TechLab by Bol

Today we explore our product architecture. We have been talking with Jim van de Waal about product organizations. We spoke to our Agile at Scale friends about product organisations and Agile at Scale. Now it is time to talk about the foundation to build these on.

What this episode covers

We call this the product architecture.

We believe that a lot of companies are in the same transformation. Years ago we dealt with a 'monolith architecture'. We transformed this architecture in a 'microservices architecture'. And now it's time for the next logical step in evolution: the transition into a 'product architecture'. We discuss why it is needed and what it will solve. We asked our guests about the steps we took so far and the first pilots we are starting. Above all we wanted to know what we learnt so far. If you want to leave a reaction, go to Twitter @bol_com_Techlab, mail us at [email protected] or reach out to the hosts directly.

Guests

• Marcel van Leeuwen – Enterprise Architect and Agile Transformation Program Manager.
• Ronald Pulleman – Architect and software alchemist.
• Robert-Jan Ostermann – Architect, one of the masterminds crafting our product architecture.

Notes

• Product organizations
• Agile at Scale
• Product organisations
• Software Parade - Creating an overview of hundreds of (micro-) services.

Update 11th march 2021

This week started with the International Womens Day. #ChooseToChallenge #IWD2021

We wanted to start a new experiment so that's why we started the experiment with this episode.We want to add automated transcription to our posts. Podcasts are a great way to share knowledge but unfortunately people who are deaf or hearing impaired are excluded.

What this episode covers

That is not what we want.

Introduction

Once again we are sharing our diversity and inclusion stories. We discuss how women in tech at bol.com encourage inclusion in tech. The idea for this podcast stems from of course the importance of the subject but also from the diversity and inclusion month we have at bol.com. In June and November last year we spoke about diversity and women in tech in the podcast with several guests. Let’s see what the latest developments and insights are, given that there has been a lot of attention to the subject in the world around us in the last weeks.

In our opinion, we need to keep having these conversations to progress. So, we will probably share more in future episodes.

Guests

• Natalia Paratsikidou – Software engineer in the bol.com retail media group (BRMG) domain
• Anastasija Efremovska – Software engineer in the platform domain and 'best friend of the show'
• Marloes Kuijper – Data scientist in the assortment domain
• Raissa Machado – Software engineer working on the select proposition, the bol.com subscription model
• Maartje van Denderen – Front-end developer in the area of assortment tooling for partners

Notes

Talks during spaces summit 2020:Making Demos great again - MarloesFrom prototype to production. A real-life cloud story - AnastasijaExperience the hive mind through Mob Programming - Natalia; this session is not on Youtube. It was a hands-on session based on the Kata principle

Earlier Episodes about Women in Tech:Our speakers during the Women in tech conferenceIntercultural Diversity

Transcription

Please be aware: the transcription has been produced by an automated process.

Thanks.

Yeah, do you have this podcast stems from the course, of

course, from the importance of the subject, but also from the

diversity and Inclusion month we have had both. Com and also in

June and November last year. In both cost we spoke about

diversity and women in tech.

In several cases. Let's see what are the latest

developments and insight, especially given that there

are some other has been a lot of attention for the subject

in the world around us in the last week.

Yes, yes, an inclusion is one of the subjects I remember well

from our podcasts. Mary was sharing her story about feeling

excluded and the talk she had about inclusion with our former

CEO. And during that interview, but also during the editing

again after it, it gave me the goosebumps. So I'm really

curious right now how it is in

this talk. And in this talk we want to define in two. So P, X2

parts we start first with diversity and inclusion, and in

this case the women in tech them order generic story an to make

it more concrete week off to the second part based on the

examples about the talks during space. Assuming so, baseball

time to introduce the guests.

Yeah, and then we have quite a list of guess. I don't think

that we ever had to so many guess so so that's I think that

also stresses the importance of this. So let me first introduce

Natalia Paratsikidou, software engineer in

the in the BMG. So that's basically where we sell

advertisements on our platform.

Yeah, great to be here. I'm really happy and I I was like

I'm on my maternity leave. But I was like I find it really

important to share my experience. So thank you very

much for inviting.

Anastasija Efremovska, she's software engineer, as she saw on her

LinkedIn profile that she like to likes to make me break

things. So I was curious about these lines in the profiles, but

if you're if you have listened to the podcasts a lot, then you

know that she was actually in one of our first. I think

actually the first port costs when our equipment was way less

than this and we were just starting out so.

Yeah, really cool to have you back.

Yeah, uh, thank You Beautiful. It's it's great to

be back. It's actually the third time I think the

previous presented part of this.

How can I yeah?

Best friends of the exactly best Friends of podcasts.

Glad to be back, yes.

Marloes Kuijper, data scientist in the

assortment domain, I know from other teams that there's a lot

going on in the Serpent domain for data scientist. So great to

have you as well.

Thank you very much Peter. Well, thanks for having me. I'm really

looking forward to this.

