My Career as a Product Owner - James Morris

Hi James! Tell us about yourself - what's your background and how have you progressed your career?

I’ve worked in tech since I graduated in 2006 with Legal, Energy and HealthTech sectors. My first role was a support analyst, progressing to a support team leader, then to customer success manager and for the last 5 years have worked within Product as both a Product Owner and Product Manager.

What drew you to a career as a Product Owner?

I had a taste for being a Product Owner whilst working within Support (before we had or I’d even heard of product), where I often spoke to customers about product requirements and worked with our development teams to build new features. This was the part of the job I always enjoyed most and eventually had the opportunity to do this full-time.

How has product and technology overall changed in your 16 years since leaving university?

Massively! When I first left university, we only had client / server applications, so everything had to be manually updated, sometimes by sending out CD-ROM’s. The user experience hadn’t been thought of at all, so most applications were over complicated, had several ways to achieve the same goal, looked very dated and weren’t very responsive to use.

In recent years we develop web applications within cloud technologies such as Azure and AWS, which makes things far easier and faster, plus we think about the user experience first and foremost, meaning that we build software that is easy to develop, deploy and adopt by users and in most cases looks modern and just works!

Also, the whole development teams can now work remotely, which means we can be more flexible, productive and hire the right people - This would have been very difficult only a few years ago.