Thomas is a senior researcher in the Systems Engineering group. His research interests are product and requirements management.

Working as senior product manager focusing on the North American market. Having a long experience from product management specifically and managerial positions, also assisting in the transformation of the company. General organisational changes as well as process improvement initiatives in the product management area.

My skills to understand a problem domain and build a professional network were necessary when I took this position, as this was a part of the company I had not worked in before and most of the team, around 25 persons, was new to me. I was managing a technical group responsible for developing and maintaining a selection of software services and products focusing on Customer Self Support (CSS) within our customer service organisation. The services includes a web portal, Android apps as well as a tool chain and backend systems. We also outsourced part of the responsibility, where I was part of and drove the RFQ and vendor selection and inital setup.

The essential skills I used as product manager are creating professional network and communication skills. The setup was global with all the challenged that comes with it, e.g. time zone differences, limited ability to meet in person, etc. Another challenge is to be able to convince others and drive requirements with little formal authority; instead relying on informal ways to influence persons. I worked in a team of software product managers for our 2014 second half and 2015 first half products. My responsibilities included, among other things, focusing on our european operators as well as some of our operator partners in the US.

Taking this position required me to re-form my relationship with my collegues and professional network with surrounding organisations, as I used to be part of this group before I became a manager of it. I also used my skills to influence people, as the organization was going through a change in how we work. I was managing a group of SW product managers. There are two roles in the organisation, one focusing on a particular area, e.g. security, and one role managing the SW for a specific phone model, e.g. Xperia Z. The team was 8 very experienced and senior persons working less with each other but rather acting as different forms of product managers with other parts of the company.

I was the product manager for the software part in the Xperia Z and ZL phones. Basically, everything in the phone related to software, whether low level platform features or high level apps, I managed the product decisions. I worked closely with the business side, to understand the business value of different software features, and with the development side to understand the technical limitation and opportunities as well as available resources. The interesting part of this role is that you interface a large variety of roles and persons, forcing you to understand very different situations and contexts.

I primarily worked as product owner for the Telephony area. The mobile network operators have a lot of requirements in the Telephony area. Hence, I worked a lot with different operators and their requirements in this area. This included having both a short-term dialogue to fix issues for imminent launches as well as long-term discussions to outline roadmaps, etc.

When I worked as team leader for a group of project managers, the biggest challenge was the constant pressure to deliver results and at the same time be able to work with the team to develop the individuals and improve our way of working. The team was assigned to support and monitor feature project team in their planning and execution phases and to plan the resource usage on a global level along with forecasts on the resource situation.

As requirements engineer, I worked with our products and platform software planners and developers to understand and analyse the requests and detail the understanding and limitations. The challenges were two-fold; firstly, a mobile phone is built up of a large software base making it difficult to understand the complete scope; secondly, supporting the project and product managers in the prioritization process.

At Fraunhofer, I worked with requirements engineering, focusing on how to improve the working processes for software developing companies. We were working with cutting edge methodologies, which we in the scientific work developed and in the consulting side of the business helped companies to implement and roll out in their organisation.