Raissa Machado, also a software engineer, this

is in the team reptile and it's on the select proposition. So if

I'm correct, the select subscription where we offer

certain things to Members for

platform. Yes, yes, that's right. That's me. Hi

everyone, very glad to be here and uh, if you're not

a member of select please go and buy a subscription.

So now we have also posted sponsored content.

They collected via the BRG stuff I guess, but we'll talk

about that later and then a last cause guest of today is

Maartje van Denderen she's fronted the developer and

given this chest in education in journalism, think debating

and I will learn a lot during this podcast says we don't.

She's look she's working on assortment tooling for our

partners on the platform

welcome. Yes, thank you very much nice to be here.

Great.

So, um, yeah.

Jim Diversion and Inclusion month. Why is it so

important in both com.

Yes, so the diversity and Inclusion Month is something

that came out out of the diversity and inclusion work

group that has on the lines of 10 people working on this.

Nowadays we think it's really important to raise awareness

throughout the company regarding the topic, so we need to speak

about this and do something that's not like a onetime

campaign but rather a continuous continuous cause that we put

effort and we tried to develop further and further. So that's

why we're trying to raise awareness throughout the

company. So that more people can see the importance of this

subject and can also join the group and help us build

something more concrete.

Can you give an example what we what we did in that month? Well,

yes, of course. So the month was divided in four weeks. The first

week was focused on awareness, so we shared a lot of numbers

regarding awareness as a more abstract topics or a general

topic. And then we will go then into the teams. So we had the

women in Tech Week. We had the pride Week and the International

Week and for every week we had a small special activity. So

either a lunch session or a talk of the international.

Or kind of like a coffee blind date. We also had the pub quest

to wrap up the month, which you guys probably heard of. It was

the first fully online event that we organized. I think we

had close to 400 people joining so it was quite big.

And we're really proud of the the month in general, because

after that we got a lot of people reaching out, starting

the conversation and just saying, hey, I would like to

help. How can I help and that's what we look for more people to

become engaged. And I think we really we really 'cause we

really made him an impact and that was really amazing I I'm

really proud of it.

And you said that in the beginning you shared some

numbers. How to spell.com compared to other companies in

the Netherlands? Could you share a little on that? Yes, of

course. So I think some numbers we are still below the national

average. So regarding women in tech we were last time that I

checked 1.5% below the national

average. But women as a whole in the company, we are 41%, so

that's quite an OK number.

And, um. Let me see if there are other numbers that I have

from the top of my head. Maybe I should have prepared better.

Turn on.

I'm sorry logo.

Overall we are not doing a.

That bad if we only take the numbers into account, of course

numbers not always give the full the full answer, right?

Exactly because then again, this would be my remark. This is just

the numbers. But that's very different than it

feels sometimes. I can imagine exactly yes.

Yes, and also it may be interesting to see that the

women in tech will Bolt form is so short of around average for

the country, but there's a country in in general, the

Netherlands is doing pretty bad on the how many women and

network in depth, and this is actually something that we

really would like to improve so that yeah we have more women in

tech services and Isabel, it's gonna be a really big company.

So because there are.

Relatively prime, quite a lot of women insect, but this is really

something we can do to make an

impact. To show that I pay this something we both won't find

really important, and maybe we can also inspire some people to

think about a career in tech if they haven't done that before.

Yeah, I knew there was a women in tech.

Community you can you came up with this statement you worked

on that together with, uh, our people end Department I believe

and and I think it was even that

aborts that. Signed the statement right, can you can

tell more about the statement? But what did we put on paper?

Yes, of course. So when we were first starting, the community

marching and I we had a very clear idea of what we wanted the

community to be like. But we felt that having only our own

opinions was not enough to build a very strong, long lasting,

relevant community. So we organize a kick up session last

year where we invited.

Everyone to participate and give their opinions and together with

Susanna, here's help. We had a workshop and we gathered a lot

1. Heard from everyone on what they felt the community

should represent. And while we should stand for, and

that's how we came up with the women in tech statement

that is based on three pillars we have the encourage

pillar, the share pillar, and the diversified pillar and

the idea under each of those pillars is that the encourage

session. The encourage pillar is where we.

Together as a community, we do some networking. We build

bridges. We try to be authentic, open and vulnerable, but most

importantly we listen and we have been doing monthly meetings

where we just have lunch together and we just have a safe

space where everyone can can support each other. That has

been really successful so far.

And then under the share pillar we we're working on

inspiration sessions because we do know we have so many

amazing women working inside the company that are really

working that their ***** off. Sorry for my language, but

that's true really being very innovative and just being

game changers and we want to create a platform where those

women can just tell their stories so that they also

inspire other women and everyone actually too.

Perform their jobs better by just sharing the their life

stories. They can also just make a very positive impact on the

community in general and then we have the diversified pillar.

And the idea there is that we embrace the uniqueness of all

people. So we want to be very aware of biases and we want to

be also very inclusive, which means that this Community is not

only for women, is for everyone. Because we do understand that

there is no way that will change the status quo if we only have

women involved. So if you are a man and you're listening to this

podcast and you want to get involved, please reach out

because we need your help. And I think that by having everyone's

perspective, that's how we can.

Actually make a positive impact and create a change on the

company and on the environment around us. And actually I also

want to give just a quick shout out to Timon from recruitment

because he has been working with us already and then that's

really positive and we need more

people like that. Yeah, so they embraced the uniqueness of all

people and that's that's the diversified pillar one.

OK, and then this statement was put on paper and then our board

member Ellen said, OK, this is that important. I want to sign

it off an want to be part of it as well, right? It's how kind of

exactly so we're really proud and we think it's really great

that we have this this kind of support from directors as well.

Great, great to see in here. Yeah and then.

Yeah, maybe that's a nice bridge. Of course, if you

talk about sharing and inspire other is is dead,

then where the if you talk about our spaces Summit?

And then we have this this yearly event. This time it was

online. You should hear the listen to the other episode. We

talked about it and in this space summit tree women stood up

and said I want to present over there and that's the bridge here

and I think. I'm

yeah, can you share something about your presentation? An

yeah. But why did you choose the topic before we go to women in

tech relationship again?

Wants to start.

I can start um, so the presentation I've

participated in a few conferences and.

They always had Carter involved as a workshop or of as of

a talk, and I thought, oh, that's a great topic to do at

ball. So can you hear me? I'm not sure I lost it. OK so.

Sorry.

That's how the idea came up. I participated in a Carter

workshop talk in Tenerife in Socrates Internet, so I

thought I can do it. I have the knowledge why not and

that's how it came in, but I really want to share a first

and foremost that I couldn't have done. It actually didn't

do it, but the workshop.

Was held by Duncan Lou and it wouldn't have been possible if.

This amazing colleague for me wasn't there to support me and

actually we did it together so I wasn't alone. I'm here to

present it. It was indeed my idea, but I had help and I

think it's there. It is well with what I said that we are a

community. We need to help each other to go further.

OK, cool.

I'm a loose yeah, those are really nice where it's a Natalia

yeah for me I presented on stream net which is an

application framework in Python which makes it really easy to

create really nice visual demos from scratch in like very short

amount of time. And basically it might seem we do a lot of

product discovery which means we do a lot of presentations to

stakeholders and to the team itself and streamed. It really

helps us a great deal because it allows us to really quickly set

up visually appealing and

interactive demos. And so the reason why I wanted to present

on this is basically to share my knowledge on. It's an it's.

It's a pretty new tool so not many people knew about it yet,

so I really wanted to make sure that everybody in the community

knows about it and can also use it to their advantage.

Cool.

But it's always nice to hear that that we can share

knowledge, and I think it's a

great opportunity. And that kind of also inspired me for

my presentation, because it's not really the stage

fright that kept me from presenting. I feel like I

was struggled to find a topic that I think would be

relevant for people and that people would have something

new to hear.

So this year I thought we actually had the perfect

opportunity. So together with my colleague Karen, we present it

on our internal infrastructure to called R2D2. You can also

check out their podcasts. By the way, Karen and your own from my

team. They talked about the art of data two awhile back on the

podcast and it has actually existed for a few years and we

have quite a new collection in the company so we thought it

would be nice to tell the story

1. How did it come to be and what were the decisions made

three years ago? And what would you maybe do differently if you

do did it today?

So yeah, that was the motivation behind those three

presentations. I believe we also put them on online on YouTube,

so insurance, we will add the links of course, but the debt so

far that the topic thing you can see that it's already 3 totally

different topics. So that's interesting. But yeah.

What was it that you?

Yeah I wanted to present something during spaces submit

and especially this subject.

For me it was in Italian for me. It was mainly because I I

was missing the CATA mindset in the bowl.com conferences in our

environment. In general I found it a great way for me to

open up and meet people and see different ideas an also

cultivate a lot for me. It helped me cultivate my.

Um software engineering practices. I think it made me a

better software engineer, so I wanted to bring it to ball.

Some are loose. Yeah, so for me. Like I said it was mainly about

sharing knowledge, but I also wanted to kind of show off the

things that the cool things that my team is doing which we're

proud of. And also I wanted to really push myself a bit, so I'm

not really usually. I'm not ready to the person who goes to

speak at conferences. In fact it was my first conference talk.

And yeah, I kind of wanted to get out of my comfort zone and

be like, yeah, why not? Why why shouldn't I do this? I mean,

it's cool and I have something

to say so. Yeah, let's try.

Attitude really wants to do this yourself that it comes from you

or did someone push you a little too to take this step.

I think it was mainly me. I don't think anybody was really

pushing me, but together with a couple of teammates we were all

really excited about space submit and a couple of my

colleagues also submitted some abstract. So yeah, that also

helped. So we were in it together, so to speak. Yeah, so,

so it really helps if other people in your environment are

also doing it, because that is more easy to to also participate

and wanted to be out there on

stage, right? Yeah, exactly yeah definitely.

