Good afternoon, I had the thought to share with you a day in the life of a Product Owner on the Customer Service Programme (CSP), providing you with an insight of my activities, meetings and discussions leading the Housing and Bereavement Service workstreams, so here goes..
Following the proud moments of watching the closing ceremony to the Commonwealth Games last previous Monday, all be it on my phone rather in person thanks to a 12 hour power cut at home. Suddenly I was faced with a clean-up exercise in removing the content of the fridge/freezer and replacing the pump and filter in my pond which blew with the surge of power when it had been fixed – So Monday was out followed by an afternoon at Asda re-stocking what we had to remove!
Anyway, back to the work front, Tuesday was a catch-up day with many meetings, I attended the daily stand-ups for Housing and Bereavement listening to the progress made in improving the customer experience, a few things to unblock as part of the agile delivery and our final sprint for these services focusing on the user research, analysis & synthesis, user journey’s, opportunities and recommendations.
There has been a real focus on turning feedback from our customers into tangible value opportunities allowing us to think outside of the box. Attending the daily stand-ups gives you a great insight on how you are progressing towards achieving your sprint goal and ensuring that your multi-disciplinary team have no blockers which risk achieving what we set out to do.
Overview of tenant journeys
It is key as a Product Owner that you not only keep in touch with the agile team you are working with but also the key stakeholders to ensure you are on the right track and working together to unblock any pain points being experienced. We are now approaching the end of the Discovery for Housing, a perfect time to meet with the service leads and playback the findings, opportunities and pain point of the tenant journey touching multiple services and focusing on the current end-to-end experience. Meeting with Housing and walking through the early findings is a check point to ensure that we are meeting the agreed goal but also start reviewing these to match back to the themes of the Customer Strategy; we review the value and size of each recommendation to form part of the programme’s product backlog which will give us a list of priorities to work on next. It was indeed a productive session as we got through 24 of 52 opportunities.
So next up was a meeting on Bereavement Services which is in Alpha at the moment and we are creating an online/offline guidance pack for our customers on what steps a customer needs to take when “dealing with a death”. For some customers this is a very testing time so guidance and support on what to do in an easy to use way helps them understand what the need to do and who they need to contact. The CSP team played back the first iteration of the online interactive guide, which is coming along nicely in terms of content and design to identify the end-to-end journey a customer needs to take, who to contact and what to do. Last week we had a playback session with the Bereavement Service to get their feedback, the team conducted user testing of the interactive design with a number of customers and groups who have accessibility needs; and then went on to playback the first design output of the offline version of this guide which is now being reviewed by the corporate design team.
Keep an eye out for my next instalment next week!