In this episode of Smooth Scaling, José Quaresma sits down with Art Huggard, former VP of E-Commerce at Build-A-Bear, who transformed the company's online presence from a crashing website to a $70 million business over eight years. Art shares his unconventional path from chemical engineering to e-commerce leadership at Bass Pro Shops, Hudson's Bay, and Build-A-Bear. He reveals how the company went from website crashes every hour during the 2016 holiday season to successfully managing viral product launches like Baby Yoda that sold out in four hours. Art discusses Queue-it's virtual waiting room for handling extreme traffic spikes, real-time system tuning during flash sales, and the importance of balancing technical infrastructure with guest experience. The conversation covers cloud scalability challenges, order management bottlenecks in Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and what it takes to handle 300+ orders per minute. The episode illustrates how preparation and cross-industry lessons can turn unpredictable demand into business success.

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• (00:00) - Welcome to the Smooth Scaling Podcast

Art Huggard is a leading expert in Digital Commerce. He has helped many well known brands such as Build-A-Bear, Bass Pro Shops, Tracker Boats, Hudson Bay and others move from chaos to High Growth. He has a keen understanding of the entire customer ecosystem including Web, Order Management, CRM, Loyalty and Digital Marketing. Known for building high performance teams Art has been an excellent mentor to many at the companies where he has worked. Most recently Art has formed Gateway-Commerce (www.gateway-commerce.com) where he provides fractional consulting to companies looking to make significant improvements to how they serve their guests. 

This podcast is hosted by José Quaresma, researched by Joseph Thwaites and produced by Perseu Mandillo. © Queue-it, 2026

In this episode of Smooth Scaling, José Quaresma talks with Ryan Sherlock, Director of Engineering at Intercom, about the realities of scaling databases in a fast-growing SaaS product. Ryan shares Intercom’s journey from a single MySQL database through Aurora, proxies, and per-customer scaling patterns—and what eventually pushed the team toward PlanetScale. The conversation also explores Intercom’s heartbeat-based approach to incident detection and response, focusing on customer impact rather than infrastructure metrics.

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• (00:00) - Intro and episode overview

This podcast is hosted by José Quaresma, researched by Joseph Thwaites and produced by Perseu Mandillo. 

© Queue-it, 2026

Infrastructure is often treated as a backend concern, but in practice it shapes how users experience a product. In this episode of Smooth Scaling, Product VP Maria Petrova explores what it means when infrastructure becomes the product, looking at real-world, data-heavy systems where decisions around compute, data resolution, scheduling, regions, and cost directly impact scalability and user experience. The conversation dives into scaling beyond the MVP, balancing accuracy with performance, and why both engineers and product managers need to think carefully about infrastructure trade-offs when operating at scale.

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• (00:00) - Welcome to the Smooth Scaling Podcast

This podcast is hosted by José Quaresma, researched by Joseph Thwaites and produced by Perseu Mandillo. 

© Queue-it, 2025

In this episode, Moji Sarooghi, Distinguished Product Architect at Queue-it, breaks down the design principles and distributed systems behind Queue-it’s virtual waiting room. He explains how the team handles massive traffic spikes, upholds strict first-in, first-out fairness on request, and maintains reliability at a scale that would overwhelm most platforms. Moji also covers the shift from server-side integrations to Edge compute, how Safety Net protects against unexpected peaks, and why simplicity and failure-oriented design drive every architectural choice. A clear, technical exploration of scaling responsibly when millions depend on your system.

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• (00:00) - Intro

This podcast is hosted by José Quaresma, researched by Joseph Thwaites and produced by Perseu Mandillo. 

© Queue-it, 2025

In this episode, Angela Timofte, former VP of Global Engineering at Trustpilot, shares the decade-long journey of evolving Trustpilot’s architecture from a monolith to an event-driven, serverless-first platform. She reflects on the technical and organizational shifts that made it possible—from early trade-offs and nano-services to guardrails, templating, and chaos engineering. Angela also discusses the role of AI in engineering productivity, why staying small matters, and what scalability really means across tech, teams, and leadership. A thoughtful, candid look at modernizing systems for long-term resilience.

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• (00:00) - Welcome & Episode Introduction

This podcast is hosted by José Quaresma, researched by Joseph Thwaites and produced by Perseu Mandillo. 

© Queue-it, 2025

In this episode, Gabor Sivók, Cloud Security Architect at Queue-it, shares a practical look at what it takes to secure large-scale systems in today’s cloud environments. He walks through Queue-it’s journey to ISO 27001 certification, the real trade-offs between security and performance, and how security practices adapt in multi-cloud setups. Gabor also weighs in on the growing role of AI in security operations—and why the best security work often stays invisible. A grounded conversation for anyone working at the intersection of reliability, scalability, and security.

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• (00:00) - Intro & welcome to the Smooth Scaling Podcast

This podcast is hosted by José Quaresma, researched by Joseph Thwaites and produced by Perseu Mandillo. 

