Bixter Interview — Azadeh Sabouri

Lead Digital Product Owner · print-ready interview reference

Lead Digital Product Owner · Bixter

AZADEH SABOURI — INTERVIEW REFERENCE

Universal Robots · 10 years

Business · Customer · Technology

Core Message

At my core, I work at the intersection of business, customers and technology. I identify opportunities where digital products can create value for both the customer and the business, and I turn those opportunities into concrete solutions and products.

What I think is particularly relevant for Bixter is that I have been through this kind of digitalisation journey before. At Universal Robots, I was part of the journey from identifying customer and business needs, exploring and prioritising opportunities, defining what was worth building, working with technical teams to turn it into products, and then measuring the impact.

The digitalisation was not just about individual products. It had to work across a complex ecosystem of customers, partners, services, education and internal teams, often with different needs and incentives. So I am used to looking at the whole ecosystem and deciding where digital intervention can create the most value, rather than solving one isolated problem.

Over the last five years, I have had both a strategic role across the customer lifecycle and end-to-end ownership of a digital platform, so I have worked both at the strategic level and very hands-on with execution.

And I think that combination is what I can bring to Bixter as you scale: understanding the business ambition, translating it into the right digital priorities and products, and making sure you invest in solutions that actually create business and customer value.

The Journey
1Understand
2Identify
3Explore
4Prioritise
5Define
6Build
7Launch
8Measure
9Adapt
5 Stories to Use
Building / ownership→ Polaris
Customer experience / measurable impact→ myUR
Digital product / efficiency→ UR Studio
Customer acquisition / self-service→ Automation Guide
Strategy / ecosystem / innovation→ Customer lifecycle + UR digitalisation journey

"I can help translate Bixter's ambition into the right digital priorities and make sure the company invests in solutions that create real customer and business value."

Product Development & Digitalisation Experience · 2016 → 2026Two complementary capabilities: building digital products and using intelligence to decide what to build
01Design & Customer Understanding
Robot Software · 2016
Customer workflows → UX → technology → solutions
02Turning Needs into Digital Solutions
myUR · 2018
Customer & business needs → opportunities → concepts → MVP → implementation
03Building a Digital Capability
Polaris · 2021
Business problem → vision → product → roadmap → development → adoption → scale
Built and owned the digital platform end-to-end.
04Using Intelligence to Drive Product & Strategy
Customer Lifecycle · 2021 → 2026
Customer evidence → opportunities → prioritisation → product decisions → strategy → measurable outcomes
Used data and insights to influence what the organisation built and where it invested.
05What This Means for Bixter
Lead Digital Product Owner · 2026
Understand the ambition → identify the right opportunities → prioritise → define the right solution → align technical and commercial teams → deliver → measure → adapt
10+ yearsdeveloping digital products
500+ usersPolaris, built from concept to launch
Roadmap · Backlog · Deliveryowned end-to-end
4 productsRobot Software, myUR, Polaris & UR Studio
80%customer interactions digitalised via myUR
3.4 → 4.7CSAT improvement
3×faster time-to-insight with Polaris
Strategy + executionoperated at both levels last 5 years
Bringing to Bixter
Turn business ambition into digital growth

Translate Bixter's growth strategy into clear digital priorities, products and investments.

Decide what is worth building

Identify opportunities, challenge existing solutions and prioritise initiatives based on customer value, business impact, strategic fit and feasibility.

Build the right products, not just more products

Define MVP scope, protect it from unnecessary complexity and create a roadmap that evolves with the business.

Bridge business and technology

Turn complex business needs into clear product direction and align internal developers and external technology partners around the right outcomes.

Create measurable value

Define the right KPIs and feedback loops to understand whether digital products improve customer experience, operational efficiency and business performance.

Build for scale

Bring experience from Universal Robots where I helped drive digitalisation across the customer lifecycle, including 80% digitalisation of customer interaction and scaling Polaris from 10 → 500+ users.

My role is to help Bixter decide where digitalisation, AI and automation can create the most leverage for growth, and then turn those opportunities into products that actually deliver value.

Over the last ten years, my responsibility has grown from designing product features to leading the execution of complete products. What I bring to Bixter is that combination — strategic understanding of the business and hands-on ownership of delivery.

