From Frontend Engineer to Product Owner: Barbara Sikora (UNIQA Insurance Group AG) on migration, cross-team alignment, and customer focus

Why this DevStory stands out

Watching “Barbara Sikora, Product Owner bei UNIQA,” with speaker Barbara Sikora from UNIQA Insurance Group AG, we were struck by how grounded and transferable her journey is. It’s not just a shift from coding to product. It’s a story about how technical depth, team culture, and relentless customer focus combine when a digital product modernizes technologically and scales organizationally.

Her path started with a school project—a simple travel blog—moved through an interdisciplinary degree, led to an external frontend role on the “mein UNIQA” product, then to an internal position as Lead Frontend Engineer in 2019, and eventually to Product Owner during a major migration. The throughline is clear: real products, real teams, real change. The technological pivot culminated in 2023 with a full migration from AngularJS to a modern stack of Angular, Ionic, and Cypress. And the Product Owner role, for her, means communicating effectively, prioritizing jointly with the business, and never losing sight of what truly benefits the customer.

The first spark: a travel blog that made things real

Barbara’s starting point is practical, almost humble: a school assignment that turned into a working website.

What hooked her wasn’t prestige but interaction. Someone clicks; something happens. For many developers, this visceral feedback loop—seeing users respond to what you build—becomes the engine for deeper learning and long-term commitment. That early “aha” moment echoes throughout her later decisions.

Breadth as a strategy: the value of interdisciplinary studies

At university (FH Hagenberg), Barbara deliberately chose breadth over early specialization: film, photography, and programming in multiple languages. The intent was to try things and keep what proved useful later.

From our DevJobs.at perspective, this pattern recurs among strong product and engineering leaders: wide-ranging experiences help you speak multiple “languages” on a team—design sensibilities, process awareness, and the technical underpinnings to hold your own in engineering conversations. For Barbara, this breadth prepared her to bridge perspectives as a Product Owner without losing technical footing.

Practice over theory: entering UNIQA as an external frontend engineer

Barbara’s first contact with UNIQA came through the “mein UNIQA” project within Team Digital. As an external frontend engineer, she became hands-on with a real product.

What stood out for her wasn’t just technology but the team culture.

That triad—appreciation, support, and agency—explains why she later moved in-house. In our experience, this is the soil in which people take ownership, push for quality, and drive change that lasts.

2019 internal move: Lead Frontend with a mandate for quality

In 2019, Barbara joined internally and took on broader responsibilities: process optimization, improving frontend quality, and finding and fixing friction points. The baseline was challenging: AngularJS, wrapped in an additional framework that constrained developers.

We’ve seen this pattern in many mature products. Legacy stacks once served well but later set the pace and define constraints—until someone pushes for change. Barbara’s focus on quality and process paved the way for a migration that would be technical, yes, but equally organizational.

The technological pivot: Angular, Ionic, and Cypress replace AngularJS

Together with the team, she helped drive modernization. The result: by 2023, the migration was done. Today the frontend runs on Angular, incorporates Ionic, and uses Cypress for testing.

Two aspects make this moment stand out to us:

• Migration is never “just code.” It is systemic change—technology, processes, responsibilities, cadences. That Barbara helped initiate it from a Lead Frontend role shows how technical and organizational work are intertwined.
• The target stack is modern but pragmatic: Angular as the framework, Ionic to unify UI/UX across platforms, and Cypress to standardize testing. This isn’t shiny tech for its own sake; it’s a clear focus on maintainability and verifiability.

A shift in vantage point: taking the Product Owner role mid-migration

During the migration, Barbara had the opportunity to become the Product Owner—continuing to push the work forward from a different angle.

She chose to stay because the project and team mattered to her. With the role change, her day-to-day shifted markedly:

• Communication became the primary tool
• Structuring and conveying information to the right audience
• Acting as a bridge between the development team and the business
• Prioritizing together with stakeholders while keeping the customer front and center

That line is the anchor. Product Ownership is about distilling complexity into decisions that deliver value for users—without losing sight of technical realities. Her engineering background, here, is more than a credential; it’s a means to run better conversations and decide more realistically.

Scaling requires alignment: six cross-functional teams, one product

As the product grew, coordination became a high-stakes task. Barbara emphasized the importance of aligning across teams and especially across Product Owners.

