CONFERENCE DAY ONE - Wednesday 22nd October

Day 1 Sessions

8:00 am - 9:00 am Registration & Coffee

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Maebh Booth

Senior Head of Engineering
Former Marks & Spencers / Yell

9:00 am - 9:30 am KEYNOTE PRESENTATION: Mapping the DX Maturity Journey: From Insight to Impact

Julien Roynette - Head of Developer Experience, ADEO
Thomas Rumas - Developer Advocate, ADEO

Join Julien Roynette and Thomas Rumas, developer experience leaders at ADEO, as they outline their organisation’s developer experience evolution - from understanding tech stacks and streamlining onboarding to leveraging a unified internal DevHub and fostering a collaborative engineering culture. This session will feature a demonstration and explore how they’re able to deliver a more seamless and empowering developer journey though:

  • Mapping the DX maturity journey by deeply understanding developer needs, stacks, and behaviours.
  • Centralising tool visibility and onboarding through platforms like DevHub to streamline the developer experience.
  • Building internal communities that foster collaboration, observability ownership, and shared problem-solving.
  • Gathering continuous feedback through structured campaigns to guide ongoing improvements.
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Julien Roynette

Head of Developer Experience
ADEO

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Thomas Rumas

Developer Advocate
ADEO

Introducing Engineering Productivity measurement and analysis to Lloyds Banking Group - the UK's largest bank, with ambition to become the UK's largest FinTech. To enable the aspiration - focus is needed on both Qualitative and Quantitative data points to inform our products and service to our Engineering community.

• Bank History - multiple takeovers/mergers causing disparate engineering practices - causing immeasurable friction for Engineers coupled with pressure to go faster to keep up with competition.

• Assessment of frameworks; identifying data sources; understanding the Productivity 'product' and 'customers'.

• Quantitative data measurement and analysis - what measured - so what? Qualitative data measurement and analysis - what measured and how - so what?

• Considerations from product focus - adoption, prototype feedback loops, customer influence, stakeholder influence, consumerability.

• Impact of data insights on Productivity.


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Hilary Lanham

Head of Engineering Productivity Services
Lloyds Banking Group

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Tom Kelk

Senior Product Owner – Productivity Intelligence
Lloyds Banking Group

As AI shifts from experimentation to embedded functionality, engineering leaders face a new paradigm in how developer tools and platforms are built, deployed, and measured. This panel brings together experts building AI-powered developer applications to explore the operational, architectural, and cultural shifts required to make AI work in practice.

  • Why AI represents a new paradigm in platform and software engineering.
  • Troubleshooting AI applications without access to real-world data.
  • Balancing rapid experimentation with cost, latency, and error reduction.
  • Managing data decay and abstracting telemetry for long-term AI performance.
  • The impact of AI systems on Developer Experience metrics.
  • Where AI is already delivering measurable value - and where it’s not.
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Jacob Castello

Lead Site Reliability Engineer
N26

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Dan Suleiman

Director, Solutions Engineering, Europe
Checkmarx

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Maebh Booth

Senior Head of Engineering
Former Marks & Spencers / Yell

10:45 am - 11:15 am Morning Coffee Break

11:15 am - 11:45 am PRESENTATION: The Impact of AI On Your Developer Teams

Martin Wheatley - Technical & Development Director, Envision Pharma Group

Martin Wheatley, Technology & Development Director at Envision Pharma will join us to unpack the broader implications and impact of AI-assisted development on engineering teams. An exploration of what’s now possible, what’s changing for developers, and what’s coming next.

  • What do your team requirements look like in the age of AI?
  • Demonstrating how AI can help solve tasks for developers and UX designers.
  • Where AI coding tools truly add value - and where they fall short.
  • The evolving role of the developer in an AI-assisted world.
  • Balancing creativity, speed, and reliability with AI.
  • What this means for your teams, your workflows, and your future.
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Martin Wheatley

Technical & Development Director
Envision Pharma Group

11:45 am - 12:15 pm PRESENTATION: Lessons From Start-Ups: Applying High-Velocity Practices to Enterprise Engineering

Harveer Tiwana - Head of Engineering Excellence, Ford Credit

Start-ups move fast, experiment freely, and build with urgency—enterprises, by contrast, operate under scale, structure, and regulation. What happens when the two worlds collide, and what lessons can leaders take from each extreme? This session unpacks how to bring the agility of start-ups into even the most complex environments.

  • What high-velocity start-ups do differently, and why it works.
  • How large enterprises can adopt start-up practices without losing stability.
  • Building engineering excellence in highly regulated industries.
  • Balancing speed, compliance, and innovation to create lasting impact.
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Harveer Tiwana

Head of Engineering Excellence
Ford Credit

Developer adoption isn’t automatic-no matter how powerful your platform is. The most successful platform engineering teams treat developers as customers, designing clear, intuitive “paved roads” that streamline common workflows while supporting broader innovation. This session focuses on how to define, build, and continuously evolve those pathways to drive real adoption and trust.

