How Becoming a Product Owner Turned Me Into a Real-Life Hero
Reading this title, you might be wondering how someone can use the word “hero” in the same sentence as “Product Owner.” Let me take a step back, introduce myself, and tell you how I got there!
A Little About Me
I’ve worked as a Business Analyst, Project Manager, and Product Owner for the last 15 years and beyond that, I’m the mother of a curious 6 year old girl. My hobbies are swimming and hiking and I love family hiking trips.
As you may know, when a child gets to a certain age they begin asking hundreds (millions?!) of “Why” questions. One day my daughter came home from kindergarten and said “my friend’s father is a firefighter and he saves people. Mummy, what do you do at work?” Well, how can I compete with a firefighter?! I could explain that I’m analyzing business processes, talking to people, and writing user stories. But to a six-year-old child, that’s probably boring.
A Little About My Work
This made me think about my career and the types of projects I’ve worked on over time. While some projects have been more interesting than others, I’m curious by nature and rarely get bored. I like improving processes and building things from scratch and luckily, I’ve had a lot of opportunities to do that. When Newfire approached me via LinkedIn to explain the types of projects I could work on here, my interest and desire to work on healthcare projects was immediately ignited.
My first role at Newfire was Senior Business Analyst working on a project to create a platform for healthcare providers to manage services for their patients/users. As the project expanded, I was promoted to a Lead Business Analyst role and ultimately gathered a lot of knowledge about US healthcare and digital healthcare in general.
Following that project, a new position for a Product Owner role opened on a new project for a new client (and I’m currently still in that role now). My client is building a unified life science platform that helps companies run their clinical trials, better engage with customers, and leverage the deepest and most up-to-date life sciences data to help do more with less. What attracted me to this project was the opportunity to work on such a meaningful mission while expanding my expertise in a very specific area of healthcare.
A Hero’s Journey
These days, I’m working on a clinical study metadata query engine that combines information about clinical studies from different data sources and provides a holistic view of valuable information about clinical studies.
How do this product and the work I’m doing have an impact on people’s lives? To put it into context: A pharmaceutical company would contact my client and describe the type of clinical research they’re pursuing, the problem they hope to solve, their target audience, exclusion and inclusion criteria, and any further information they have from previous clinical studies. From here, Data Analysts would use a query engine to search through metadata to identify examples from previous studies that may provide valuable information to help this pharma company speed up their process of bringing new treatments to deserving patients faster.
This is what being a Product Owner is all about – working on a product that has such a big impact on people’s lives, prioritizing requirements that will bring value to users, and ultimately helping patients receive better and more efficient treatment. This is the work that helps me feel like a superhero in the eyes of my child. 🙂
