Punčec at debug 2024: How PO role evolved with our enterprise SaaS product

The story of how the product owner role evolved at Emil Frey Digital has everything to do with the growth of our company and the core product we’ve built, said our Renato Punčec at .debug 2024, held in Zagreb beginning of June.

Back in 2017 Emil Frey Digital developed a leads management solution. It was a fairly small application (still, far from easy to build!), with its product owner involved in every aspect of features planning and delivery. Work processes were fast and unstructured. Things were done in ways that you would expect to see at a typical software agency.

Over time, the application became a fully-fledged enterprise SaaS. It now has dozens of thousands users in European car dealerships and distribution companies operating under EFG. And it is constantly expanding, with rollouts to new countries and user groups. The product grew in complexity, and the number of enterprise-level integrations made it the backbone of sales and marketing operations for the entire group.

To do that, dev teams had to grow in numbers and in ways they planned and delivered the product. They adopted new skills, upgraded and changed job roles, stopped using some processes and introduced others. For the product owner role, it meant going from owning features to owning the product. Working processes became structured and slower. Setting priorities became much more important than doing everything.

There was some proud cheering of Renato’s colleagues, as his presentation came to an end. All in all, the journey he described was hailed as smart evolution, and a successful leveling-up of a dev organisation.

Debug is seen as the biggest dev conference in this part of the country. More than 2000 people attended; among them mostly software developers, designers, engineering and HR managers, and other IT professionals.

The largest European company of its kind, this year Emil Frey Group is celebrating 100 years in business. It operates across 18 European countries, including Croatia. Emil Frey Digital, headquartered in Varaždin, is its research and development center. The Group is headquartered in Switzerland and owned by the Frey family.