Claire MORIN

Claire Morin

I started my career as a Product Owner in 2010. I had no training. So I read a lot, mostly Mike Cohn and Kenneth S Rubin books to learn the job. I was not part of a community yet, so I learned the principles through the project director Florent Lothon who had the role of coach. 

Since then tt's been a "must be" way of working for me. Having scientific background, research oriented, it was the only way for me to give my work some meaning. I've been trying to spread this mindset since the beginning around me.

In 2014 I trained myself about Design Thinking. I was really interested in the design aspects and tools. I felt they were important skills to become more unbiased while taking product decisions. 

Then I met and joined the agile commnity in Paris. It allowed me to join a team of agile coaches for a while. I learned a lot, about training, transformation, and agile techniques like ATDD for instance.

I started coaching teams, more specificaly on the product ownership aspect, and improving Product Owner/ team interaction. I helped them gain empathy for their users, and get the whole team aligned on a vision from sponsors to developpers. 

I used Design Thinking and Lean start-up principles and tools and included them to the scrum framework to achieve it. It was really about asking the right questions for them. Putting themselvers in the customer shoes, and become aware of what they had to learn to create a good product. So stoping asking the customer what he wanted, talk a lot less about features, and a lot more about the customers stakes, problems and constraints. And of course teaching them about the way you test it.

I alternated then working as Product Owner and a Coach. I had the occasion to use data a lot more in my Product Owner role. Make it a part of daily life, and a base for decision. In the mean time, I trained myself on user experience, more specifically user research and user experience strategy. These two aspects qualitative and quantitiative user knowledge are now the ground basis of my work as a Product Owner.

I coached a small web agency desiring to become fully agile. I learned to be in a position where I offered coaching as a service. I was there to listen, and teach tools whenever the teams felt the need in order to improve the interaction with their customer, or solve organisation issues they had that were due to their specific constraints. I tried to make the managers reflect on their interaction model. They were in a  situation where the lack of trust between teams and managers was impacting both motivation.

I worked as a Product Owner on a product for developpers for a year in 2016-2017. I had to put myself in a developer shoes. It helped me gain empathy and a better understanding of developpers difficulties in the way they interact with Product Owners or with each others.

Since july 2017, I collaborate with Michel Goldenberg in NBS consulting on agile coaching missions.

At the same time, I work on a start-up project. I experience lean-start up fully, and challenge myself on a more personnal project. It makes me feel all the difficulty to stay unbiased while working on something you deeply care about.