Tell us about yourself
  • ·Intersection of business, customers and technology
  • ·Identify opportunities → turn into digital products
  • ·UR digitalisation journey — 10 years, last 5 most relevant
  • ·Strategic role + hands-on end-to-end ownership
  • ·Bring this experience to Bixter as it scales
myUR, UR Studio, Automation Guide, Polaris — full UR digitalisation journey
Why Bixter?
  • ·Growth phase — digitalisation is important for scaling
  • ·New role means real opportunity to have influence
  • ·Want to sit close to business decisions and take ownership
  • ·Similar journey to what I experienced at UR
Joined UR during a growth phase and experienced the transformation first-hand
Why are you a good fit?
  • ·I have been through this journey before
  • ·Understand B2B2C / complex ecosystems
  • ·Commercial + customer + technology perspective
  • ·Can bridge business and technical teams
  • ·Comfortable with ambiguity and growth
  • ·Both strategic and hands-on experience
UR ecosystem — customers, partners, Academy, commercial org, R&D and product teams
How would you help Bixter grow?
  • ·Understand business ambition first
  • ·Identify where digital can create leverage
  • ·Prioritise opportunities based on value
  • ·Build the right solutions, not simply more solutions
  • ·Create a coherent roadmap
  • ·Measure whether investment creates real value
UR customer lifecycle → identified opportunities → incorporated into strategy → measured impact
How do you prioritise?
  • ·Start with the business problem
  • ·Customer value + business value
  • ·Strategic importance
  • ·Feasibility / technical complexity
  • ·Cost vs potential impact
  • ·What needs to happen now vs later
Worked across UR customer lifecycle to identify which opportunities were worth turning into digital solutions
How do you define an MVP?
  • ·Smallest solution that can test the important assumption and create enough value to learn
  • ·Avoid building unnecessary complexity
  • ·Get something usable into hands of users fast
  • ·Learn → measure → improve
Digital products at UR developed incrementally with customer feedback and measurement
How do you work with developers?
  • ·Lead and align internal developers and external partners around the problem, priorities, scope and outcome without micromanaging the technical solution
  • ·I don't need to tell technical people how to build
  • ·Make sure they understand what problem we are solving and why
  • ·Clarify priorities, scope and desired outcome
  • ·Protect the team from unnecessary complexity
  • ·Make decisions when trade-offs are needed
Worked closely with heavy R&D at UR, translating customer/business needs into focused solutions
How do you work with external partners?
  • ·Lead and align internal developers and external partners around the problem, priorities, scope and outcome without micromanaging the technical solution
  • ·Clear outcome and priorities from the start
  • ·Understand enough technically to challenge and guide
  • ·Keep ownership internally
  • ·Make sure external teams solve the right problem
  • ·Maintain alignment between commercial needs and technical execution
UR ecosystem with external partners + R&D + product + commercial teams
How would you build a roadmap?
  • ·Start from business strategy and customer needs
  • ·Identify and prioritise opportunities
  • ·Connect initiatives into a coherent direction
  • ·Define outcomes and KPIs
  • ·Keep roadmap adaptable as conditions change
Strategic customer-lifecycle role at UR, connecting opportunities to strategy and product development
How do you measure success?
  • ·Business outcome — growth, efficiency, conversion
  • ·Customer experience — satisfaction, NPS, CSAT
  • ·Adoption / usage — active users, engagement
  • ·Feedback and behavioural data
myUR: ~80% customer interactions digitalised, CSAT 3.4→4.7 · UR Studio: reduced consulting time · Polaris: 10→500+ users
What have you actually done as a Product Owner?
  • ·Two sides to my experience
  • ·1. Built and owned a digital product myself — Polaris, end-to-end
  • ·2. Used customer, market and business intelligence to influence what products and solutions the company should develop
  • ·I understand both how to build the product and how to decide what is worth building in the first place
"There are actually two sides to my experience. One is that I have built and owned a digital product myself, Polaris, end-to-end. The other is that I have spent years using customer, market and business intelligence to influence what products and solutions the company should develop. So I understand both how to build the product and how to decide what is worth building in the first place."
