SummitOne 2019
On October 24th and 25th the XXXLdigital SummitONE took place at Panzerhalle in beautiful Salzburg. The aim was to bring all XXXLdigital employees together for a two day event to share information, communicate, network and last but not least to celebrate together!
Information Sharing
The leaders Udo Gündermann (CIO) and Maximilian Rabl (CPO) guided the team through the event with inspiring talks and valuable insights including a speech by Thomas Saliger Head of Marketing of XXXLutz; the kickoff statement by our CEO Michael Seifert being that “we want to become an innovative world market leader within furniture retail at all levels - across all physical as well as digital touchpoints!” setting the perfect tone for the days to follow.
Internal Speakers
Various teams and employees presented exciting insights on current and upcoming projects - this being highly relevant for us given the fact that we are all located in different locations and need to stay up-to-date on our broad range of projects and priorities. Moreover, it gave us the opportunity to learn from other teams while also allowing us to realize the potential for future collaboration. Our CTO, Christian Renner, responsible for our technological efforts and building up our online development team spoke about the importance of agility within our department. He invited everyone to participate in other team’s meetings, sprint planning or dailies in order to understand different workflows and continuously learn from each other.
AI @XXXLutz?
Yes, Karl Maurer, Teamlead Program Management together with his colleague Klaus Puchner talked about his latest topic of Artificial Intelligence. Their team developed the XXXLutz AI Toolbox and presented the early version of the “Pimp my Room App” which recognizes the furniture type through images and gives personalized furniture recommendations offered in our online shops.
Product Development & E-commerce Warehouse
Barbora Dörflinger & Catrin Puchberger, Team Product Development talked about the yesterday and tomorrow of their roadmap. The main focus, as always, being on our customers: After analyzing and knowing who our customers are and what they need, we create, try, test, fail, learn, improve, and then? Exactly, we do it all over again! Julia Brandner, Project Manager at XXXLdigital Würzburg talked about her physical E-commerce Warehouse project in Amt Wachsenburg. Multiple teams and brains are currently working on a daily basis to build a high rack warehouse where you can store about 90.000 pallets, with the go live scheduled for the 2nd of June 2020.
Stocklevels, Enterprise Service Bus & “digitalaktiv”
Followed by these large scale construction projects, we heard from Thomas Noitz, Teamlead Core Dev who shared insights on stocklevels: a new approach on providing up-to-date delivery-information for our customers. Martin Greger, talked about the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) where his team is connecting systems and people minimizing the effort for integration and maintenance. Last but not least Robin Küppers, CRM Program Manager, introduced his social initiative “digitalaktiv”, provided a review of past events and achievements and gave a preview on the future plans.
External Speakers & Guests
Our moderator Sebastian Vorbach led us through the program over the two days. Another highly interesting speech on Chinas Technology and #Digital Landscape, including the Alibaba Ecosystem and Chinese mobile payment usage gave us insights into digitalization, providing us with a totally different perspective on the scale and dimensions of our digitalized world. Thomas from Huberbuam then brought us back to our physical reality, to the mountains and nature which are both tied close to his profession. His motivational speech about his career as a professional hiker was also truly inspiring as he shared the challenges he faced in the past, his learnings and the physical and mental freedom he has managed to reach in his life. Andreas Gall Chief Innovation Officer at Red Bull Media House, inspired us with his companies’ approach to innovation. Their mission is to check, test play and finally introduce various forms of innovation to their stakeholders. If they see value in it, they do everything to make it happen.
Networking
During a WorldCafé different teams from all locations and departments were mixed together and had to discuss certain topics such as how to improve working together, how we can improve communication across teams, knowledge sharing and employee well-being. Moreover, the breaks and lunch together provided us with the opportunity to have a chat with colleagues with whom we usually just communicate via webex, email or slack.
Celebrating success
We reached multiple milestones over the last months, for instance the launch of the new Austrian XXXLutz online shop! A Blog article about this can be found here. Celebrating our achievements together is as important as the results and the products we create at the end of the day. Thus, our leads invited us all to a great dinner @theLoft Salzburg with a nice view over Salzburg town. The XXXLdigital team showed off their moves on the dancefloor and celebrated together until late!
On Friday our new XXXLdigital website was presented. Moreover, everyone received an award for being part of this great team. In the afternoon, busses were organized to take everyone back home, while some of us took the chance to spend some more time in Salzburg for sightseeing.
Conclusion
Within these two days we clearly realized that we already have what we need in order to achieve success - we have a great team, we all have different skills, experiences, expertise and mindsets, and that’s awesome – because we need a combination of exactly these elements in order to build great things together!
Last but not least, a huge thanks to our Head of HR André Schneider and his team for organizing such a great event!
Next Steps
Dear XXXLdigitals and our followers, the next Summit will happen.. Stay tuned for more details. What we know for sure is that that we will keep growing – so in case you are interested, we are always looking for curious and open-minded colleagues in Würzburg, Koblenz, Graz, Wien, Wels and Barcelona, interested in joining us on the journey to becoming the number one digital retailer in Europe!
Author: Julia Großbichler, Employer Branding Specialist