Cool.

And for under. Ask him what was

your. Motivation your drive.

Yeah, so on one hand we've been receiving a lot of questions

about R2D2, so we wanted to take this opportunity to answer some

of them. And also it's made us a bit more transparent. I find on

what we're doing to the rest of

the company. An to a kind of add on Marluxia story. It was a bit

too. I wanted to practice my presentation skills, but my

colleague Karen also wanted to do the same. So this is a really

nice opportunity to do it together and also hold each

other responsible of its two to make it good and to share the

load. So I really like that. Yeah, so it's a combination of.

Yeah, really present about the the topic, the content, an

combination of the development, personal development. So you

want to make a next step in

presentation, etc. So, um.

Yeah, if you're connected with your ex and your experience with

the other questions and if you if you look at the number of

women presenting during spaces submit, it's really unknown

number. Um?

Can you explain it based on your experience?

Yeah, so maybe I'll start this time. I think from from myself

at least I I always struggle a bit to find a topic as I said

that I think people would be

interested in. So I think as women we maybe try to be a bit

perfectionist and really find the really nice thing and

something that hasn't been done

before. And we really try to have a topic that's really good

or in other safe or whatever, But that's that. Doesn't have to

be always the case. I've noticed I've been to many conferences

where where you can hear very niche sort of things that maybe

have been discussed.

And they are not necessarily your topic of interest, but

there are somebody's topic of interest, so you can always

find people that are interested in what you have

to say. And just because you're not good at that

certain topic doesn't make you good in another topic, so

you should think that probably you have something

interesting to say.

I think that's my experience.

For you and Marloes, yeah, so I also agree I can relate to what

under Stasya saying. I also think it can be quite daunting

to present at a conference. I mean it's it's one thing to

present for your team, but it's another to present for the whole

tech community, right? So and that's not just for women, but

that's also for men. And I think you know there are quite a few

people who have done this like many times who are very

confident in. Presenting we're very comfortable. And then

there's also a very large group in the tech community

who have never done that before who don't feel like

really comfortable presenting for a large audience and.

So I think we already have a lot of like a big support

system in place, but I think making sure that everybody

knows that it's there that there is a lot of support and

that is a very safe community to present in is really,

really important, and I think that could be very powerful

thing to do moving forward.

For you to tell you it's similar experiences or I

like I couldn't agree more with an assassin marlous.

Really, I felt exactly the same way.

One extra thing that I notice is that the reason why in ball, but

also in other companies, I do believe that ball is doing quite

a good job. Let's say based on my previous experience, is the

way a company presents itself.

So I also I have an experience in a conference that someone

asked me. Would you like to talk a bit to us about women in tech?

And I was like why? What can we do to increase what they would

do it? What can we do to get you into our company? And I was like

look for personally for me. And of course this is Natalia

speaking. It's different per person. If I see that the

company is presenting itself full of men and predominantly

like how strong they are and

how. Like getting it all out there. I would feel a bit scared

that not scared that all will go there and what am I gonna do?

But mostly like are my idea is gonna be heard. Is there space

an enough security let's say for every different idea to be

cultivated and I think that's the most important thing and I

think it that is also diversity is not only about women in tech

is about different perspectives.

And ways of thinking.

And because my loose mentioned the feeling safe

and also about presenting at a conference like the Space

Summit Diffie, in your opinions, do a good enough

job there so that you could feel safer. Or should we

still take additional steps to make it even better?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think like I said, we have a

really nice support system in the tech community. There's

the walk-in sessions for speakers. You know, there's a

presentation course that you can take, so there's already a

lot of things going on, but of course we don't really know.

This is in the case of very few female presents, as we don't

really know why it is that there are so very few female

presenters, so I think there could still be. You know there

are a lot of questions still unanswered and I think that

would be my suggestion in figuring out what those answers

are. You know, like maybe collecting data through survey,

figuring out if people are willing to or women are willing

to present next year and why.

It is that they will or why they don't want to go an. You

know, collecting some feedback, asking the

important questions like you know what is it that we can

do to help? What are things that are fair? What are

holding you back? And if we have answers to all those

questions, we can determine what are the next important

steps and if we're doing a good enough job, I think.

What was it already a topic and maybe now looking a bit

more to my tan? He said in the women in tech group?

Number of women sharing their stories in space, assuming there

wasn't. I'm not sure, but we are preparing a session for the end

of this month where we intend to do exactly this survey so.

Individually, I have been speaking to a few women so I

have an idea of what might be. You know the issue there, but we

want to gather more more inside

1. We intend to do that during one of the lunch sessions. Just

have an anonymous survey so that they can answer and hopefully

will find more concrete things

to tackle. Yeah, but it was not not some discussion

already up front. For instance, during the request

for proposals that unfortunately now.

That's that's good to realize.

So it wasn't inside. You got during their spaces, summits

that there were really few women in doing this presentation.

Um?

