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 and Moderator.
Thomas Riedel is a freelance tech-journalist, podcast producer, father and moderator in Cologne. His previous stations include deutsche-startups.de, Digitale Leute and Mediencluster NRW as Communication Officer and Event Manager for Gamescom and DMEXCO. He currently produces and hosts Germany’s largest Metaverse podcast „Spatial Realities“, the Apple Vision Pro podcast „Beyond Reality“ and the largest XR Meetup in North Rhine-Westphalia. In the podcast “FutureFuture”, he discusses future narratives with experts from all fields. As a speaker on the topics of metaverse, startups and digitalization, Riedel appears repeatedly in podcasts, meetups, conferences and as a tech-expert on live-TV.
