Meet Steen. He’s a Scientific Data Product Owner.

Be great in act, as you have been in thought

In my role as a product owner within Research & Early Development, I coordinate the development of digital products for two IT development teams. Part of my work involves organising, detailing, and prioritising deliverables between our users – who are scientists and data scientists in the early research phases of drug development – developers on the team, and other stakeholders such as people leaders, programme managers etc.

As part of my work, I have to keep an overview of many different products, people, and strategic initiatives within Novo Nordisk – to ensure that we keep delivering simple and usable products to our users while also adding value to the business.

The job involves a lot of meetings with users. To understand what they need, and be able to clearly describe, and scope the work together with my team, so that our developers can transform these needs into digital products. I love this part of mediating between roles and different “languages” from various job roles and diverse educational backgrounds. I also love being a central driver of delivering new solutions that help solve issues for my super smart scientific colleagues!

Fancy a variety?

♡ I am part of an amateur theatre group performing a fun old-fashioned comedy each year for a week! I met my fiancée in that group.

Joining

Growth trajectory

I started in Novo Nordisk as an intern in 2016, while I was studying molecular biomedicine, and my ambition was to try out what it was like to work in a pharma company. Here, I learned that I simply loved helping my close colleagues with solving the many challenges they faced in their IT and digital setups. So, when the opportunity came to join the same department as a digitalisation responsible, I applied, and was lucky enough to get the role. During the following 3 years, I worked in a scientific department sitting side by side with scientists and lab technicians. This was a great experience, because I learned about so many aspects of IT in Novo Nordisk, helping me understand the daily life of the scientists driving our drug development projects.

I have always found this environment very stimulating, and I’ve had many chances to improve my professional skills. After a while, I started functioning as a developer, and then I transitioned to being a product owner, before I fully moved from Global Drug Discovery to Digital Science and Innovation. And now, compared to where I was initially, I work on completely different digitalisation challenges, trying to come up with ways to improve data management and discoverability for all scientists in R&ED and building applications to improve our scientific target discovery.

Learning milestones

␥ Working in Histological Sciences in GDD and learning about the business processes in our drug development projects.
␥ Mastering how to use AWS and OmeroPlus in managing histological imaging data.
␥ Learning about agile IT-development. 
␥ Starting up a self-led team with the goal of improving the ways we work in non-clinical drug development projects. 
␥ Leading an IT development team as a Product Owner, setting development priorities, finding team-members, and ensuring the team delivers value to the business. 
␥ Being the first employee in the new Data Products area within R&ED, establishing a new area together with new managers and new colleagues. 

But not at the same time?

🕺 🏊 I love dancing and winter bathing, when I can find the time

Projects

Hang on, let me LogSeq that

One of the teams I'm leading builds web apps for all sorts of scientific challenges. Right now, I am super excited about a project where we are working on how to streamline the process of single-cell RNA sequencing data visualisation into an application called CellXGene. The team is doing this using a variety of tools such as Python, Docker, FastAPI, and JavaScript. I don't really code myself, but my role is also to keep the grand overview and ensure that the project progresses. That means working closely with Data Engineers, Cloud Engineers, Business Analysts, Scrum Masters, Scientists and Data Scientists. 

On the side, I also lead a fairly new team that is establishing processes for registering our data assets across the whole of R&ED. Here, we'll also work with cloud technologies such as AWS, Azure, and Power BI. My own primary tools are MS Teams, Azure DevOps, emails, and a lot of notes, all in perhaps my favorite software called LogSeq!