Speaker

Alex de Groot

Alex de Groot

VP of Engineering at Trengo; Scaling Product Teams as a profession

's-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands

Alex is a dynamic software leader with over 20 years of experience in steering successful (SaaS) teams and crafting innovative software solutions. His infectious positive energy, combined with a genuine interest in people and a beginner mindset, underscores his reputation as a quick learner and an enthusiastic speaking partner. Alex's dedication to data-driven decision-making is evident in his commitment to staying abreast of the latest technical innovations and leveraging technology strategically to achieve business objectives. His true passion lies in intelligently utilising technology while fostering meaningful connections to drive success.

A true enthusiast for challenges, Alex thrives in high-stakes scenarios with substantial constraints. Beyond his immediate focus, a significant portion of Alex's efforts revolves around exploring how innovation can address global challenges. He actively advocates an open data revolution, envisioning a future where secure and private access to high-quality data empowers individuals and companies to tackle the world's most pressing issues such as democracy and climate change. By engaging and publicly speaking about security and data ethics, identifying business opportunities, and staying abreast of cutting-edge technologies like AI, Big Data, and Platforms, Alex is dedicated to contributing to the greater good.

In addition to his extensive software leadership experience, he has played a pivotal role in building organisations inspired by modern socio-technical pioneers, shaping teams that embrace cutting-edge principles in technology and collaboration. Through the application of innovative techniques such as Wardley Mapping, Team Topologies, Domain Driven Design, and Event Storming, Alex has cultivated environments where teams not only adapt to change but thrive in delivering value efficiently.

Area of Expertise

  • Information & Communications Technology

Topics

  • Product Development
  • Product Management
  • Scaling
  • software engineering
  • Cloud strategy
  • Technology
  • DevOps & Automation
  • Azure
  • Privacy
  • Encryption
  • Data Privacy
  • private cloud
  • Teamwork
  • Software Engineering Management
  • saas
  • Team Leading
  • Software as a Service

Implementing a Privacy First Strategy

Over the last few years privacy of the individual online has become a hot topic. With the introduction of the GDPR, privacy became a first-class human right for EU-citizens. At the same time, recent allegation at the address of many social networks have shown that when technology grows uncontrolled, it easily jeopardizes this right.
Although this focus on privacy can easily be classified as risk and a lot of work for your business, it can also reveal a massive opportunity. Can we turn it around and make privacy a unique selling point of your software?
During this talk I'll give a clear definition of what a Privacy First strategy is, where it comes from and supply simple patterns & practices to make it part of your software and the daily routines of an engineering team.

The emerging need for EngineeringOps in an AI world

Explaining engineering productivity is complicated as it goes way beyond 'how to produce more code'. Recently this was shown once more by McKinsey who couldn't explain it properly to their boardroom audience. While there seems to be consensus in the community the DORA metrics and all of the follow up work by Dr Nicole Forsgren and Gene Kim, that does not mean that we act accordingly in organization. A good example of this is the recently published product by Github, Jetbrains and AWS which all promise to double engineering productivity.
While they might be right in specific use cases, it's time to face the reality: engineering productivity is context specific. Over the last few years we've seen modern Sales and Marketing team setup dedicated RevOps teams who help them optimize their selection of work and behavior to gain the maximum value. Shouldn't we do the same in the world of engineering?

It's an interactive session where the audience can participate based on their experience. A decent internet connection is required to deliver a smooth session.

Beyond Platform teams, Value Streams and Continuous Delivery... It’s time to relax and shift down!

We've tried it all: Agile, Scrum, SAFe, Less, Kanban and Continuous Delivery. We've even setup Platform teams, are actively practicing TDD, apply DDD and deploy every day to production. Still we feel overwhelmed and not productive.

The above is a common thing I'm experience across companies I've worked with and spoken to during the last few years. Effectively they've done everything right and innovated well, but they missed a single aspect: how to make it easier for themselves? A typical habit for organizations is to not make software delivery easier, but bigger, more enhance and more complex.

Nope, this was never the intention of any of the techniques mentioned above... but how did we end there? This talk will not tell you what you should start doing, but rather what you should stop doing. Or like Google calls it: Shift Down. Hit the break. And decrease your load, rather than increase it with another gimmick.

The talk can be delivered as a short lightning talk or a more in-depth one. It's also possible to focus more on a managerial or engineering audience.

Rethinking databases... let's go serverless all the way!

For years we have accepted the position of databases in your infrastructure / cloud landscape: our big solid but expensive heart of our precious application. While the economy started to cool down, some interesting happened... We started to look at our bill again How can it make sense that my high traffic (serverless) application runs for 5 euros a month and my databases costs me 1200 euros? Can't we do this cheaper?

The database vendors responded and many innovations are hitting the market currently. Let us look at infinite scaling options, branch schema's, new data storage patterns and optimized compute. As a bonus, let's look how this all positively affects the AI use-case where I inject knowledge from one database vectorized into a LLM...

Depending on the audience and the conference, this talk can be delivered showcasing other cloud+database-vendors / implementation technologies.

Future Tech 2022 Sessionize Event

June 2022 Utrecht, The Netherlands

DevSum 2022 Sessionize Event

May 2022 Stockholm, Sweden

Alex de Groot

VP of Engineering at Trengo; Scaling Product Teams as a profession

's-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands