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Fernando is the senior director of platform engineering at Adidas. I had the pleasure of meeting him three years ago when he presented with Marcus Roger to his VP about the group of rebels who are bravely seeking to create a better way of working, um, inside of Adidas, they had regular meetings at this place. That's coffee intensity on where they made an executed their plans. Eventually leading to a meeting where they pitched the CIO at 10:00 PM at a leadership offsite, which led to the creation of the platform team who will be presenting with Ben Grimm, senior director of.com who drives the product vision for the e-commerce channel that generates billions of euros of revenue annually. They will be presenting on the continuation of the ICS journey, including being responsible for one of the 23 board level initiatives and how they're educating people across business and technology on creating world-class practices to help them win. Um, and so by the way, I was so inspired by this story. Whenever in the unicorn project, you hear about, uh, the Dockside bar that is indeed modeled after cafe intensity on Fernando, uh, and Ben

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If we can see things for what they are, If we can see what they could be, if the plastic we use, we never throw away. If the end of one thing Could be the beginning of the next, If we know that less can create more, if we can return, we reciprocate, we regenerate. If we are here for others, if we can work as a team, all we have to do is connect and the world opens up. The future is about giving back.

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Hello everyone. Thank you for having us with me too. So I'm Ben and with me today is Fernanda. We are both working at Adidas and, um, so thank you Jean, for having us today in Las Vegas. It's so exciting to be here and, um, and also thank you to the whole team for the organization. So, um, as you have seen in the video, um, we added us, our core belief is that through sports, we have the power to change lives. And to do that, the best way to do that is to build one-on-one relationships with our consumers. And digital helps us with that through premium, personalized, and connected experiences across all our touch points. So in the last years we have seen premium experiences and new enhanced experiences coming up across the whole industry, especially around the sports industry. So our, our target, they have high expectations to what's the, that, uh, um, experiences right across touch points, very individual, um, very personalized.

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And we just opened our flagship store in London, um, which is the best retail digital experience we have ever built so far. So when you are at the next step ups conference in London, you can definitely come by and have a look. It's really amazing. So about two, three years ago, um, we had a good would say basic online store, no app outside, but today, um, it's a different marketplace and the opportunity and the potential is endless, uh, beyond 2020. So today we talk about our platform strategy, our latest progress, or Fernando, uh, can give you all the insights. And I will talk more about how it enables our business and our growth and how we achieve the targets with that. Um, and overall how we trans trans form, um, they're $22 billion net sale Euronet sales company towards a future ready digital company.

00:04:06

Thanks again. So hello everyone. Good morning. So it's a pleasure to be here in this crazy city for the first time in my life. So my favorite, my name is Rhonda Carnegie, and I'm carrying out the platform engineering practice for Autodesk. So we are, as the team typologies will define us. So we are at the same time, a platform team providing a self-service platforms to our engineers and an enablement team. So helping them learning to good practices and the usage of our pathways with the final goal of making them autonomous. So my relationship has been said with, uh, with this fantastic community, I started like three years ago. I was the lead of global software development. We had an, a recent development model for, for Adidas, and I came to London looking for inspiration, right. And I found it. So I need to send a specialist on Cox Disney because he, he made me see the light, right?

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So I came back directly to our small, small German billet. Now that's where we are, uh, where we are focused and where our founder was born 70 years ago and created well, he greeted the company 20 years ago. He was born materia, right? And, and basically we start, I started a couple of meetings with different technical leaders in different departments. And we were meeting in a small bar. We call it cafe intention. And our goal was to convince our CIO and our business leaders that software and new practices should be really, uh, taking in Adidas in order to make us successful. We were successful. And I was talking about that last year. And this year, uh, Dean asked me to talk about culture, a strategy, how to bring our business together. And that's why Ben is here with me this year, because he's the owner of our biggest, fastest, and most profitable, this story in the world, our.com.

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So basically we go everyday to the office with really wanting to change lives through sports, but basically software is changing the sport. So not only how we practice nowadays, no one is going in running without the smart words, and then setting the activities with the phrase to come in fight experience, but also how we consume it. We are in the U S so watching an NFL game now, right now, it's a full experience of real time. Miss stats probably is this it's amazing, right? So are we a software company? Definitely. We are not. So all our revenue comes from physical products on the different centers, but we need to start behaving like that. Like one, because we have more than 2,015 million lines of code in our code repositories that are accessed every day for more than 2000 people.