Yeah, of course if there are in general will be more women

working in tech then of course you can expect the number we've

been presenting in the present in the conference is also be

larger so. Yeah, that's of course the currency

problem, right?

Should we do as a company something specific on that site

should be you've been talking to time and already, but should we

do something in the way we publish our vacancies?

That's boots.

Easier accessible.

Uh, for non white men, let's let's put it like that.

I think he has been very busy working on that specifically, so

basically going through all the copy so the very small things

the way that you write stuff you have to be very careful not to

use like very.

Not to put gender as a very big role there. Also one thing that

we notice while we were on the women's at conference last year

in Amsterdam we had some pamphlets. We had a booth. We

were there as a company as Balakan and we had a group and

we had some pamphlets to showcase the company and while

we realize while we were at the conferences that the pamphlet

only had pictures of men and we were in a women in tech

conference. So that was, you know one of the things.

We should definitely work on if we want to showcase the

diversity that we already have in sideball, then we should be

paying more attention to those small details for sure. Another

thing that we have been.

Working together with recruitment is making sure that

every time that we have a female engineer on the process on the

recruitment process, now we make sure that she she meets with at

least one female engineer as well so that she knows that

there are also female engineers working at the company and she

can feel more, perhaps more safe or more relaxed during the

interview process to maybe ask questions or just identify

herself a little bit more.

If I may add something on that, um, I think from my perspective

we should also be a bit careful because we don't want to

segregate the whole. The subject of recruitment, so I think we

have to be careful with the pamphlets and with the wording,

including diversity, diversity, but not really be targeted as of

we're trying to improve to increase our seats.

Of how many women we have? Becausw yeah, we're trying to

promote uh, self more into that area. Becausw. Speaking from

experience I have heard from a lot of female engineers at Ball

event that they don't want to be identified as of something

different. They just want to an I. I feel the same as well. I

want to be part I don't wanna be something separate.

So it's more about inclusion, I think.

But that's kind of hard if you're.

And it's it's needed to to to pay attention to, so that's why

we have this women in tech statement and we have you

explained the three pillars but all the other or the other

hands. You know you want to be one team and it in fact you

saying it shouldn't be necessary? Is that what you

mean? It's yes, because then it becomes too much. Yes, because

we saw it with the international community as well. That it some

point. People, don't you need everyone to work together, so

you need everyone to identify with that and.

I I don't want to feel that I have special treatment and I

think that people in tech want to feel empowered because of the

no let's not be cause someone.

Made them a favor. Let's say that that is

not the hardest thing.

And how with hiring people, right? Let's the most.

The hard thing at the moment, because a lot of companies are

thinking about how are we going to make our company more

diverse, but you have to put some effort, but nobody wants

to be the first be higher. So how are you gonna make sure

that you do? Having heard the first thing but at the same

time that people don't feel like they are different to the

higher and that's really hard I think. And the main thing to

do is to make sure that in even the BSS that we're really

inclusive company and that's everybody feels welcome and.

Yeah, definitely. I think the trick there is that we should be

aware of the biases on our recruitment process. So there is

this very cool study that Air BNB performed with their

recruitment process. They removed the names and the gender

from the the.

Thank you from the CVS and then they notice that a lot

more women were going through the pipeline. So just by

removing the gender, they already notice that there was

an implicit bias there that no one was noticing. And that's

that's the type of thing that we we try to work on as well.

Just removing our own biases.

Especially from the bonds that we we think we are, we don't

have, but it proves you have to do by doing it like this.

But this example amazing if you think about it.

Now I just once smoke way question for the topic for about

spaces. Some it again before we go to the closing runs already.

What especially for spaces some it is needed. Then we talked

about some recruitment examples already. What is for space

submit needed to attract more women? What do you think?

I think, um, I think it's good to include or to promote a bit

more first time speakers we notice by talking with Marty

Heiser that a lot of us were just the first time that we

present it. So I think the coming years it's good to have a

bit of a campaign of helping out the first time speakers. So

maybe in the survey we can.

Ask everyone OK, what? What are your interests? What would you

like to present for instance? And then we can see from there.

But other incidents interest maybe on the women side or on

the men's side than yeah, if you have presented before. If not,

think that's how we could be inclusive, but not only

specifically promoting an yeah

agenda. OK. Yeah, I think so too. I think that's a

really nice way to look at it to promote people

who would normally not present to to actually go

and get up on that stage.

Yeah, so for instance you could. Like I said there are many

experienced speakers out there who would probably love to coach

someone who's never spoken at a conference before. So in that

way you could also leverage those that knowledge that's in

the organization to help someone make that final order that

needed Step 2 to present. And yeah, and I think the survey

that's going to be.

Sent out by Asia on like women, presenting at Safe

Spaces, Summit is also a really good step forward.

I cannot agree more and I think having the I took this

here the preparation workshop that we organize usually for

presenters an I must recommend it and I think it would be

nice if we promote that and with more throughout the year

and not pursue only be for a conference. Come by. That way

we give people a bit more time and a bit more leisure to kind

of do it in a less stress way or in less time pressure.