From a customer’s vantage point, a product must feel seamless. Internally, that makes synchronization a core responsibility—strategic alignment across POs, awareness of dependencies, and shared priorities that produce a coherent experience. It’s the difference between a collection of features and a cohesive product.

How ideas become releases: end-to-end from research to deployment

We appreciated how concretely Barbara mapped the lifecycle of a feature. It’s not buzzwords; it’s a series of well-defined checkpoints:

1. Customer research: A dedicated team investigates what customers want and which problem is actually being solved.
2. Concept phase: POs and developers design only technically feasible solutions—ideally preventing surprises later.
3. Prototyping: Building and testing a prototype acts as a reality check before full implementation.
4. Development and deployment: Only after concept validation do teams implement and ship.

Her technical background pays off especially early—in making feasibility an integral part of concept work and articulating that clearly to the business side.

External vs. internal: learning paths and motivation

Barbara offered a balanced take on external versus internal roles.

At some point, though, she wanted something else:

We read this as a compass: Variety versus ownership, breadth versus depth. Both are valid; the key is matching your career phase and motivation. If you want long-term product impact, an internal role—when culture and team are right—can offer the stage you need.

Skillsets contrasted: Product Owner vs. Frontend Engineer

Barbara drew a sharp line between the two roles. Frontend engineering focuses on writing efficient, reusable code. Product Ownership emphasizes conveying information so it lands with the audience—business stakeholders, developers, or end customers. That requires empathy: stepping into the other person’s shoes and translating between perspectives.

From our vantage point, the role change isn’t a retreat from technology; it’s an expansion of scope. Code becomes the team’s primary domain, while the Product Owner creates the conditions for great code to matter—clear priorities, stable interfaces, realistic targets. Technical background reduces misunderstandings, surfaces dependencies earlier, and produces more pragmatic concepts.

What we took away as an editorial team

From “Barbara Sikora, Product Owner bei UNIQA,” we distilled several practical insights for developers and aspiring Product Owners:

• Try early, learn broadly: The school travel blog and the interdisciplinary degree weren’t detours; they were building blocks of a mindset. Breadth produces perspective—a big advantage, especially in product roles.
• Culture over stack: The internal move happened because of appreciation, support, and the ability to influence. These conditions make migrations and quality initiatives possible in the first place.
• Migration is organizational work: Moving from AngularJS to Angular, Ionic, and Cypress isn’t just a technical step. It calls for prioritization, coordination, and communication—core Product Owner skills.
• Customer value as a north star: “What truly benefits the customer?” anchors Barbara’s decisions. It guards against tech for tech’s sake and grounds prioritization.
• PO synchronization at scale: With six cross-functional teams, alignment is a central task. On the PO layer, individual streams become a coherent customer experience.
• External or internal? Both are right—depending on your motivation. Variety and rapid learning versus ownership and long-term product impact.

Practical prompts for day-to-day team work

Translating Barbara’s talk into action, here are practices we’d bring to any team:

• Feasibility first in concept: Pull developers into concept work early. It’s the simplest way to save time, money, and frustration.
• Testing as cadence, not afterthought: Embrace tools like Cypress to standardize feedback and reduce regressions. The tool matters less than the commitment to testing.
• Treat the PO as a translator: It’s not about forwarding tickets. It’s about translating from problem to solution, from customer desire to implementable scope, and back.
• Make customer focus explicit: Even without heavy metrics, ask of each backlog item: Which customer problem does this solve? How will we see evidence in reviews?
• Maintain cross-functional clarity: With six teams on one product, responsibility and interfaces must be explicit—plus regular alignment among POs.

Quotes we’ll remember

Several lines from Barbara’s session crystallize her approach:

Conclusion: A career defined by impact, not titles

The lasting impression from our time with Barbara Sikora of UNIQA Insurance Group AG is that titles shift, but impact compounds. Her journey from frontend engineering to Product Owner wasn’t a hop between unrelated jobs; it was a deliberate widening of responsibility—from code quality and process improvement to prioritization, communication, and customer value. The technology migration—away from AngularJS to Angular, Ionic, and Cypress—served both as catalyst and proving ground.

For anyone navigating between engineering and product, the signal is clear: Broad skills aren’t a luxury. They are the foundation for handling migrations, scaling teams, and crafting products that feel “whole” to customers. Or, to echo Barbara’s stance: Figure out what’s needed—and take responsibility for making it happen.

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