Introducing Jamie

Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting fragments of the book, to introduce you to Jamie, a somewhat-stressed PO who has just started a new job with the insurance start-up ‘InsAny’, and is finding out that the rush to market was successful but also came with a few cut corners and they are the one to deal with all the trouble that comes from that…

Jamie’s story runs through the whole of the book, at the start of each chapter and if you find some of the challenges the team at InsAny have to deal with familiar, this might be the book for you! As one of the readers messaged me: #IAmJamie We’ve all been there.

These fragments are, hopefully, fun to read and show how some of how the book recommends you deal with legacy. They are only a small part of the story, though, and even just a small part of the examples in the book. I also sprinkle in a lot of my own experiences at different client and workplaces over the last thirty years. Ok, sometimes I mash them up a little to tell the story better, but it’s all real experiences.

For Jamie’s story, the cast is wider than just Jamie, of course. We’ll also meet Allison, an project manager at BigInsured, inc., Freddie, an engineering lead, Andrea, a software engineer, Olav and Ben, testers, and CTO Jennifer and CEO Roger. But all in good time, let’s get started at the beginning…

5 months ago, Jamie started working as the Product Owner of the InsAny App, the app that functions as the main contact point of the insurance start-up to their customers. They had been very excited to get started, working with an app that already had over a million users, and had been growing at a fast pace over the last three years as it disrupted the insurance market.

Jamie had come into work that morning with their head full of plans. Plans for the changes that needed to be done to comply with regulations. Plans for the day, and the refinement sessions he was going to run with two of the teams to discuss those requirements and get some estimations in place. Jennifer, the CTO, had made it very clear that there was not much room to maneuver: this had to be in place by the end of the quarter, or an expected audit by the national bank would mean the InsAny license would be at risk.

When Jamie arrived at the meeting room, he found Olav there, as well as Ben, the testers from the two teams that were supposed to be there. None of the others had turned up. Olav quickly got him up-to-speed: a problem with the response times of the database server was causing multiple services to fail, and every time they’d tried to restart the services the problem had quickly returned. The whole team was working on the problem.

Jamie sighed and, because they’d been through a few of these situations at InsAny, now, and resigned to work out the new requirements by themselves to avoid taxing the team any further…

“The good thing”, Jamie thought, “is that when we talk about bugs, we get input from the support team. It’d be so good if we could involve them structurally with the requirements process and get their input into the UX models for the new… “. Jamie’s attention got pulled back to the present when the next bug, probably the 37th they’d been through, came on the screen.

“Jamie, so what do we do with this one?” Yeah, regular input from support would be nice. But for now, all they could do is talk about the problems caused in the past. Talk, and talk, and talk, for hours each week. Jamie sighed, and said: “I don’t think we’ll be able to work on that one anytime soon. Let’s put that back on the agenda for after we get through the audit prep project.”

The manager of the support team, Oscar, was not thrilled with the response. He’d already made a point of describing the number of questions his team had been fielding about the confusing user interface that caused many of their customers to falter while requesting reimbursement of a car damage incident. The ease with which that was possible had been one of the prime selling points of InsAny, initially, and reviews for the app had been going down, while support calls were going up. But Jamie had very explicit, different priorities so there was simply no way he could help.