I think the water I'm going to do a circle. I think it is

really like important that maybe that's also a key to success.

Having more simulation throughout the year, not having

to wait Spaces Summit for the presentations. Wehavetheball.com

meetups also. Uh, personally, I haven't really seen how this

process goes and how you can reach out. What can. What are

the topics that you could present or other small internal

initiatives? Yeah, other talks as well. That's amazing. Yeah

yeah, I mean like speaking like anything else, like writing cold

or whatever, or flexing your muscles is a muscle that you

need to get comfortable with so.

Taking any opportunity you can, you can find to present.

I think it's a very nice practice for anybody.

And if you're scared of presenting and I would like to

visual thing, you can also contact your favorite podcast

house and say, hey, I've got an interesting topic for you and

then that would also could be for our number, so that would

would benefit us both so.

But getting more serious on this phone which you

have any recommendations for beta and myself?

Uh, yeah. Also to work on diversity. Is there something in

our approach why we are having the people in our show that we

have in our show?

Or do you have any ideas on that?

I think just from the fact that you we do that in English and

that means that we are reaching out to the whole of the end. For

me, it's really important. Whatever it's happening in

English, I really feel as part of the family. I think that we

saw is amazingly inclusive because even from the beginning

there were diverse people there. I think it's percentage wise is.

Kind of help Alpha based on knowledge and experience in

gender and cultural background so.

I also like that the topics are quite mixed, so they're not

strictly very technical. Sometimes attach a bit on social

topics to like like the Imposter Syndrome podcast you had

recently. It's just maybe something you see in tech a lot,

but it's a more general topic. I think it's nice to have a bit of

a wacky topic now and then and just be you have a crazy thing

you've been thinking about? Do you think it's worthy?

Tell me something really fun, yeah?

Alright, now maybe it's going to to go to the closing round

trip and fall. What do you think? I think it's time for

that. Yeah, so so good you'll share your your your key

takeaway here with the audience please.

Well for me, um for me the most important thing was

that although

I had an idea and I was really convinced that I would like to

present it this time after all these years football and then I

was pregnant and from the beginning it was obvious that I

wasn't being able. I wouldn't be able to present it, so I had the

great help from Duncan Luann. Actually, I think that even if I

wasn't on maternity leave, it would have been.

Great from the beginning to share it with someone else

and do it together and I really wouldn't have done it

without him. It was a collaborative effort and I

would like to suggest to everyone to try to talk to

other people and do it together.

OK.

Nice yeah I completely agree. I think that's a

really nice way to do presentations and talks for

1. I think the key takeaway is that.

We all really like Spaces Summit, but there's always

things that are up for improvement and I think it's

really nice that we are reflecting and that we are

bringing it to the table and that we are talking about this.

And I think only in that way you can really make make things even

better. And yeah, there are a lot of cool things happening, so

I'm really looking forward to next year Space Summit to see

see what we come up with.

Yeah, for me it would be if you want to present but you don't

have an idea, think about it. I'm pretty sure you can find

something interesting that doesn't look interesting at

first view, but many more people would be actually happy to hear

about it. So ask around then you'll see you'll find a nice

topic to talk about.

OK.

And from their women in tech community drivers Martin Heise,

what about you?

Yeah, so I would like to see our community playing a more

prominent role in engaging more women towards presenting. So as

we mentioned before, maybe creating a safe space where they

can practice doing those throughout the year. Also, just

assessing perhaps the underlying issues that are not very clear

right now, so I would like to see the community taking a more

active role in that manner.

Yes, I totally agree with that.

And my personal takeaways near me that I have to

present next year.

Postponing it so yes.

Cool.

Yeah so Yep, thanks for your time to share this with with us

and with with you all this I I believe it's really good to do

an explain what you came up with this statement with the three

pillars but encouraged by Sharon diversity, but also about the

stories about the space Summit

talks an. And I like already. I see kind of red

line in and do it together.

Lower the the your own barrier to to do so and and start small

and the space time. It's an internal summit, but you can

also use other internal ones before you go out standing, so

that's also great to hear. Really interesting in what comes

out of the.

The inventory that you want to do the the questionnaire survey.

And I'm also interested if somebody is listening that wants

to share thoughts, and if it's internal bullet come, you know

how to find out workplace, but if it's outside bullet come you

can send email to tacklefootball.com or you can

come to the Twitter account or send it to us. Or maybe to you

as well. So share your ideas on this that would be also very

nice I believe. So yeah, the food for thought I would would

say, but also it's we started off with women in tech, but then

it became diversity in tech.

And yeah, it it's there's a lot of stuff to talk about again, so

so thank you, yeah.

Thank you very much Sir. Thanks for having us.

Very much here. Yeah, that was great.

Ever since we recorded the podcast about Agile @ Scale, we wanted some of the people involved again in our show. We care about the topic. Think there is a lot to tell and learn.