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So in a new world where we push pro ownership to our business, because we are organizing value streams, what is the role of technology? Right? So for me, it's having the best engineering practices to provide speed at the right quality. So sustainable speed in the longterm, but really speed to succeed and fail and change our way, right? Especially us because we sell from the last, the state of DevOps from Nicole this year, that retail, where we are in is the only industry that correlates directly with top performance in it. So we are there, or we are deaf and how do we do that? So we go DevOps by default. So that is a strategy, no one challenges that not all the teams are there, but we go the both by default. And we define DevOps and also inspiration coming from my first year here from, uh, as Jez humble said with the word Kalmz standing for culture automation, lean measurement, serene.

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And basically this is what we use for every single one of our activities as you insulate, and that it comes to platforms. So can we do DevOps with some analytic architecture, with a commercial of the selves? Definitely you can do some steps, but there are certain capabilities of the platforms that needs to be there in order to boost, help the teams to go easy or easier into the journey. So basically the platform is to be on demand and sell service. And ideally you need to want to run them up and down on automation, common interface, SDK, API, you name it. They need to be a scalable and elastic. So they need to scale up and down depending on the needs. And ideally based on your availability in our automated way, and you need to pay per use, but it's not the platform team who is having the budget.

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No way we don't want that. We've seen a lot of times when infrastructure has grown like hell and no one knows what is there, because the teams using they are not paying for that anymore. So the teams will pay for what they use of the platform, fast pattern and miserable, or sorority ski and choose directions. So the application team needs to know what is happening in the platform real time and the platform team for us. It's good to know what is happening in the team, because sometimes we think that the platform is app, but the applications are not. And last but not least open an inner source, not only by opening operas, by using open source by default, but just by opening the platform to the community. So they feel part of it, right? So you open your backlog, but if you, even, if you don't have capacity, you open your code for others.

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So they contributing to the platforms and how all these technical things feed into our strategy. So we have a pretty focused CEO globally, Casper roasted, and he is ringing our board on produce projects up to 23. And I have the luxury of running one of them. And he said, these are tech foundations. And as you can see here, these are, the foundation is helping all our core digital initiatives on, on dark gray. So from lethal commerce of how we sell and the team of Ben is dealing with that, how we engage our consumers, our members, the programs, how we deliver in a normal channel strategy and how we create into a needle creation. That is super cool because it's like them the metallic time, right? So by us, certain in the lead time of the software, we are enablement, enabling the company, our business, to create physical products faster because we create directly digital first.

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And that is helping us relate, uh, in our relationship with our factories. And also with our resellers, our wholesalers, our B to B business. They don't need to see the pros anymore in order to sell them right. And that this, the fact that this initiative is relevant. It's super cool. We are United as we make our revenue for physical products, as I said, right. And we have to present this to our board every three months and it's helping us into that direction. So we are educating the board in things like automated testing, make data, city consumable, uh, continuous delivery, a number of bills quality. And at the same time, this is forcing us to really link everything that we do in the bottom of the engineering of the core of the engine room of the company. We link everything with business results. So with that money, if possible, okay.

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And you can imagine that there are a lot of funny conversations that we have with these business leaders and some things that we kind of struggle in the spending, why quality's important and why are we feeling about these are important. But then we realize what we are doing in the platform is not that different than what we started doing 70 years ago, and what has helped our company to be successful during all this time in a leading position of the sporting goods industry. So we call all these, the idea that India theater platform, and it's nothing else that a set of capabilities that working together allow our teams to go faster. Alyssa started by all the, be opening it, that platform. That is the compute part. So when our interactions with our consumers happen, so if you go to one of our stores, Sina, BQ is super frustrated, right?

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Would it be cool if the star systems will pop off when the queue widows and we'll pop it down when the queue disappears, even going up to Sera. So this we can do thanks to our modern 29 Kubernetes clusters. And now we serve it as capabilities, but they'd be cool. Also, if this is the assistants are popping us whenever they will, we are. So we need to be closer to our consumer. And nowadays for Adidas, the main focus is north America. And here I come this weekend directly from China. And if you want to be in the forum for a lot of digital retail or industry photo, you go there. So the direction has changed. So it's not global. Now pushing face to China is global learning from China. So we have now for this, we have Kubernetes clusters. Our platform is spinning up in, in, in five different regions of AWS, uh, last but not least, we're going to be cool.

