My Career as a Product Owner - James Morris

10 Oct, 20225 Mins

In this blog:

We caught up with experienced North-West based Product Owner James Morris on all things product and how things have changed in his 16 years out of University! It was really interesting to find out from someone with so much experience, how much the product scene and market has changed since he was just starting out as a fresh faced 22 year old. Also, some great tips for anyone working in a technical role but wants to break into a product centric role – as this is what James did himself!

James Morris

James Morris, Product Owner

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.

What do you think are the biggest challenges the product market is facing post-covid?

Hiring good product people who really understand how to find out what the most important things to work on and can pull everyone together has always been a challenge, however post covid, where most teams have at least some people working remotely, I think the biggest challenge is ensuring everyone on the team is engaged and have a good understanding of the goals we’re trying to achieve as a team.

What advice would you give to someone wanting to break into a Product role?

Don’t be afraid to get things right first time (it rarely happens!), good Products are built by getting continual feedback from customers and not being afraid to build something that might not work.

I’d also advise reading up on agile methodologies (Scrum / Kanban) and try to get on a Product Owner course in order to give you a good understanding from the beginning.

Some great advice here for anyone that’s in a junior role out of University at the moment and wants to break into the wide world of Product! James has worked in some great industries on some fascinating projects – it's great that he’s able to share his helpful insight with the community!

Thanks James!

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