Product management at Fastighetsägarna Service

Fastighetsägarna Service is a property management company. Their customers are property owners and housing cooperatives. Fastighetsägarna Service deliver services such as real estate and financial management.

INTRODUCTION

The problem

The year before I started, Fastighetsägarna Service invested in a couple of new solutions to become an even more digital and modern service provider. When the projects ended they also made a large re-organization that resulted in unclarity of who was responsible for which solution and that made it hard to continue developing and refining the new solutions.

The solution

We focused on the solutions where we had the best possibilities to change to an agile way of working, meaning creating smaller teams with an end-to-end responsibility. These teams also got a bigger influence on the budget.

My role

As a business developer, I help gather requirements and made sure the internal processes and the new services were aligned.
The new services included a mobile app, a customer portal, a ticket handling system and other minor initiatives.
To be able to continuously refine the solutions I also worked with implementing an agile way of working throughout the organization with roles and responsibilities such as product ownership.

THE ASSIGNMENT

How did we start?

We had an idea of what we wanted to achieve and started creating teams around those initiatives. Since everyone was involved with multiple initiatives we needed to agree on when to work together and when to work on other things. This was very important to get the team members to feel like a team with a common goal.

What did we learn?

Integrating different solutions is not only a technical  task. To get a seamless journey you need to consider the information and the users that are affected by the new investments. Draw a rough sketch of the different parts and start talking about them. 
Involve the people who’s going to use the new solutions and way of working from the start instead of handing over a solution to a maintenance organization. 

What did we do?

  • User interviews, inquiries, and workshops to gather insights from customers and co-workers and document them as user stories, low fidelity wireframes or storyboards.
  • Scrum - dailys, backlog refinements, sprint planning meetings, sprint demos and retrospectives with external teams.
  • Continuous prioritization of user stories in each solution’s backlog.
  • Align vision and roadmap with stakeholders.
  • Knowledge sharing in different forums with stakeholders and super users on a regular basis.

THE CONCLUTION

Results and impact

The main benefit was that our way of working with system development and implementation became more structured, agile and value driven. Instead of having temporary project organizations we let the teams take responsibility as much as possible for the product/service no matter maintenance nor bigger feature development.
We also included the end users (internal and external) in a larger extent in our prioritization work and to test our assumptions.

Main challenge and lesson learnt

To get the expected value, agree on a common goal, make it visible and revisit it often. Don’t be afraid to change it if needed. The world changes rapidly and so must we.
The majority of people worked part time in different projects which made it difficult to focus. Our weekly stand ups and short iterations helped us to align and create value continuously. 

Next steps

When I left the assignment we had just created a roadmap for the upcoming six months and a plan for how to educate the users who were going to use the new solutions.