Tell us about something you built — Polaris
  • ·Identified internal business problem — fragmented knowledge
  • ·Built capability and digital product end-to-end
  • ·Created systematic customer intelligence
  • ·Connected insights to decision-making
  • ·Scaled from 10 to 500+ active users in one year
"I didn't just recommend a solution. I identified the problem, built the capability and owned the product."
Give an example of customer impact — myUR
  • ·Customer interaction was fragmented across channels
  • ·Identified opportunity for digital self-service
  • ·Worked through discovery, design, product development
  • ·Digitalised ~80% of customer interaction
  • ·Customer satisfaction improved from 3.4 → 4.7
myUR customer and partner portal — measurable business and customer impact
Give an example of business impact — UR Studio
  • ·Identified opportunity to reduce friction around robot deployment
  • ·Digital simulation solution for customers and partners
  • ·Reduced consulting time significantly
  • ·Made customers more self-sufficient before purchase
UR Studio — efficiency and digital self-service for the sales and onboarding journey
How do you deal with AI?
  • ·Start with the problem, not the technology
  • ·Identify where AI can create meaningful leverage
  • ·Evaluate business and customer value
  • ·Test feasibility before committing
  • ·Build into the product where it makes sense
  • ·Measure the outcome
AI-enabled Polaris — developed AI business cases and quantified potential business outcomes
How do you handle change / ambiguity?
  • ·Comfortable working where the answer isn't already defined
  • ·Break ambiguity into problems and opportunities
  • ·Make decisions based on evidence
  • ·Build, learn and adapt
  • ·Keep strategy connected to execution
UR's transformation over 10 years — last 5 years operating across strategy and execution
What is your commercial mindset?
  • ·Customer value and business value have to work together
  • ·Customer experience is not separate from commercial results
  • ·Connect experience to revenue, retention and growth
Customer lifecycle work at UR — connecting experience, business needs and product development
What would you do in your first months?
  • ·1. Understand business ambition and growth strategy
  • ·2. Understand customer and ecosystem
  • ·3. Understand current digital products and capabilities
  • ·4. Understand what is already being built
  • ·5. Identify gaps, duplication and opportunities
  • ·6. Identify highest-leverage digital opportunities
  • ·7. Prioritise against business value, customer value and feasibility
  • ·8. Establish coherent roadmap and measurable outcomes
"First understand what is already working and where the biggest leverage points are — before proposing what we should build."
What do you need from us to succeed?
  • ·Clear strategic direction
  • ·Access to decision-makers
  • ·Ownership and mandate
  • ·Ability to challenge existing solutions
  • ·Close collaboration with commercial and technical teams
These are conditions for accountability, not demands.
If you joined us, where would you start?
  • ·I would not start by proposing a new product
  • ·First understand where Bixter wants to grow
  • ·Understand where the current business is constrained
  • ·Understand what digital capabilities already exist
  • ·Understand what is already being developed
  • ·Then identify where digitalisation, automation or AI could create the biggest leverage
  • ·Turn that into a prioritised product roadmap
"I would not start by proposing a new product. I would first understand where Bixter wants to grow, where the current business is constrained, what digital capabilities already exist, and what is already being developed. Then I would identify where digitalisation, automation or AI could create the biggest leverage and turn that into a prioritised product roadmap."
We have a lot of ideas. How would you decide what we should actually build?
  • ·Problem → business opportunity → customer value → strategic fit → feasibility → effort → learning → measurable outcome
  • ·Prioritise against customer and business value
  • ·Consider feasibility, effort and time to value
  • ·Be very comfortable saying no
  • ·Limited capacity should be spent on what matters most
"I would also be very comfortable saying no. A Product Owner isn't successful because the team builds many things. They are successful because the team spends its limited capacity on the things that matter most."
Lead Digital Product Owner · Bixter