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If, if this is true, assistants are popping up at home when you cannot live. So this is why your platform needs to run on-prem for these applications that they cannot live on prim because of data confidentiality, or mainly data gravity and data you heard in the form representation. So all the innovations that are coming in the present and the future will come for getting access to the data and play around with it. So we generate Garcinia tons of data from our product design, manufacturing, supply chain sailing, they leave it into a consumer and accessing quickly to this data is key. So we see the data as the bottom on a relay race. So that runners are a small level of steam and they need to be fast, but the four fastest runners not always win the race because the handle needs to be a smooth, okay, this, we achieve thanks to our global streaming and API strategy across the globe, where there were thanks to a smart contracts between the different teams. You can access the data from, from other team quickly. And it's cataloging what data port and at the end, where all this data is flowing because this float is flowing automatically to our big data platform. There is where we live at at so the power from our hyperscaler, AWS. So our data science can play around with AI ML, deep learning, where our normal algorithms cannot get.

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So a lot of technical pieces, right? And we said that we are working on this to bring value to, to our, to our business. And now whether it's building an app is building, putting together a set of pieces of a puzzle, and they need to work together. And a certain point in time exactly like American football, right? So the team has a purpose, a vision goal, but it's the touchdown. But in order for this to happen, the different players is to move as a certain point in time to make it happen for this. We use our implementation of Yankees with on asteroids, I will say. So basically we use to spin up a feminine master agents for the different teams. So they are fully independent. We sell plugins and run on their own. The platform Demali provides the backup connectivity to our systems and security.

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The bleeding continuously is nice, but you want to deliver something that is working, analyze the user. And this testing obsession we get from Hardy. Our founder was a pioneer in going into the field and testing with the, at least our products. And we do the same. So we need to test what the consumer has. So our automation testing platform is also spin up across the globe, basically how our product owners right now, physical owners, they test our products with automatic kickers. And so on, same concept with this automation for robotic process, for these tasks on the back office, on our global business centers, uh, that they are not making us different from our competition. We use UI path on also on a scale. Uh, last one, not lists of severability, no one wants to see a sport without the scoreboard. When I go to see my kids and I don't know who is winning, it's not the same, right?

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So basically, you know, you need to know what is happening. So we use the same approach with data. We use four metrics, all our metrics, traces and logs, our catalog, and they have put in a, in an operational lake. So they are accessed by other teams. So whoever wants they can access teams from a dependent, uh, metrics solid from not from a dependent, from a dependent application, technically all this is cool, but nothing will work without people. So people is our biggest assets, especially in engineering. And basically our platform is as successful as appealing is for the teams. So they need to feel that they are part of it. And this is why you need to boost community. You need to boost train, and you need to be to boost a lot of activities. So they feel part of the game. And if there is something that I feel proud of all these, uh, after all these two years of your needs, the community that we have created, right?

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So you that's called. You can see in our t-shirts. So we started with no engineers four years ago, and now we have more than 300 and we are in Dublin. We are now doubling this, this, this number by opening up new centers in, in Columbia. And in India, we have more than a hundred, 150 events a year with even one day where every single unit of value that is in our headquarter for an internal conference, with internal, external speakers, hackathons, everything. And we have a smooth onboarding. Every single technical person joining the company comes to Spain. We're currently 70% of our engineers are, and they build an application into end. In two days in the last two days, they'll be an application when in the past, it took for us even six months to get it to production. But most important is that they meet all the different responsibles of the platform.

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So these community is built forever. It's the most important thing on your body and then culture. And this is my, I, I'm not anyone here to talk about suggestions, but this is what I, what I do and what I applies, apply in your company culture, in everything that you do. So I come from different companies and I will have never done this in different companies, but in Adidas, we did that, right? So we were, uh, in the monthly meeting of all the directors of engineering is struggling because we have to retain, are they both my two different where all the accelerators, everything. And we saw that some teams were not progressing as, as we wanted for them to progress, but we hate top-down mandate in engineering, but also more, even more in areas in areas you put that rule as someone is champion. So basically we said in Adidas, we like competition. Let's open a cup. So basically that the only thing that they needs the team needed to do is say where they were and say they were wanted to be in nine months from them. Only condition is bringing in these people. So bring your boat owner and tell us also how this has brought beacon a success to your team.

