Scaling Sustainable Innovation through Team Autonomy by Tom Stoepker

A commonly sought after and discussed competitive edge in the tech industry is the ability to maintain innovation velocity. Terms like “agile” and “fail fast” are used to support efforts to implement and adopt cutting edge solutions at all costs to maintain a competitive advantage and disrupt competition. And while this approach to conducting business in the 21st tech industry is undoubtedly a valuable aspect to consider, concepts and practices around how to do this sustainably and at scale are often overshadowed by the hype. This presentation focuses on how this balance is struck at one of the EU’s premier internet marketplaces, bol.com. As a tech company that pre dates Facebook and Twitter and has since grown into a platform that has over 10 million customers tapping and clicking 5000 times a second shopping for items over a wide range of product categories - bol.com has maintained an innovative competitive edge while reliably serving its customer base all while growing it’s Engineering and IT department. This presentation covers ways of working that fuel a core tenant of the operational model that has powered this growth – Team Autonomy. The presentation will not only discuss high level strategic concepts, but also include demos, design concepts and tooling that enable this mode of work including: Micro Service Design Patterns with Kubernetes CI/CD tooling and approaches Tuning systems for performance and cost effectiveness Tom Stoepker is a software developer originally from the United States now currently working and living in the Netherlands. He has 10 years of professional experience writing and shipping code with a myriad of tech stacks across a wide range of industries, but as of late his focus has been on working with cloud based systems. In addition to a genuine passion for working on software, Tom has gained an appreciation and awareness of the challenges that arise while aligning engineering culture and business objectives - and has spent the latter part of his career facilitating pragmatic innovation that blends the two. Outside of writing code, Tom writes music and is working on speaking Dutch a little less horrible than he does now.