Interview with James Robinson from Postnord

Postnord has accelerated its digital presence and among several initiatives is the new branding and consolidation of all the Nordic websites for Postnord.

We have interviewed James Robinson who is the Product Owner for the Web initiatives at Postnord to get some insights into the rebranding project and also how the pandemic played a role in productivity within teams.

What were your challenges before starting the project?

We had different challenges; a lot of technical debt and complex structure with many Nordic market sites sharing the same code base. We had a lot of legacy code from 6-7 years ago that needed to be reviewed, refactored, and get up to date. The old solution didn’t focus so much on the consumers and autoscaling was missing. We saw a real challenge in rebuilding and simplifying the solution to be more future-proof.

Did you reach results as expected in the project?

We’ve now rebranded the sites for all Nordic countries. First, we just made a 1-1 migration to the new environment, and now have a platform which we can evolve. The migration and update also made it possible to use more of the out-of-the-box functionality within Episerver, like personalization and A/B-testing.

What was the best thing about the project?

One of the best things was that we managed to get a quick go-ahead/approval internally and full support from stakeholders. This enabled us to make big strides in the project quite quickly and make quick decisions within the team. I am very proud of what we achieved together in a relatively short period.

Did you learn anything new in the project?

Working in a small agile team has worked really well, we could make decisions within a small team knowingly that we had the full support of stakeholders.

Miro has been really key in helping us to be productive at a time when everyone is working from different locations and attending meetings online. In fact, when everyone is working online we are able to be even more productive in some aspects. 

Before Corona, I experienced a lot of problems with hybrid meetings (hybrid meetings is when most people are gathered together in a meeting room and a few people are connected online). But right now, when everybody is online, it has worked really well, we’ve experienced more mutual respect for all team members. Online meetings have been very inclusive, easy to follow, and without the challenges of hearing people sitting far away from a speakerphone.

What do you like about Epinova and our consultants?

I think it is nice to work with people who you can trust. They tell you if things are wrong and what needs to be fixed. Often technical challenges are fixed without even saying.

I have worked with consultants from Epinova before and have always had a good working relationship and respect for each other’s way of working. You need people with good communication skills to get these types of projects done.

The interview was rounded off with some further discussions regarding the way of working due to the Corona effect. I think we can learn much from James’ experiences in this project and I’m looking forward to the upcoming work together.