00:00:08

Hi, my name is Jaco keynotes on, uh, I'm from H and M group and work as a credit area, lead engineer for platform engineering. And I'm here to talk about our cloud transformation and how we do that at scale. So H and M started in 1947 in a small Swedish town called the vested was, and in 1998, we started our first online shop. And at the moment we're 177,000 employees, 4,000 within it. And around 800 of those are developers. And right now we're building a product organization. And one thing that I need to highlight is that 73% of employees in positions of responsibility are women. And that's really cool. And, you know, retail it's rapidly changing. We see a lot of changed customer behaviors, a lot of change customer expectations. And of course the competitive landscape changes all of the time. And you all know that software eats the world.

00:01:15

It is the traditional businesses is the value shame. And of course we need to adapt. And in sort of forming our digital business, we came up with a sort of number of tick principles. So we want to be customer centric close to the customer and build a digital experience that, that customers want a love. And we want to be open. So start moving away from legacy integrations and use API APIs and be really open and connected and agile being able to release on the mat and to really live up to those customer expectations and intelligent data enabled. We have a lot of information flowing through our applications and platforms, and we want to leverage that data to really take data-driven decisions and global we're a global company. We have customers all over the world and to build a digital experience that they love. We need to be as close to the customer as possible.

00:02:18

And why cloud then you might ask, well, we see cloud as a real true enabler and cloud will give us a faster pace. It will build us a better at a global scale and of course, more value for money if we build right, and then focus on those value added services. You know, the cloud providers, R and D departments are far greater than we could build. In-house. So leverage those services that really make an impact to build better products. And traditionally we've been really slow. We've been siloed. We have been working to keep the lights on and it has been successful, but it has made us really slow. And now we want to change that. We want to focus on our sort of key differences, what really makes us different. So we come up with our cloud strategy, H and M group should run entirely in the cloud, supported by an organization that could build effective and secure cloud solution using DevOps practices and our approach.

00:03:30

How did we get started in this? Well, there were initiatives within the cloud all around the company, uh, but we needed to say some sort of central governances sort of kickstart at central initiative. So I'm going to talk how we get started about agile and dev ops practices and knowledge sharing, and really having everything as code. And as I mentioned earlier, we started small. There were proof of concepts locally within different divisions, and we took the learnings from that and formed sort of a central team. And the first thing that sort of project or team did was to establish a line organization that could take over when the project was finished. So we stablish a center for enablement called cloud office, uh, to really become the tech enabler and the focus or mission that we have is to enable and monitor the H and M cloud strategy drive and support our cloud adoption and folks, a lot of engineering efficiency and the developer experience.

00:04:41

And one thing that we can do to improve the experience and the efficiency of our engineers is to develop self-service capabilities that really enable the development of product teams to maximize the value output and to start hit the ground running. And this was the starting point. So we formed a center for enablement. We had one team focusing on the cloud adoption, helping out with advisory, really being out there in organization, getting the teams up to speed. They could support with reference architectures, mapping, current architectures to a good cloud architecture and, and so forth. And the platform DevOps team, they stand on two legs. So one developing the platform with the governance and guardrails and some central services. We haven't hub and spoke architecture. We're in a hybrid state at the moment. So taking care of those platform capabilities and the other leg that they stand on is to focus on that developer experience.

00:05:49

So automating flows and sort of building the Lego blocks that you can and drop into your pipeline. So for everything that, so everything doesn't need to reinvent the wheel for things like ordering DNS certificates, authentication on your application and those things that really makes us faster. And then we have a cloud operations team, uh, that helps with developing the platform capabilities and also run our central services and coming up with sort of evolving our platform, taking aim at the north star, where do we want to be? We have some design principles, so we want to be cloud native. So leverage cloud native capabilities over third party software. And we want to be application centric to really cater for autonomy within our product team and resources, belonging to an application should live as close to that application as possible and subscription or infrastructure democratic sessions, so important.

00:07:07

So every resource that you spin up in the cloud as a product team, you take care of that. So it's, we're putting the infrastructure at the hands at our product teams when they need it on demand so that they can build a product X products that really make a difference. And we need to course to be archetype neutral. We have a lot of legacy systems and our cloud platform needs to cater for that as well. And we run our platform as code. So every change that we do to the platform is checked into a repo it's deployed via pipelines. So we get that traceability and reusability and can really set an example within the organization on the everything as code agenda. And we do some policy driven governance, and we see that with the central governance and the de-centralized provisioning, we're really hitting the best spot within our sort of cloud estate. And we focus on hundred percent self-service and automation, and we provide reusable assets to get our teams going. So, as I was mentioning those things that every team needs, but you don't want to reinvent the wheel every time. So get things, things that do can drag and drop like Lego bricks into your pipeline to get your certificates and enable your authentication and work with your application.

