Lin Bele Jacobsen

Projects

Service management

Working closely with 4 dedicated customers.

Role
UX · Agile Product Owner
Client
Pureservice
Year
2013-2016
Team
8 in Norway · 5 engineers in Kongsberg Gruppen (India) · 13 in total
The Pureservice ticket console with an expanded filter drawer, showing zone, team, status, priority, category and company filters above a list of open tickets with their owners, status and creation dates.
The finished tool — a ticket list with a full filter drawer for narrowing down by zone, team, status and more.

My key takeaways

Working closely with 4 dedicated customers. Having them involved in decision-making, and prioritising the backlog, gave us the ability to release a good value MVP.

Huge value in going SaaS with this tool!

Project goals

  • Rebuild the existing Service management tool on a more secure and scalable framework
  • Build a mobile app with the team in Bengaluru, India
  • Built-in onboarding in the tool itself (so that we can stop hosting the 3-day training/course for new service desk employees)
  • Make the tool compliant with the ITIL standard

Role, tasks and method

I was hired into this company to do the mixed role of UX and PO, which I find especially rewarding. This combo allows close access to the developers, accessing their knowledge and experience.

We had the luxury of having more than 300 dedicated and enthusiastic customers using the “old” tool, and they wanted to help build the new tool.

Using Design Thinking as my process was a good choice and I never ran out of helpful stakeholders to help shape our journey towards a successful release!

  • Interviewing the existing customers and potential customers
  • ITIL certifications
  • I worked on 2 different service desks for 2 weeks to learn the trade
  • Having internal and external workshops for 4-30 people
  • Competitor analysis
  • Owning the backlog and planning releases from start, via MVP to finished product
  • Writing user stories
  • Building wireframes
  • User testing
Diagram of the designer's tasks across six categories: Research, Ideation, User testing, Scrum, Information Architecture and Product Management.
My tasks, grouped by discipline.
A low-fidelity wireframe of an agent dashboard, showing open ticket counts, a team workload chart, and a prioritised ticket list.
An early low-fidelity wireframe of the agent dashboard.

Over my three years at this company, I successfully facilitated over 10 large-scale workshops, engaging between 5 to 60 participants. These sessions were instrumental in brainstorming and prioritising solutions and functionalities.

Challenges

The existing customers wanted a more modern tool, but they wanted the look-and-feel of the old tool… This taught me how important it is to understand the existing users’ current setup.

This project lacked a dedicated UI resource, resulting in developers handling the UI design. Consequently, we frequently needed to redesign components as the project progressed. An experienced UI designer with a clear vision could have guided us from the MVP stage to a polished final product, potentially avoiding these challenges.

A glass wall covered in colour-coded sticky notes capturing user feedback themes — labels in Norwegian for issues like 'old-fashioned', 'cumbersome', 'slow' and 'not cohesive', grouped with sad and happy face stickers.
Mapping user feedback into themes.

Successful releases

After the main tool was built our customers wanted a mobile app to support the tool. We had access to a brilliant team of mobile developers in Bengaluru, India. I also did wireframes, stories and daily management of this team, travelling between Norway and Bengaluru. We launched an iOS and an Android app.

My third round working with brilliant people in India. This product is now the most used Service management tool in Norway. More than 450 companies in Scandinavia use the tool every day! Customers like VY, Redningsselskapet, Toll, Widerøe, Telia, NHO and 173 kommuner.

A group of around ten colleagues standing together reviewing a sprint board and screens in an open office.
Reviewing progress together as a team.