POSITIONING & STRATEGIC FRAMING

For CEO + COO interview
MY POSITIONING IN THE ROOM
·I am not positioning myself as a mid-level Product Owner who is mainly there to manage a backlog.
·I want them to see me as someone who can sit at the leadership table and help translate business ambition into the right digital priorities, products and investments.
·My value is at the intersection of business + customers + technology.
·I can help decide what to build, why to build it, what NOT to build, how to turn it into an MVP, and how to measure whether it created value.
·I have already been through a similar digitalisation journey at Universal Robots.
·I can bring experience from a company that went through significant growth and digitalisation, while understanding that Bixter has its own business and industry context.

Think: "strategic product partner who can execute", not "backlog manager".

WHY MY EXPERIENCE IS PARTICULARLY RELEVANT

My experience is relevant not because Universal Robots and Bixter are the same industry, but because I have already experienced the type of transformation Bixter is now going through:

Growth → increasing complexity → digitalisation → multiple stakeholders → technology investment → need for prioritisation → scalable digital products → measurable business impact

·I joined Universal Robots during a growth phase.
·I was part of the digitalisation of customer and partner interactions.
·I identified needs and opportunities.
·I explored and evaluated different solutions.
·I helped determine what was worth building.
·I worked with technical teams to turn ideas into products.
·I owned Polaris end-to-end.
·I worked strategically across the customer lifecycle.
·I used customer feedback, research, market insights, data and measurement to guide decisions.
·Several digital initiatives ultimately became part of the company's customer and product ecosystem.

The strongest message: I have already lived through this journey, not just studied it.

BIXTER'S COMPLEX ECOSYSTEM

Remember that Bixter is not simply a company building a product for one type of user. The ecosystem includes:

Bixter → commercial organisation → customers/employers → recruited workers → academy/education → partners → external technology teams → internal teams

·Used to designing for multiple customer and user groups.
·Worked across customers, partners, commercial teams, education/training and technical teams.
·Understand that different stakeholders have different needs, incentives and levels of technical knowledge.
·Comfortable finding solutions that work across the ecosystem rather than optimising for one user group.
·Comfortable working internationally across different cultures.

Do not just say "I have customer experience". Say: "I understand complex ecosystems with different stakeholders and competing needs."

COMMERCIAL PRODUCT MINDSET
For me, commercial product thinking is not only:

“Does the customer like this?”

It is also:

“Is this the right place for Bixter to invest its limited resources?”

Customer value
Business value
Strategic fit
Growth potential
Operational scalability
Feasibility
Cost and effort
Risk
Time to value
Measurable outcome

A Product Owner is not successful because the team builds many things. They are successful because limited capacity is spent on the things that matter most.

Lead Digital Product Owner · Bixter

WHAT I BRING · LEADERSHIP · REMINDERS

For CEO + COO interview
WHAT I CAN BRING TO BIXTER
✓Translate business ambition into concrete digital priorities and products.
✓Identify where digitalisation, automation and AI can create the most business leverage.
✓Prioritise limited resources toward initiatives with the strongest customer and business value.
✓Define MVPs and protect them from unnecessary complexity.
✓Create a coherent product roadmap connected to business strategy and measurable outcomes.
✓Lead and align internal developers and external technical partners without micromanaging the technical solution.
✓Make sure technical teams are solving the right problem, with enough clarity to execute.
✓Challenge existing solutions and assumptions when they no longer serve the business or customer.
✓Establish KPIs and measurement so we know whether digital investments actually create impact.
✓Connect customer experience, operational efficiency and commercial outcomes.
LEADERSHIP OF DEVELOPERS AND PARTNERS

My role is not to be the strongest technical person in the room. My role is to:

·Make sure the right problem is being solved.
·Give technical teams clear direction and context.
·Define the outcome and constraints.
·Clarify priorities.
·Define what is needed for the MVP.
·Protect the MVP from unnecessary complexity.
·Challenge scope when necessary.
·Give developers room to decide the technical solution.
·Align internal developers and external partners.
·Make sure everyone understands the business reason behind the work.
·Keep delivery connected to the intended business outcome.

“I don't need to be the strongest technical person in the room. I need to make sure the technical people are solving the right problem, understand why it matters, have enough clarity to execute, and are not spending time building unnecessary complexity.”

DO NOT FORGET
·I am interviewing for a Lead role.
·CEO + COO are in the room.
·Stay at strategic level first.
·Let them pull me into operational detail.
·Don't list frameworks unless they ask.
·Don't try to prove everything I know.
·Don't present myself as a technical expert.
·Present myself as the person who connects business ambition, customer needs and technology.
·Use Universal Robots as evidence that I have already done this type of transformation.
·Use Polaris as evidence of end-to-end ownership.
·Use myUR / UR Studio / Automation Guide as evidence of customer-facing digital product impact.
·Use the 80% digitalisation, measurable customer impact and other existing metrics as evidence, not as a list of achievements.
·Show that I understand the complexity of customers + partners + education + commercial teams + technical teams.
·Show that I can make decisions about where NOT to invest.
·Show that I can work with developers and external partners while keeping focus on business outcomes.
·Show that I can turn an ambitious growth strategy into concrete digital action.
·Don't go into the room trying to prove that I can do the job. Go in showing how I could help them grow the company.