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Amazing. So the participation was 220 people applied for it, and every team received a mentor and the coolest stuff is that they receive a mentor from a different team. So both the mentor and the team, we see fresh perspectives of a different vision of the world. Now, the winner that is the mobile team, you can see in the, in the ceremony where we are giving the gifts, they are doing a world tour around all our different headquarters, China, us Russia, uh, to really spread the word, the adoption of the platform and the best practices we do like hell. So we have more than 10,000 Kubernetes port running. Now, as I speak and more than 116 projects in our software delivery life cycle metric tool that is taking, uh, metrics from all the different tools, JIRA, sauna, Bitbucket, uh, uh, and, uh, Jenkins, and then creating metrics for the team to improve.

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And even all the critical teams are using cows, our environment and DevSecOps in the, in the life cycle, golden metrics. So deployment. So the teams of, of, uh, of Ben, they went from six weeks to deploy, basically whenever they want the mobile team and a cycle time of a campaign. It was three days with lenti emails, long meetings, and now it's a button for the, for the product owner, the customer service team from 26 outages, a quarter to Sera and all things to improve in their levels practices and business value. So it was amazing. So the Adidas app team, they started with 6, 7, 7 people. They report like 3000, uh, minutes free for working in real features. They escaped the teams up to eight teams, and they do the revenue by five times during the time of the Davis cup in nine months, the customer service running on Salesforce, Ali that was pushing Salesforce and telling you Salesforce on the, uh, integratability of the code on the disability of their gold, et cetera.

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And they turn themselves from maybe not cost a cost center into a value driver. So turning complaints into business opportunities are in too cumbersome for, for, for our econ, the product creation. So for me, it's a perfect example of the platforms over platforms. So we provided them with the platform from compute, for data transfer and APS, and they build an operational data like for our appropriation and they are an enablement team. So they have a goal to disappear. Now they are disappearing and they are pushing all this information and all this ownership to the teams. But at the same time last year, they already save half a familiar for this company, a team of six, seven people, or the store associate mobile, providing mobile applications to our in-store assistance. They really grew adoption multiply by 10 because of trust because we able to deliver fast and in a secure way. And even they reported that they save a good bunch of threes. That is always good for sustainability. You save, save paper.

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Thank you, Fernando. So I take the next couple of minutes and talk about how does it accelerate our business because as Fernando already said, um, at the end, it's all about speed. Um, so we see it as a competitive advantage to invest into the platform to get it at speed. So looking back around three and a half years ago, so Adidas came together and created a new strategy company strategy called creating the new, um, which were one initiative out of that is, is the platform. But in general, there was a very strong agreement in investing into digital. So where we are at the moment. So 2018 from that 22 billion, we had 2 billion net sales revenue from digital channels. And we would like to double that by 2020. So the expectations are high towards the technology and the growth. So back in 20 16, 20 17 sounds like a long time ago.

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It's just two free years. Um, we started with a very basic shop, um, and we had no app. We did not work in social. We did not do good email communication and so on. And now we have more than a hundred engineers working on the experiences across our portfolio and ecosystem. And here, it's important to say that when we set our objectives and key results for the quarter, um, we want to stay flexible and how we achieve our outcomes that we set for the quarter and the platform and the teams give us the flexibility to populate teams across the most initiatives. And they can change by quarter by quarter. So it can be maybe a new app. It can be a new experience to create, to sell exclusive products to, or target group. So it's faster time to market. As teams don't need to focus on building basic capabilities like monitoring, reporting, scaling, and performance issues were a problem in the past.

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So we don't, we don't really see that anymore based on our platform. So it's easier to scale. We have around a 1 billion talking about 1 billion views a year on.com and we see the improvement in the cycle times and sorry, and lead times around development cycle. Overall, what is important for us is the quality as well, especially when we go into the holiday season now with 11, 11, the single stay in China, which is bigger than black Friday and cyber Monday together. It's a huge day for us. Plus obviously end of November black Friday, cyber Monday 35% of our business is in Q4. So usually we don't really think about that right. Sports summer spring, but we do out of our domain business, especially in digital, in Q4. And when you look back to the numbers, imagine you do 4 billion out of a 22 billion net sales.