© Queue-it, 2025

In this episode, Sezin Cagil, Head of Unified Commerce Technology at Dr. Martens and MACH Alliance ambassador, shares hard-won insights on implementing and scaling MACH architecture in real-world environments. She explores how to approach modular migrations, manage complex vendor ecosystems, and prepare systems for high-traffic events. Beyond the tech, Sezin highlights the importance of team readiness, operational maturity, and aligning architecture with business needs. A must-listen for anyone navigating composable commerce or modern retail infrastructure.

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• (00:00) - Intro Intro & What MACH Really Means

This podcast is hosted by José Quaresma, researched by Joseph Thwaites and produced by Perseu Mandillo. 

© Queue-it, 2025

In this episode of the Smooth Scaling Podcast, Ilia Bromberg (Akamai) and Martin Larsen (Queue-it) explore the evolution of bots, the growing complexity of detecting them, and the real-world impact on hype events like product drops and ticket sales. They introduce Hype Event Protection, a new joint solution from Queue-it and Akamai, designed to level the playing field for genuine users. The discussion covers technical approaches to bot mitigation, performance optimization, and the importance of layered defenses for high-demand online events.

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• (00:00) - Welcome & Guest Introductions

Martin Larsen is a Distinguished Product Architect at Queue-it. Starting as a software developer, Martin was one of the company’s first employees. He played an instrumental role in building the foundations of Queue-it and is heavily involved in activities including the design, architecture, testing, and deployment of the virtual waiting room, as well as defining and executing on product vision. This podcast is hosted by José Quaresma, researched by Joseph Thwaites and produced by Perseu Mandillo. 

© Queue-it, 2025

In this episode, Johannes Boumans, Engineering Manager in Zalando’s SRE team, shares how Lounge by Zalando handles daily surges of up to 200,000 requests per second. He discusses the shift from monoliths to microservices, the “you build it, you run it” model, SRE champions, and the trade-offs behind reliability, fairness, and cost. From bot defense to chaos engineering, it’s a deep dive into scaling one of Europe’s largest e-commerce platforms.

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Johannes Boumans is an Engineering Manager in the SRE organization at Zalando, where he leads reliability efforts for Zalando Lounge, the company’s off-price shopping destination. Over nearly 10 years at Zalando, Johannes has grown from product support into SRE leadership, where he now supports 25 engineering teams in building resilient, fair, and scalable systems. Johannes is passionate about the “you build it, you run it” philosophy and champions practices like chaos engineering, predictive scaling, and bot defense to keep systems reliable.

This podcast is hosted by José Quaresma, researched by Joseph Thwaites and produced by Perseu Mandillo.

00:00 – Intro
01:28 – Zalando: Europe's leading fashion destination
02:42 – The company’s rapid tech evolution since 2008
03:41 – From one team to 25: Johannes’ journey
05:48 – How the SRE champions model works
08:00 – What reliability really means at Zalando
09:27 – From monolith to full DevOps accountability
11:32 – What makes Lounge by Zalando unique
12:50 – Dealing with massive daily traffic spikes
14:05 – Predictive scaling and real-time cost control
17:15 – First-come, first-served: fairness at scale
22:11 – Solving the challenges of limited inventory
25:09 – Combating bots with layered protections
27:12 – Trade-offs: performance vs. experience
29:38 – Why Lounge doesn’t have a search function
31:17 – Advice for engineering managers facing traffic surges
34:25 – Chaos testing in production—including turning off zones
35:53 – Scaling advice for daily vs. seasonal peaks
37:55 – Evaluating virtual waiting rooms for fairness
39:30 – Book & mindset recommendations for engineers
41:43 – Scalability is… balance, cost, and confidence

© Queue-it, 2025 

In this episode of Smooth Scaling, Jillian Als, CMO at Queue-it, unpacks The Age of Online Trust report. She explores why reliability is the license to operate, how trust is earned in drops but lost in buckets, and what 1,000 consumers revealed about their expectations for fairness, transparency, and resilient digital experiences. For technical leaders, the findings confirm that every percentage point of uptime and performance directly impacts trust, loyalty, and long-term business growth.

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Jillian Als is Chief Marketing Officer at Queue-it, where she leads global marketing efforts to help businesses earn and protect online trust for billions of digital visitors each year. With 15+ years in B2B SaaS marketing, she’s known for her expertise in go-to-market strategy, demand generation, and brand development, as well as her passion for building happy, high-performing teams. A frequent speaker at industry podcasts and events like SaaSiest2025 and Funnel Vision, Jillian brings a deep understanding of consumer behavior and the link between digital performance, transparency, and loyalty.

This podcast is hosted by José Quaresma, researched by Joseph Thwaites and produced by Perseu Mandillo.

• (00:00) - Intro: Trust, Scale & a Special Guest