  • Identifying and mapping developer journeys to eliminate friction and redundant decision-making.
  • Tactics for aligning paved roads with both infrastructure and application team needs.
  • Enabling self-service without sacrificing quality, reliability, or observability.
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Hasith Kalpage

Director, Platform Engineering & CISO
Cisco

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Louis Bailleul

Director of Architecture and Platform Engineering
TGS

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Maebh Booth

Senior Head of Engineering
Former Marks & Spencers / Yell

12:45 pm - 1:45 pm Lunch

1:45 pm - 2:15 pm PRESENTATION: Exploration on AI-Driven Developer Efficiency: Tools, Trade-offs & Reporting.

David Graca - Developer Experience Lead Expert, AXA

As AI continues reshaping the software development lifecycle, engineering leaders are under pressure to identify real outcomes. From co-pilots to agentic systems, AI promises major productivity gains - but only when applied to the right problems with the right tools. David Graca is the Principal Developer Experience Engineer at AXA, he joins us here to explore how we are looking to adopt AI in software development, balancing cost, efficiency, and developer joy.

  • Unlocking and measuring the real-world productivity impact of AI tooling.
  • Understanding the difference between agentic AI and co-pilots - and when to use each.
  • Avoiding misuse: AI is a tool, not a solution - how to align AI capabilities to developer pain points.
  • Cost considerations and operational trade-offs of integrating AI into daily development workflows.
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David Graca

Developer Experience Lead Expert
AXA

2:15 pm - 2:45 pm PRESENTATION: Capital One’s Transformation Journey: Re-thinking Agile in the Cloud

Tom Morton - Director of Engineering, Capital One

Capital One has been on a journey to transform efficiency, speed, and agility through their cloud transformation. From optimising software delivery pipelines to embracing a nimble, cloud-driven engineering model, the shift has been as much cultural as it is technical. This session shares the lessons learned along the way - and how to win hearts and minds in the process.

  • Reassessing agility: how Capital One returned to its roots in lean, fast delivery.
  • Optimising software pipelines within an Enterprise cloud environment.
  • Building a cloud-first strategy for the business.
  • Driving cultural change to bring teams along the journey.
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Tom Morton

Director of Engineering
Capital One

Manufacturing companies are embracing digital platforms to stay competitive - but they bring a different set of challenges. Join this panel to hear how engineering leaders are translating platform best practices into industrial environments.

  • Understand how platform engineering intersects with OT, edge, and factory systems.
  • Explore platform strategies that work within long innovation cycles and physical constraints.
  • Identify resistance points across non-technical teams and regulated processes.
  • Learn how digital platforms are driving smarter production, traceability, and agility.
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Jean Burellier

Technical Lead
Sanofi

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Moncef Mouhouche

Digital Factory Strategy Manager
Thales Digital Factory

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Noud Donders

Former Head of Platform
Former-A.P. Moller Maersk

3:30 pm - 4:00 pm Afternoon Coffee Break

4:00 pm - 4:30 pm PRESENTATION: Platform as a Product – Delivering Real Value to Developers at DKB

Stephane Di Cesare - Senior Platform Engineer, Platform Experience, DKB

Treating the platform as a product is more than a mindset shift - it’s a practical approach to making platforms genuinely useful for developers. Standardising tooling alone isn’t enough. Adoption comes from solving real pain points, simplifying workflows, and treating internal teams like customers. This session explores how product thinking at DKB transforms internal platforms into high-impact tools that developers actively want to use.

  • How to work with platform scope and strategy and how to make them visible for users.
  • How to optimize working with product discovery and feedback.
  • The importance of the user interface and user experience of the platform.
  • Metrics and other ways to evaluate the impact of the platform.
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Stephane Di Cesare

Senior Platform Engineer, Platform Experience
DKB

4:30 pm - 5:00 pm KEYNOTE PRESENTATION: Building Engineering Excellence Through Community Learning and Collaboration

Daniel Gittins - Developer Experience & Strategy Manager - Connected Vehicle Software, Ford

Engineering excellence doesn’t happen in isolation - it thrives in environments where learning is continuous, knowledge is shared, and teams are empowered to evolve. This session, Daniel Gittins, Developer Experience & Strategy Leader, explores how Ford is seeking to foster a culture of excellence by connecting engineering communities, enabling peer learning, and embracing dynamic re-teaming.

  • Leveraging experimental peer learning and cross-team knowledge sharing to accelerate growth.
  • Creating scalable frameworks that unite siloed teams and foster shared training and ownership of engineering standards.
  • Linking DORA Metrics to Capability Building: How to use performance insights to set aspirations and guide team development.
  • Dynamic Re-Teaming for Continuous Learning: Rotating engineers across teams to promote adaptability, innovation, and cultural cohesion.
  • Building small, focused capabilities that collectively drive a new culture of engineering excellence.
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Daniel Gittins

Developer Experience & Strategy Manager - Connected Vehicle Software
Ford

5:00 pm - 5:10 pm End of Conference Day One

5:10 pm - 7:10 pm Drinks Reception