further. How can we use data to predict something? Through that experience I started to move toward becoming a data scientist. I still wouldn’t consider myself one, but I’ve been through quite a bit of training and have built my own algorithms to predict and forecast data. Those two aspects of my background have prepared me for the unique problems that data integration presents.  

Q: What would you say has been a unique challenge regarding the development of Lumino for you? 

A: I guess I’d have to say that learning how it functioned and the inner workings. while also being in charge of its direction was rather difficult. Coming into it not having a good grasp of what Lumino was but overseeing the backlog and the user stories and trying to figure everything out was a definite challenge in the beginning.  

Q: How much engagement do you have with customers once they are onboarded? 

A: A lot. The product owner is the person that is supposed to meet with stakeholders and in this case the customer is the stakeholder. It’s my job to understand what it is they want even if they aren’t exactly sure yet. They have an idea of what they want and it's the product owner's responsibility to really flesh out the concept. You kind of build out what their dream actually is, before they even know it. 

Q: What was the biggest challenge to managing potential gaps before we started bringing on new customers? 

A: The biggest gap I had then was understanding what my stakeholders (at that time the CEO and CTO) wanted. This is Mary’s company (CEO) and its Christian’s baby (CTO). They would come to me and say let’s do this. I’d have to push back and ask well why do we want to do this? What purpose does this serve for our future customers? Is it something that makes life easier on them in the Lumino portal? Does it offer additional features that are going to make things better, what is the priority of these things because we can’t be going multiple different directions while we are getting customers up and running.  

Q: Has there been any unique challenges to everyone being remote during all of this? 

A: What I’ve found from working remotely is you can get a whole lot more done in a lot less time because you don’t have the distractions of an office. However, there is a flip side to that, which is that you can also get bummed out without people to talk to regularly throughout the day. People are freer to do what they need to do when they need to do it. That also helps with morale. We are all a lot happier having that freedom, which in turn keeps us all engaged when something pops up.  For example, if our CTO Christian has something he needs to talk to me about, we’ll be chatting at 7pm over Microsoft Teams and it doesn’t bother you the way it would at a larger onsite company. When onsite, that conversation might necessitate staying late at the office until 7pm when you should be home doing something else. If we need to have a quick chatter later in the evening, we can easily do it, feet kicked up on the couch eating some popcorn. 

Q: What are two key factors that you would say are the most important to you being a successful product owner in general? 

A: My breadth of knowledge not so much my depth. I have enough skill to be proficient in many areas based on my previous experiences. I know Sequel - I’m not a developer but I understand it. I can tell what’s going on and I can copy and manipulate code and whatever else I might need to do on the fly. I’m not the middleware person but I understand what it is doing and am beginning to understand how to build integrations for future customers. I also have a lot of expertise in the manufacturing and supply chain side as well relating to cost and efficiency which ties in well with what we are building as a company. I feel at home talking customers dealing with supply chain and manufacturing issues. I’ve felt their pain, I know what the issues are, I can help them understand what their opportunities are. The other factor to my success as a product owner would be that I’m very good at puzzles - putting things together - which is the basis of what a product owner or project manager is. Your job is to understand what all the different pieces are and figure out how to put them together in a way that meets the stakeholders need.