Meet Lars. He’s a Product Architect.

Design, review, prioritise → Repeat

As a Product Architect, my role at Novo Nordisk involves creating technical roadmaps and establishing architectural vision for various Operational Technology (OT) products. Some of these products utilise out of the box capabilities provided by software vendors, while others necessitate additional development or coding by our in-house team to meet our specific needs. 

My job is to design, review, and prioritise the technical milestones that are related to that. If the technical development is outsourced, I actively participate in setting business-to-business user requirements to ensure the software aligns with our needs.

Snatch, Clean & Jerk

🏋‍♂️ I have participated in the national championship for Olympic weightlifting

Joining

I’d say it qualifies as a large company

I’d been working in small engineering companies for close to a decade before joining Novo Nordisk. I decided to make the change because I wanted to try the opposite, and work in an established business. I would say that Novo Nordisk qualifies in that regard.

This also defined my expectations of the company. I thought it would be a highly professional company with established procedures, a good canteen, professional challenges, and career opportunities. I would say that my expectations were met, but I was surprised to learn how much freedom I would be given to pursue things that bring value, and also how much Novo Nordisk cares about my wellbeing as an employee.

Work

Minimising the virtual machine

I work on many cool projects. Beyond providing architectural vision and roadmap creation, I’m also tasked with standardising SCADA systems within Novo Nordisk and identifying solutions to global challenges. I think one really cool project was improving the scalability of a certain IT product, while also minimising its Virtual Machine footprint.

The solution was to change the infrastructure to use cloud technology solutions instead of Virtual Machines. This included several benefits such as better lifecycle management, better scalability, reusability… and for my own personal development, it was great as well. My involvement was split between leading the effort and being a developer, and I was lucky to work with very capable people who could bring the project to the finish line.

Challenge

Quality control

My biggest challenge is to be as efficient and ambitious as possible, while keeping quality at the highest level. Working in an industry as regulated as this, quality is at the centre of everything we do. But I find a lot of inspiration by being part of the Ignition Community of Practice within Novo Nordisk, and of course, also by working closely with our domain architects.

Learning milestones

✓ Computers ✓ Programming ✓ Problem solving ✓ Project leadership ✓ Communication ✓ Empathy ❤

Planning for the future

⍡ I programmed navigational algorithms for an autonomous car before I had my driver’s license.