Testimonials

Julian J?ger

M.A. Information Science (2016)

Product Owner

LinkedIn

Xing

Hello, I'm Julian and I currently work as a product owner.

I studied Information Science at the University of Regensburg. From 2010 to 2016, I first completed my Bachelor's degree in the subject combination with media informatics and finally my Master's degree.

I started my professional career during my Master's degree. From 2014 onwards, I worked as a working student for user experience 16 hours per week at a medium-sized company that developed a web platform for recruitment agencies and recruiters. Working closely with the developers, we developed the interface not only functionally, but also as intuitively and consistently as possible with the existing system. After completing my studies, I was taken on there full-time and in 2017 I took on additional product management tasks and then worked as a product owner (PO). In 2019, I was then allowed to gradually build up my own PO team. Due to company acquisitions, I was also interim PO in a new sister company in 2020. After just over 7 years, I took on a new challenge in 2022. To expand my repertoire, I took on a position as PO for mobile apps in the B2C business.

From my studies, the methods and know-how of usability engineering as well as programming skills helped me the most. Especially through the latter, I had the opportunity to communicate with the developers almost at eye level and was able to quickly earn their recognition. In more abstract terms, the breadth of the subject areas and the form of an interface degree helped me in my adaptability as a product owner. The scientific way of working still enables me to keep structure in the chaos of numerous feature requests and to critically question them. Finally, the many group works and projects have prepared me to organise and work on new topics again and again in new constellations of people.

Advice I would like to give to students:

• ?Use the projects in your studies to develop not only yourselves in terms of content, but also in terms of organisation.
• ?Try things out, actively ask if you want to try out a different role in a company (in my experience, this works quite well in medium-sized companies).

Maximilian

"I completed an internship as a Data Science Intern at Amazon UK during my Master's degree in Information Science. I worked as a Data Scientist in the 'Transport & Supply Chain UK' department during my internship. Roughly speaking, the department takes care of the supply chain for orders on the online retail website. The office is located in the heart of London, more precisely at 1 Principal Place in Shoreditch. The building was built around 2017 and counts as Amazon's headquarters in the UK. The team where I worked sits on the 11th floor, with everyone free to choose their seat. The team's job is to manage customers' orders in a way that guarantees the customer 'next day delivery', if possible.

There are various ways for Amazon to earn money via the trading platform. On the one hand, products are purchased themselves, such as a TV from Siemens. This is then stored in a fulfillment center and shipped as soon as it has been ordered. On the other hand, Amazon earns most of its money with FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon). This is a service from the company to receive goods from various merchants, store them and make sure they reach the customer on time. This part accounts for about 60-70% of the income in the online retail sector. The problem with this is that the company never knows exactly how many packages will be sent to the fulfillment centers by the merchants. So there must always be enough goods in the warehouses. However, not too much merchandise must arrive, otherwise certain parcels would no longer be able to be taken in. However, not too few goods must arrive either, because otherwise the workers in the warehouses have no work, which then has a bad effect on morale. Another difficulty is that, if possible, every product is available in every warehouse in order to be able to guarantee "next day delivery". This requires frequent stock transfers, and care is taken to ensure that every product is available in every "fulfillment center". In order to master all this, the superior team works with forecasts using historical data. This provides an overview of how much product is coming in, how much product can be processed by the workers in the warehouse, and how much product is leaving the warehouse.

My team focused on the forecasts of the incoming goods. The team consisted of about 8 young people. I wo