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“Make the Easy Thing and the Right Thing, The Same Thing.” Day 2 at SpringOne Platform 2019

As we saw on Day 2 of SpringOne Platform 2019, digital transformation spans so much further than the technology—at its very core, it’s about the culture, values, people, and a product-focused mindset that forms organizations and creates a purpose to drive momentum forward. This means that shifting to focus on the developer experience and customer experience is imperative to success. And investing in the two will pay dividends in the long run.  Perhaps Barbara Sanders, Chief Architect at Home Depot said it best; “Make the easy thing and the right thing, the same thing.” 

The Home Depot’s Journey to Digital Transformation 

As an industry leader, The Home Depot is a behemoth of an organization. From the 400,000 associates that they support every day at their 2284 stores to their 3500 engineers, their 6000 daily git commits and the 91 percent of software that they write in-house—it’s safe to say that there’s much for The Home Depot to consider when undergoing digital transformation. 

Yet, digital transformation—and a successful one to boot—is exactly what they did. 

And the results speak for themselves. They’ve won multiple awards for their mobile software. Where they once had 70 interactions to get code live to now over 500 pushes to production a week, Higher quality software, creating an environment that is attractive to over 1000 new engineers.

So, after 4 years of a successful journey, what was the magic sauce? According to Barbara Sanders, Chief Architect at The Home Depot, it’s simple. “[We] truly live our values and put [our people] first in every regard.” One of the biggest differentiators for The Home Depot has been giving developers the tools that they want with Pivotal Platform running on Azure and Google Cloud Platform. This has enabled their developers to push code faster than they ever had before with zero downtime. 

This belief carries past just their developers to their 400,000 associates with The Orange Method, The Home Depot’s 15-week coding bootcamp for their store staff. This not only enabled their employees to be empowered and take steps in their career, but it’s also been helpful for the organization who has a high need for cloud-native developers. 

Spring at Netflix 

In a highly competitive market—video streaming—Netflix has reigned supreme. However as even more streaming competition arose, the need to make the company more viable became evident. 

For Netflix this wasn’t limited to just their platform, as they’ve doubled down on content production—spending 1 billion dollars in 2018— the applications and tools for their studios that did tasks such as capturing footage, scheduling shoots, and editing video became incredibly important. 

This didn’t even include the other applications that they needed to run a successful business. 

“That’s where the decision to move to Spring came from.” said Taylor Wicksell “There was a huge ecosystem.” 

This move has been a game-changer for Netflix, and its partnership with Pivotal has been key in the move. “Pivotal engineers have helped us out a lot,” said Wicksell “and gave us the confidence to move over to Spring.”

Now, they have more than 300 applications running in production. 

“To see that many applications running in prod, shows that we’re doing something right.” said Wicksell. 

“It’s the Journey Not the Destination” 

When talking about winning both today and tomorrow, GM has the formula. Niall Sheehan, Senior Digital Transformation Leader at GM discussed how by “letting developers be developers” and “reducing the toil” through automation  has been the key differentiator in delivering software from weeks and months to just minutes. 

“Walk a Mile in Your Developers Shoes”

Jeffery Hammond of Forrester probably said it best on the SpringOne Platform Main Stage: “Software delivery works its best when developers are highly engaged and well enabled.”

But how does one enable their developers? 

Hammond chatted to four industry leaders; Allen Chang of Goldman Sachs, John Ng of DBS, Melissa Chapman of CVS, and Rob Rose of Cerner to discuss how at their respective organizations—empower, invest in, and engage with their developers. 

Here are some highlights: 

Other Highlights From the Day: 

 

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