Ludovic Toison
Passionate about computers from the very beginning, Ludovic programmed his first website when he was a kid and never stopped coding since. After having implemented distributed systems in Java, he became interested in deploying and operating these systems in production with a particular emphasis on observability. Ludovic has been working for several years as a Technical Architect to support organizations in adopting Cloud Native technologies such as Mesos/Marathon, Kubernetes, OpenFaas, and Istio. He is now leading an engineering organization as VP Engineering and is driven to build a high-performing and collaborative engineering culture allowing teams and individuals to grow.
Session
3 years ago, we expanded our engineering organization by incorporating two teams located on a different continent. Suddenly, we had to adopt a new working style: juggling multiple time zones, managing cultural differences, dealing with increasing ambiguities while maintaining delivery pace.
During this session, we will explore the difficulties we encountered in this scale-up phase. We will share how Team Topologies guided our team restructuring for optimal cognitive load and faster flow. We'll share our painful mistakes and how we leveraged insights from The Culture Map to bridge cultural communication gaps and foster trust across continents. Finally, we will show how integrating Non-Violent Communication (NVC) principles enabled us to turn conflict and ambiguity into productive conversations.
By the end of this presentation, you’ll have a clear understanding of the structural, cultural, and communication practices that help a technical organization scale successfully across continents.