Jonas Forshell

I am an experienced Product Owner who cares about how products actually work in practice. I work with the why, the roadmap, and the delivery details, but my way of working is quite practical: I like to build something functional before asking a team to commit serious engineering time.

My background is in the engine room of the business. I started in customer service, fraud, payments, and live operations before moving into product roles at King, Lendo, and Clearon. Working close to those processes taught me to notice the hidden friction that slows teams down.

I have worked across different markets, including time in Malta and the UK. That made me more realistic about how teams, systems, and companies actually work in practice.

Outside work, I keep things fairly simple: family, friends, books, TV series, travel when I can, and getting out on the bike. I like gravel cycling and bikepacking, although I do less of both than I would like. What I enjoy about bikepacking is the practical problem-solving. You have what you brought with you, and when something does not work, you have to find a sensible fix with what is available. That probably says something about how I work as well.

How I use AI

I use AI to make product ideas more concrete earlier. Sometimes that means a clickable prototype. Sometimes it is a rough workflow, a small interface change, a clearer handover, or just a better way to test whether an idea makes sense before it becomes backlog work.

I also build things on the side to practise and learn. Some of it becomes useful, some of it is just for learning, but it helps me pick up new skills, understand technical concepts better, test my own thinking, and notice the details that make something harder than it first looked.

This is not about replacing engineering. It is about reducing the translation work between an idea and something the team can react to. A vetted prototype, rough as it may be, lets the team feel the function early, spot logic gaps, and discuss edge cases against something real.

I have no ego about the prototype code. It can be deleted and rebuilt properly once the logic is proven. The value is in the learning you get before expensive work starts.

Operational empathy

I do not draw a hard line between external customers and internal colleagues. A product usually depends on a lot of work behind the screen, so I pay attention to the manual steps, unclear decisions, and repeated checks that quietly make the organisation slower.

That is the work I find most satisfying: a fraud investigation tool that reduces noise, a decision flow that helps support avoid unnecessary escalations, a batch process that removes repetitive clicks, or a calculator that makes shipping easier.

I care about what gets shipped, but I also care about how much friction has been removed from the system.

How I work

I usually start by looking at where reality is breaking down and what the smallest useful change might be. I prefer working with engineering and design early rather than arriving with a fixed answer.

I am comfortable enough in technical discussions to ask useful questions and understand constraints. I also know the limits of AI, including security risks and architectural debt. That helps me talk with developers without pretending that rough discovery code is the same as production code.

Because I click through functional prototypes, I often find the unhappy paths early: edge cases, missing states, and logic holes that would otherwise stop a sprint later.

I work closely with engineering, design, CRO, and marketing, and I think the best decisions usually come from open discussion rather than working in isolation. I care more about getting to a good outcome than about pushing my own view through.

What I work with

Delivery: backlog ownership, prioritisation, requirement shaping, roadmap alignment, cross-functional delivery
Discovery: AI-assisted prototyping, functional validation, edge-case mapping, handover packages
Flows: application journeys, consent flows, onboarding, payment and checkout logic, subscriptions
Systems: partner integrations, event-triggered journeys, compliance-sensitive flows, internal tools
Operations: fraud handling, support workflows, internal tooling, manual work reduction
Tools: Jira, Confluence, GitHub, Figma, Looker, Slack, VS Code, Claude Code

Professional history

Clearon AB - Product Owner (Digital Platform)

Sept 2025 - Feb 2026

Clearon is a Swedish payments and clearing company operating across retail, handling digital coupons, gift cards, and payment clearing for around 6,000 stores. I joined as Product Owner in an environment with one development team, several legacy systems, and a backlog largely driven from above.

During roughly five and a half months I led three major initiatives from definition to delivery: a new capability for campaign sendouts, a prepaid gift card subscription flow with balance checks against Visma, and a more flexible fulfilment model for digital value objects, first used for Triss lottery delivery but designed to support other code- or link-based products later. Part of the work included introducing consent handling for marketing and building out how campaigns could be sent based on user choices, including opt-out handling tied to campaign activity.

Alongside those deliveries, I also started early discovery work on how Clearon's main products could become a SaaS offering.

I also used AI in a practical way to shorten feedback loops and test ideas earlier. That included building a dashboard prototype package from backend API information as a faster frontend handover, creating an internal calculator for Customer Success to optimise physical gift-card shipments, and introducing early funnel and consent tracking around campaign sendouts.

Lendo AB - Product Owner (Business Loans & Insurance)

Aug 2023 - Mar 2025

Lendo is a loan broker operating in a regulated space where conversion and compliance have to coexist. My focus was the business loans and insurance vertical, where the user journey is long, the integrations are complex, and the stakes of a broken flow are high. Much of my work in this role was around improving customer flows without breaking compliance or underlying integrations.

I led three major initiatives: an integration with Monto.ai for open banking data, an accident insurance flow woven into the loan application, and a Focus API integration. I also transitioned the team from Scrum to Kanban, not as a philosophical stance, but because the work had shifted towards longer-running integrations where sprint cycles were creating more overhead than value.

I also worked closely with CRO around experiments and iterative improvements in the customer journey, and set up lightweight Slack-to-Jira automations that made it easier for the team to capture bugs and follow-up work.

King - Product Owner (Payments)

July 2018 - June 2022

King's payment platform sits underneath millions of microtransactions across global markets. I owned the platform through four years of provider integrations, compliance work, and internal tooling development.

The thing I am most proud of from that period is an internal fraud investigation tool I built in QlikView, put together when we had the underlying data but not the capacity for a full backoffice build. It let the team compare signals like username, email, IP address, registration date, and number of payment cards to spot suspicious patterns. It reduced fraud by roughly 40% and saved around 50 hours a month in support handling. Better tooling that quietly makes the whole organisation run better is the work I find most satisfying.

King - Product Owner & Operations Manager

June 2015 - July 2018, joined 2008

I joined King in 2008 and spent the first years moving through operational roles: payment support, tournament management, risk and fraud. By 2015 I was leading the product and live operations for royalgames.com, running a Scrum team that handled legal updates, technical improvements, and third-party integrations.

One of the things I am most proud of from that period was a decision-support tool for the support team: a simple yes-or-no workflow that helped first-line support decide whether a case really needed to be escalated for fraud review. It was shared as a clickable PDF, reduced handling time, lowered error rates sharply, and cut unnecessary escalations.

Another change that had a bigger effect than it first looked was how we processed withdrawals. After the normal safety checks, each withdrawal still had to be handled through repeated confirmation clicks. I changed that flow so approved withdrawals first landed in a batch list, which removed hundreds of repetitive clicks from the daily workflow while still allowing review before send.

Education and certifications

Atlassian Agile Project Management Professional Certificate - LinkedIn Learning / Atlassian (2025)

I took this in 2025 to sharpen the practical side of agile delivery in Jira: how work is structured, visualised, and kept moving without adding process for the sake of it.
Certified Product Owner (CSPO) - Crisp (2015)
Certified Scrum Master (CSM) - Crisp (2014)
Agile Project Management - IHM Business School (175/225 HVE credits completed)
Technology, User Behaviour, and Project Management - (75 credits)

I am open to conversations about product roles and practical product work. If this sounds relevant, feel free to reach out.