What this episode covers

And it is of interest to a lot of our listeners. That is why at least we think it is awesome that this episode is about Innovation Rhythm - How to drink less coffee and achieve more.

In the first Agile@Scale episode we talked about the 'Why' of Agile@Scale, the flight levels of Klaus Leopold. OGSM and OKR processes and the first step of this transition. We talk July 2019, so time to find out what happened since.

Guests

• Judith Verkerk – People Lead in Retail Technologies at bol.com; She is in the show because of her contributions as Domain Lead for Retailer bol.com in the group of Domain Leads.
• Hessel de Gelder – Agile Innovation Lead at bol.com. Given that this is the second appearance in our podcast he now is “Friend of the show”.

Notes

Another episode on Agile @ Scale

Business Agility

OGSM process (Objectives/Goals/Strategies/Measurements)

OKR format (objectives and key results)

Almost a year ago we spoke to Jim van der Waal, a former colleague and now working as a Product Manager at OneFootball. Back then he had just delivered his presentation: “Scary close to autonomous teams” during the Spaces Summit 2019.

Recently Jim posted a range of blog posts, with topics like:

Product Owner vs. Product Manager: what is the difference?

Making SLO’s fast

Product Teams: striving for Autonomy & reaching for Business Agility

Which triggered questions like: Would the teams be fully autonomous now? How are things with Jim? What did Onefootball discover and learn this year?.



Guests

Jim van der Waal; now works as Product Manager at Onefootball in Berlin. Before that, he started as Information Analyst in 2014 at bol.com and built up a broad experience in roles like Scrum Master, IT Project Manager and Product Owner. Always engaged with how can I improve the product, the organization and ... himself.

Notes

Jims blogs on medium.com

In this episode, we are exploring a topic that is definitely work-related but not that tech-related: Dealing with stress in the tech sector. At bol.com we have at least twice a year an employee engagement survey. Some of the questions are about how the workload is perceived.

What this episode covers

If you look at the results they differ per domain. So, context is very important. As is being pressured by deadlines.

Our guest reached out to us with the following message:"For all of us working in the tech sector most of us have felt the presence of anxiety from time to time. Especially when a big project has a hard deadline which cannot be pushed further in the future, or maybe sometimes due to the pressure we put on ourselves in order to "show the world we're capable and worth our position". Of course this subject can be way more relatable in nowadays where the pandemic has hit the world causing us to change our work habits, which might cause drops in productivity. Sometimes this anxiety has got me as well and that was the starting the point for doing small research into finding out easy tips & tricks that can help a person cope with the stress in the tech factor. So here's a list of tips and tricks split into two categories: a) How to cope with anxiety, b) how to prevent it from building up"

So we dove into this topic and found out there's a lot to tell and explore it.Indeed we touch upon 4 tips and tricks to cope with anxiety. Next to that we discuss our own experiences and relate them to prevention and even trends.

Guests

• George Katsikopoulos; a friend of the show! Young Professional and Software Engineer switched teams since the last episode from the Fintech domain into the Offer domain

Notes

The Imposter Syndrome; seen as one of the causes of stress

Spaces Summit in corona time means Spaces Summit goes virtual. Maybe you remember from last year that we have an annual internal tech conference at bol.com. Given the measures, in place, we can’t come together.

What this episode covers

So, we go for a digital online equivalent. We wanted to know what it takes to organise an event like this?

But we found out there's an even more important step before. It's getting the answer to the question "what are we going to do?" Many people and organisations who are organizing conferences, meetups, summits and other gatherings will recognize this. The preparation already started months before the date of the event. And than Corona kicked in and it wasn't safe and allowed anymore to do this event. So there's this question "what are we going to do?"

We start with a brief explanation of the Space Summit, what is it and why are we doing this in bol.com? After that, we dive into this "what are we going to do?" question. After the decision to go virtual, our guests explain what it takes and takes differently to arrange everything for this virtual edition.

Guests

• Michaela aus dem Spring – Tech Community Builder
• Kostas Mavrikis – Software engineer and organising the Spaces Summit
• Niels Kuiper – Software engineer and Cloud liaison, also in last years edition in the podcast about Spaces Summit so a friend of the show!

Notes

Podcast Spaces Summit 2019 Part I and Part II

The platform used for broadcasting the streams: Microsoft Teams Events

The platform used for gathering the audience in a virtual way Google Chat for business

The topic of this show is exactly why we like to be the hosts of this podcast. We learn a lot about all areas in our business. In this show, we dive into the marketing domain.

What this episode covers

We will learn about models like multi-touch, lift studies, time decay, and more. We talk about Data Science for Marketing Attribution.

Put simply, marketing attribution is the analytical science of determining which marketing tactics are contributing to sales or conversions. And then there is a Data Science twist to this.

Guests

• Ernst Kuiper; Data Scientist and Craft Lead Data Science
• Ivan Budincevic; Senior Software Engineer Data Science

Notes

Ivan refers to measuring 2.0 (M2) Measuring 2.0 – Streaming measurements; this episode discusses the source which is used for Marketing Attribution.

Search Engine Advertising and and Search Engine Optimization (SEA and SEO)

Bol.com afiliate partner program (APM)

Turning to business analytics this episode, we discover it’s a broad field. Business Intelligence hasn't been discussed that much yet in our podcast. So, we are excited to learn more.

What this episode covers

In an earlier episode, we discussed moving our Big Data platform to the cloud. This blog is described how we move our data platform into the cloud.

What tools do we need to get the data out and have all our users use it to their advantage? One of the tools is Tableau and together with our guests of the show, we dive into everything around this theme. How to become data-driven? What is the role of the data coach? How can you become scaleable? The road to self-service BI, etc.

Guests

• Frans Poldervaart – Data coach and “Analytics Ambassador”
• Willem Bekkers – Business Intelligence specialist / Data Coach

Notes

Tableau; the BI tool used by 50% of the company to do their daily analysis

Atscale; the layer in between BigQuery and Tableau

BigQuery; Google’s Data warehouse running in the Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Information Lab; the company we work together with to grow and benefit even more from the tableau usage.

Tableau Blueprint; the blueprint which is used as guidance

Let’s look at another programming language we use at bol.com: Python. At bol.com we use Python for Tools, Data Science and more. It has been around since 1991.

What this episode covers

It was created by a Dutch guy: Guido van Rossum. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability. The language's core philosophy is summarized in the document The Zen of Python (PEP 20), which includes aphorisms such as:

• Beautiful is better than ugly.
• Explicit is better than implicit.
• Simple is better than complex.
• Complex is better than complicated.
• Readability counts.

All well, but what do we do with it? What do we use it for?

In the earlier episode “How we tame Google Cloud resources with R2D2” we discussed the Deployment tool we built for our Software Engineers. This tool has been built in Python.

But we do more great stuff in bol.com with python, at least that’s what we heard in our tech community. We asked around and, not surprisingly, ended up in the Data Science area. So time to introduce our guests to the show….

Guests

• Olaf Meuwese – A software engineer who has worked mostly with and in Data Science teams in the last years.
• Bas Dunn – Data scientist, econometrician in Assortment and earlier in Partner Performance Management.
• Jasper Adegeest - Data scientist, since September 2019 at bol.com in the Personalization team.

Notes

The zen of Python

Pythonic: When a veteran Python developer (a Pythonista) calls portions of code not “Pythonic”, they usually mean that these lines of code do not follow the common guidelines and fail to express its intent in what is considered the best (hear: most readable) way.

SKlearn: Machine learning module for Python

Tensorflow: The core open source library to help you develop and train ML models

Datawarehouse bigquery

Jupyter Notebook: The Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text.

Flask: a lightweight WSGI web application framework

Fastapi: a modern, fast (high-performance), web framework for building APIs with Python 3.6+ based on standard Python type hints.

Django: a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design

Axle - the opinionated framework to build Java apps within bol.com

Covid-19 rules the world, so it determines the subjects for our podcast. Just like others, we moved from studio recording to home recording. Basically working from home (WFH) and adapting our way of working.

What this episode covers

So we think it’s time to spent three smaller episodes on this subject as well and share our experiences.

We build up a trilogy which will cover the following subjects:

1. Episode Office Automation: creating the prerequisites for WFH. A peek behind the screen of our Office Automation hero’s. Sharing how they prepared and showed their contribution in these uncertain times.
2. Episode Season load: What are the Consequences of the Corona measurements on our e-commerce platform and IT systems.
3. Episode Way of Working: How we moved from 1 office into 2000 offices and how our 600 people tech community adapted to this new reality.

As e-commerce player we are in the fortunate situation we can continue working and we can even contribute to helping people stay safe. The question, how do we facilitate all this from a tech perspective and even still innovate with our innovation teams? How do we adapt our way of working to this new normal?

As bol.com we tend to be working closely together on the same physical location. We want everyone who contributes in and to the team as close as possible. In these circumstances that isn’t possible. So, what did we adapt? We have been taking measures for over a month now. Time to look back, reflect and share some learnings and good practices.

Please be aware: This episode was recorded on the 30th. of March at the beginning of the 3rd. week WFH.We are fully aware that in the 4th. week, as we are in right now, WFH normalizes but differences between people in teams are visible. Energy levels aren't as high as the first weeks.

Guests

• Burgert Kirsten – Coach or as we introduced him in a previous episode Human Systems Architect. Not sure whether you’ll be able to tell during this episode but with a love for improv theatre.
• Marijn Goedegebure – Software engineer. Interested in Visual Impact.

Notes

Trilogy Part I

Trilogy Part II

Jamboard

Burgert referred to a company which has WFH by design with over 1100 employees by now. This company is automattic. Known from Wordpress. One of their statements: "Everyone works from the location they choose. We’re spread out all over the world in more than 70 countries". The podcast Burgert is referring to is called Making Sense Podcast with Sam Harris.