Tero Pänttönen has a long career in insurance and has worked in a variety of roles over the years. He started at Nextcon in May as a Product Owner in Agile Development.

We interviewed Tero and asked him about his career, his expectations of his new job and what motivates him at work. 

From vehicle insurance to digital development

– My main career has been in the insurance industry, working in motor insurance for several different companies. I have been involved in product and term development, pricing, training, vehicle accident investigation, claims partnerships and also as a team leader, Tero says.

Over the years, Tero has been involved in insurance industry cooperation groups and has also acted as a registration officer.

Tero has been working with digital development since 2015, when he joined Fennia’s digital services as a development manager.

– In addition to my work as Development Manager, I was responsible for Fennia’s digital customer experience for personal customers. Even before that, I had already been a project manager in another company in a project on digital claim forms, where, among other things, mobile-optimised forms were already created in 2011.

An interest in online commerce led to agile development in the cross-functional DevOps team.

Tero says he has always been interested in online commerce and that’s how he got involved with the great cross-functional DevOps team at Fennia.

– The team developed single-page applications for buying insurance using highly agile and fast methods. All the essential roles were in the same room working, from designer to test automation developers, Product owner to Business owner, SRE to scrum master. Great things were achieved with the team and the buying flows, the efficiency of digital marketing and of course the sales results improved nicely. This was of course all done in collaboration with, among others, content production, digital marketing and product managers.

Customer projects, modelling and agile development

After Fennia, Tero moved to Eficode in a versatile role.

– After Fennia, I worked at Eficode, where, in addition to a few customer projects, I worked with my colleagues on a model that describes the entire digital development cycle, from identifying customer needs to how to measure and operate a live service and how to extract new development ideas from it. I was also involved in making the transformation from ad hoc development for large organisations through Lean and Agile to how a large organisation can operate like a Lean startup.

Improving the employee experience is more relevant than business objectives.

– In my work, I am motivated by delivering results and making life easier for the end user, in practice improving the customer experience.

Tero says that improving the employee experience is more important than meeting business objectives.

– When people are happy to be in a team, the conditions for doing their work improve all the time. All in all, I’m driven by the general improvement of things in all areas at the same time.

“Now we are clearly at the beginning of something new and wonderful.”

Tero is looking forward to meeting new colleagues, using his own skills, learning new things and growing together at Nextcon.

– I look forward to using my extensive and mainly business background to develop digital services for the benefit of Nextcon’s customers. The projects will also increase my own technical understanding and thus give me more knowledge capital for myself.

– Of course, I look forward to meeting new colleagues and learning from them. I also look forward to seeing how Nextcon develops over the next few years, as it is clearly the start of something new and wonderful. It’s great to be part of writing and making that journey!