Eric van Winkle

Background

About Eric van Winkle

I am a Product Owner / Manager with a background as a software engineer. I have worked in a variety of Agile environments and a few more traditional ones. Most recently I was part of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) implementation within my product team. I took on a Product Owner role for my own SCRUM team in order to take part in requirements definition (to make my engineering job easier) and was asked to join the Product Management team and act as Product Owner for multiple teams across international offices. I had additional training in Product Management fundamentals and took responsibility for managing enhancement requests through an Ideas Portal as well as organizing customer demonstrations and interviews to better understand the users needs. As a Product Owner, I coordinated extensively with teams and stakeholders both in designing specific features and in planning each PI. I was responsible for assessing the business value and customers' willingness to pay for features. I had to capture user and non-functional requirements for features, manage risks and dependencies, write well defined stories and acceptance criteria, and keep all stakeholders apprised of progress towards the product roadmap. All of these features and any non-feature work (maintenance, research, etc) have to be managed in a single unified backlog. Others (architects, support engineers, etc) may add to that backlog, but the priority of the items should be managed by Product Owners (or Manager) according to the strategic vision determined by the Product Manager with input from stakeholders. This should be guided by the current roadmap and feed back into roadmap updates. As an engineer, I worked in the full stack of Microsoft products including Windows/IIS/SQL Server (T-SQL)/.NET (C#), but also worked across platforms, writing JavaScript and working with Oracle (PL-SQL) and using tools like ExtJs and nHibernate. I have domain experience in a variety of industries, including healthcare, telecommunications, and IT infrastructure, and am always interested in solving new problems.