00:08:41

And to really spread the information. We're a large organization. We started out with setting up a lot of events and forum and hack days and knowledge sharing and inspirational, and really start that evangelization both within cloud and dev ops and started to build a community. And it's really important in the beginning to be super approachable and inviting and let all the people from the organization join you. And a key success factor for us has been having a central developer portal where we can have the documentation and guidelines and publisher repos would reference architecture, reference implementations. And we call that text bot. So text bot is not only a portal, it's a community, it's a Q and a, it's the documentation, the guidelines, the how tos they call them patterns, but there's also the events part of it, the meetups and the, uh, it's, it's actually, it's building our whole engineering community.

00:09:55

And as I was mentioning where we have a past, and now we're building our product organization and we're actually merging it and business development to work together in the competent product teams. So we say, we don't have any, we don't have any it department anymore. We just have business tech. And the base of course, is our foundation of the H and M values. And then with the building blocks of dev ops and agile decoupled, modern architecture and the cloud. So we have super exciting times ahead of us. And the business tech will focus on the customer and business value and tech to really build a digital experience that our customers will love. And if we look at our products teams, they will have end to end responsibility of their product or application. They will be multi competent and of course, fully autonomous, so important tying back to that first idea of locality and simplicity.

00:11:06

And of course, working with dev ops practices. And what we want to achieve with this is of course, be passionate about customer and business value and excite and empower our people that are building those products and shorter that time from idea to market. And we're not tailoring to serve the business anymore. We're here to solve the problems that our customer faces in ways that serves the business. And if we look at where we're coming from to where we're going, so traditionally, we had roles that define the specific responsibility, and now we want the products teams to share their responsibility, to have that shared responsibility of the product and the future and the roadmap of the product. And we're coming from a handover and approval based way of working. And now we want to focus on having that constant flow of value and reduce our manual activities.

00:12:15

And we want to build a culture of automation and actually paying off that technical depth. And of course the organizational and complexity depth as well, and developing measured on sort of feature delivery and operations must measure it on reliability. Now we want the products teams to take full responsibility and being measured on the value output that they provide. So we want to be able to move away from those sort of long release cycle to have that friction free continuous delivery of business value. And it's a really, it's a competitive advantage to be able to release on demand. And of course we shouldn't be afraid of failure. We should use failure to learn and then try to pivot. And if we're trying to sort of sum this up, having a clear strategy of course helps a lot, and you need to have that top management support it.

00:13:18

Maybe you can transform a couple of projects, but without that sort of top management support, it's really hard. And going back from where we started, we were sort of the pioneers and it took us two years. And then we built the product organization that really captures all the values that we were after. And don't worry too much on operating models, just get the team going and establish the team, start executing and just get going. And I think we're not a bank. So we allow maximum of freedom to our product teams. We just enough governance. And I encourage you to use small batch thinking, MVP and femme scale, and super important to incorporate those key functions, uh, keep the security close and networking, they identity and access management, because all of those things changes when you move to cloud and have that close partnership with your cloud provider and support team. And of course, super important to test, fail, learn, and constantly revisit your solution because cloud it's constant involvement changes every term.

00:14:44

So scaling for our product organization, I mean talking about our sort of center enablement for cloud, but now we're also building enablement teams for API and integrations for DevOps and test when secured in risk, because it's going to be hard. We're a large organization. It's going to be hard to have that expert competence within all of the teams. We're over 200 product teams. So we're building enablements that works on hands-on advisory. Um, being out there with a team coding with them, having assets, guidelines, documentation place. So get the teams going and H and M we're all in on business tech and the organization that you build must support the vision and establishing our center for enablement and working with agile ways of working and demos practices has been really successful in our cloud journey. And they are in our organizational journey and the way that we actually provide value.

00:15:54

And as an example, now we can provision a developer environment within under 10 minutes, and this could have taken weeks in our own premises state. So we're setting up all our platforms to be easy to use, and self-service, we're starting to build a community for our engineers and having that developer portal, the one turning point where, you know, you can find the information that you need, and it's also community driven. So you, as an engineer at H and M can come to tribute with you knowledge and provide onboarding support in the beginning to get the teams up and running and never stop improving super important. And with that, we see a future with an infinite ambition. We will continuously work to surprise and delight our customers by releasing the power of people, data, and tech, to accelerate our business. It's really been an honor to be here at the DevOps enterprise summit and being invited by gene.

00:17:01

And I want to finish off with some words from the H and M founder, Ireland Patterson, and the secret to our success. There is no secret. The industry is so dynamic that it's absolutely necessary to constantly renew yourself and have a flexible mindset. And I think this is super relevant even today. And with the times we are in now with the COVID and Corona situation, um, many of us working from home, it's super important to renew yourself and have a flexible mindset. And with that said, I want to say, thank you. And my name is work as a product area, lead engineer at the H and M group. And it's been a pleasure to be here at the DevOps enterprise summit. And I will watch to as many sessions as I can and try to learn and absorb as much as possible. Thank you.