Building digital products with one or two teams is well understood and some might even say ‘easy’. Doing the same with many more teams comes with very different challenges. In this interview, Jan Hegewald and host Thomas Riedel will look into the implications of scaling digital product development, focussing on the organizational, technical, and alignment aspects. They will discuss why an overarching approach is needed and also what opportunities scaling up your tech teams can bring.
VP Engineering at SumUp. Held roles at Idealo and Zalando.
The computer science graduate from Berlin spent the first nine years of his career developing individual software at Capgemini. The developer gained his first experience in team management at Campana & Schott, where he developed agile for the first time. A little later, he left consulting and moved to e-commerce at Idealo. As Head of Technology B2B, he integrates hundreds of thousands of merchants into the platform and is jointly responsible for reorganising the entire product development. When he discovered a job ad from Zalando, he joined Zalando in 2017. There, Jan brought his extensive and long-standing experience leading agile teams to the rapidly growing company. Today, Jan is VP Engineering at SumUp.
Journalist & Moderator.
Thomas is a child of the 90s. Having grown up with the Game Boy and Star Trek TNG, he was already tinkering with PCs as a teenager. With podcasts on his ear, the former boarding school student studied Philosophy, Rhetoric and German Studies in Tübingen, while discovering MMORPGs and programming websites on the side. In 2010, Thomas moved to Cologne to join the media. During his traineeship at a local magazine, he became interested in the Cologne startup scene and founded Nerdhub, a calendar platform for tech events. In 2016, he joined the startup blog deutsche-startups.de, from which Digitale Leute has spun off shortly afterwards. Today, the freelance journalist works for online newspapers, produces podcasts and moderates and curates events around the tech scene.
