Product Owner at Schindler

Schindler is a Swiss company that builds, sells, installs and maintains elevators. It employs about 70k people worldwide and their installations carry 2 billions people daily.

Elevators are the world's most used transport by far, and their complexity is rarely acknowledged.

Joining Schindler I was curious to learn how they deliver such a complex product while managing intricate teamwork. How does one organize people to operate around the idea of delivering such an ordinary yet highly complex product?

The management of much critical information had to flow in ways that allowed for no mistakes: from the coordination of hardware and software limitless dependencies, to the numerous safety regards and the testing strategies they require over the countless combinations of configurations (height, number of doors, restricted floors, brake modules, counterweight systems…), often contradictory regulations from countries (and sometimes cities), support for various emergency procedures, power cuts management, entrapment risks, installation safeness, competitors integrations, remote diagnostics, contactless interfaces, from the internal communication of requirements to the products’ end-of-life considerations, elevators are unknowingly one of the most high end products that Mankind has built.

It is a tricky exercise to detail my activities without revealing too much of the company’s gears, and so for now I’ll just list here a few concrete achievements:

• Lead what became the Foundation Team, consisting of a group of software engineers working on the controller software’s most fundamental aspects such as works related to the OS adaptations, critical activities such as Test Automation and Defect Management, and Secure Development Lifecycle for cybersecurity.
• I applied a testing philosophy of my own (see Sigma Testing) and lead my team to create a powerful and sophisticated alpha-testing ecosystem, rapidly developing advanced autonomous digital testing from scratch, and enabled a global test strategy rework.
• I oversaw aspects requiring DevOps methodology such as at the levels of code change delivery and hardware simulators management.
• I helped manage management tools such as Atlassian’s Jira, Confluence, Advanced Roadmaps and drove their adoptions and evolutions.

Schindler has been one of my most enriching experience to understand how people function, and a reminder of a core idea of the world: things are fragile and should be cared for, and people should want to care for them, and this right here is an ever up-hill battle. You need to be able to recognize potential in people and gems of ideas that will carry the company, often unbeknown to it. You have to balance risks, freedom and ambitions of your team members. You need to speak the same language (what is a test? what qualifies as automation? what is even an defect?), and sometimes that means acknowledging uncomfortable weaknesses in order to heal vital processes.

What I’d like to cover in the near future:

• Habits of a great Team Leader
  • Shut up, watch, nudge
  • Wearing someone else’s shoes
  • Freedom & Rules
  • Carry the load no one wants
  • Clarity
  • Infusing possibilities
  • Working with egos
• Be a Project Gardener
  • Planting ideas
  • Caring for the Seed, the Soil and the Tree.
  • Alive or dead, dancing with breath and decay
  • The Rosarian
  • Fruits ripeness and delivery

In early 2021 I was hired as Technical Product Owner.

The youngest of a team of about 40 people —many of whom were around for close to 20 years— and the dedicated Lead for about 10 of them.

I was part of the team working on the software that runs on every Schindler lift, the one that controls everything from button presses to special services.

My roles consisted of (1) focusing the team and (2) optimizing the flows. I was there to streamline the processes and managing initiatives that pushed the controller software towards impeccable quality.

I worked to apply my principles of Product Thinking and User Experience at the level of delivery spirit and teams coordination. I was setting a vision to aim for, and providing the tools to achieve it.

If Schindler was serving people the ability to move from point A to point B, I was helping the company design its upcoming point B (“what’s next”), while establishing point A (“where we are now”), at the level of our department which itself was at the core of the products abilities.

Since I joined Schindler I wrote various articles, see Sigma Testing, Product Thinking, User Experience.