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It's getting very significant in the last two to three years. So at the beginning, if you have hiccups and you lose some money because you have incidents, that's kind of acceptable and you need to work through it, but with these numbers, now we need to have a very strong and solid platform in place. So there is no choice. We need to invest into it. And I'm so happy that it support priority. Um, so we dev ops helps us with site speed. So based on the platform that funder just talked about, we created a new headless e-commerce high texture on, based on APIs was a new front end. And we increased our load times from around four or five seconds to below two seconds, which is a very strong drive and conversion rates. So we did that last year. So our conversion rate overall in the shop raced by about 10%, which was way better than every other feature just by improving the site speed, no new features, no new products, just site speed, which were very successful.

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So you can see here, for example, the drop end of last year, last but not least, we want to create premium experiences for our consumers. So here's some examples we did in the last, last weeks and months, we said, now the return on investment of the platform and the headless architecture, it takes some time to get there, which is very important to be consistent in the transparency and the communication towards the board. But once you get the return, it's very nice. So we have an example here. The first one is a feature that we just launched on the product listing page, where you can buy inside of the product listing page directly. You can, you can add products to the card. So the imagery is head to toe and you can, you can click on an image and you can basically probably every product data saw on that picture.

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The second one, another example, which goes in a different direction is all about how do we release products? How do we tell the stories you can see here? The photography is, is larger. It's all about the stories and setting reminders to inform the consumer. When the product finally drops also core commerce feature. The first one around checkout sounds pretty boring, but it's, it's a huge conversion driver. You do it the right way and a very complex beast. So around the globe with different carriers, different payment methods, different risk management and scaring, very hard. So we, we just released our new checkout in the U S one and a half months ago, one month ago in the UK and this week Germany, we were looking forward. So we see really significant improvement in the card to order conversion rate. And the fourth example, it's all about telling the stories on the product listing pages.

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So for us, it's very important to do it there because they, the consumer, the consumer is not on campaign landing pages and other pages like that there on the product listing pages to on a product detail pages. And here, for example, for the product Stan Smith, we tell the stories directly in the product listing pages, which is very important for us to do so, but what I just showed you as, you know, the it's maybe good now, but it's, it needs to be good in the future. And we need to continuously invest into the platform and what is next it can find under, can talk about what is next

00:28:40

and I will lead to,

00:28:47

Okay. And I'm going to rest a little bit because it will not be the first time that I can kick out by this man from the, uh, from the state. So basically what is next? So dev ops is never done, but we are, we, we, the teams are already too progressive or too in the game to really create another demo scab. So basically it's a proposal coming from one team. We are creating what we call liberals maturity, incremental index. So we have a tech list of 70 things group in development of severability, product architecture, culture process, and with different maturity steps from crawl to run. So now will the teams, are we asking the teams to report monthly on which, or how many points have you improved, uh, how this is bringing business value? And we, as a management team, we only need to review every quarter and moving something from run to walk scientists from work to crop.

00:29:35

So what is good today? Maybe it's not as good tomorrow, aspiring engineers. So our role in a future of it in an engineering based organization is to have the best engineers. So we have created a progressive framework for learning. So each team is cataloging this technical skills that they need in the different levels. And also the trainings to get there is good for the engineers. They know what do we expect from them? They know where are the skews more hyped or more needed in the company. And they have people to help them get there through mentorship or through even job rotation. And it's good for the companies because we can't even declare future skills. Okay. AI ML, things that maybe we don't have very extended, but we will have in the future. Gamification, you see this man, right? So he doesn't like our thesis. So he's just very enthusiastic about this.

00:30:27

And also we are a little bit tight over the black. So we have created a new, complete new internet platform for gamification, where you can get the stickers. If you are good in different technical capabilities, SV mean security, uh, Kubernetes server lists, and you get one, two or three strikes, depending if you are good, if you are very good on, if you are even teaching others and contributing, you get this stickers. And if you get enough amount of stickers, basically you can get more, uh, more colors, white dessert, or even hoodies, right? This is also working like, uh, like a terminology and last but not least, what's the next big thing. So we want to, we are going to copy. We want to copy the dip of SCUP and create next year, the AI cup. So we are upskilling all our engineers in the next six months in AI ML. So next year we can announce things to our boat owners and AA cup. Company-wide I hope to be here next year, tending to you. And that's it. Yes, perfectly on time. Jean, you can not say anything and hope to see you next week.