Platform Engineering & Developer Experience Summit

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

8:45 am - 9:00 am Opening Chair Remarks

9:00 am - 9:30 am Opening Panel: Platforms as Products: Perspectives from Engineering, Product and Leadership

Treating the platform like a product is reshaping the way teams collaborate, measure success and define value. This discussion will bring together leaders who have adopted this mindset and observed how it changes expectations across the organisation.

• Balancing user needs, business priorities and technical realities

• Applying product practices to internal services with measurable outcomes

• Evolving platforms based on surveys, usage patterns and long-term strategy

9:30 am - 10:00 am Presentation: Industrialising Dev Ex, Cloud Provisioning and CI/CD, How Lloyds went from 77 Days to less than an hour

Modern engineering teams can only move as fast as the platforms beneath them, and at Lloyds this meant unifying infrastructure, pipelines and security into one internal developer platform capable of supporting 1000's of engineers. As expectations rise across financial services for faster delivery, stronger controls and consistent developer experience, Lloyds' multi-year journey offers a powerful model for how large organisations can scale safely and confidently.

• Significantly reducing the zero to hero time for on-boarding, provisioning infrastructure, deploying applications using standard CI/CD pipelines

• Providing standardised Tooling, developer device & access model, a Catalogue of reusable assets & Golden Paths to put all the common templates at the Developer's finger tips

• Strengthening security and compliance by consolidating controls, aligning cloud workflows and creating one bank grade entry point for all developers

10:00 am - 10:30 am Presentation: SEB's Developer Portal Revolution: Golden Paths for Speed, Safety and Simplicity

With over 2,000 developers navigating legacy systems, heavy regulation and complex environments, SEB is building a powerful internal developer portal to cut friction, standardise workflows and help engineers ship faster with greater confidence. In this session, Joachim Karlsson reveals how SEB is defining golden paths, reducing choices and embedding compliance directly into the developer journey, creating a modern, streamlined experience.

• Creating golden paths that simplify decisions and accelerate delivery across legacy heavy teams

• Building a central portal that unifies tooling, speeds access and strengthens compliance by design

• Supporting safe AI adoption as usage increases, ensuring speed without compromising security

10:30 am - 11:00 am Morning Coffee Break

11:00 am - 11:30 am Presentation: Modernising a 35 Year Old Platform for the Age of Automation & AI

The financial services industry faces mounting pressure to modernise, yet many organisations are still constrained by legacy platforms, manual processes, and heavy governance that stall innovation. At Ford Credit, a 35 year old platform made automation and meaningful AI adoption nearly impossible. Disha Mukherjee is leading a transformation project to tackle deep tech debt, redesign the data platform, and automate core operations. This work is laying the foundation for a secure, scalable, AI ready future.

• Rebuilding legacy platforms with automation-first principles

• Streamlining data, governance, and processes to enable AI readiness

• Designing a modern platform around downstream users to ensure seamless migration

11:30 am - 12:00 pm Panel Discussion: Cutting Through the AI Noise: Choosing the Right Tools Without Falling for the Hype

The AI landscape is moving at breakneck speed, with new tools appearing faster than enterprises can effectively evaluate them. Leaders are now facing the challenge of separating genuinely transformative capabilities from expensive distractions. This session explores the different perspectives on how to build a clear selection strategy that prioritises value, governance and long term impact.

• Establishing decision frameworks to assess AI tools objectively

• Avoiding hype-driven adoption by focusing on measurable outcomes

• Building responsible governance to ensure scalable, sustainable choices

12:00 pm - 12:30 pm Presentation: Leading Talent in the AI Era: Unlocking the New Potential of Junior Engineers

AI is rapidly reshaping how teams build software, forcing engineering leaders to rethink how junior talent is trained, supported and integrated into modern workflows. In this session, Rick Clegg from Wise shares how the WiseStart programme is evolving early career development to include AI aware skills, architectural thinking and safer, more structured workflows. He shares how these shifts help teams stay fast, confident and high quality as automation increases.

• Developing junior engineers with AI adjacent skills and clearer learning pathways

• Designing workflows with human in the loop checks and safe AI practices

• Measuring progress with simple metrics such as innovation ratio, output tokens and structured feedback

12:30 pm - 1:30 pm Lunch

1:30 pm - 2:00 pm Presentation: From Tickets to Tracks: How Platforms Keep Sweden Moving

The Swiss Federal Railways (SBB CFF FFS) operate a diverse digital landscape, ranging from marketing and passenger services to rail operations and safety-critical infrastructure supporting over a million journeys daily. This talk outlines how this environment is evolving into a coherent platform ecosystem with the challenge of supporting very different needs – from long-lived, safety-critical systems to short-lived campaign applications – and how platform engineering enables both

• Aligning teams around shared platforms and workflows to scale delivery

• Applying AI to remove friction and improve efficiency where it delivers clear value

• Maintaining high service quality by strengthening coordination, visibility and platform consistency

2:00 pm - 2:30 pm Presentation: Engineering the Future: IKEA’s Evolution into a Platform of Platforms

As modern practices and not least AI, reshapes the engineering landscape, the role of a central organisation is no longer just about providing tools - it's about architecting a "Platform of Platforms". This unified ecosystem bridges the gap between infrastructure and innovation, ensuring that capabilities serve not as add-ons, but as foundational layers of the developer experience and user journeys.

To get those journeys right, we need the right context and the data quality, we explore the necessity of data liquidity and quality, ensuring that the right data is accessible, secure, and structured to power next-generation AI augmentation.

• Shifting from fragmented entry points to a centralised platform core

• Embedding AI as a foundational layer of the developer experience rather than an add on

• Offloading complexity to the platform so developers can focus on delivering business value

2:30 pm - 3:00 pm Presentation: Operationalising AI and Tooling for Enterprise Grade Maturity

Early AI tools and emerging platforms often show promise in isolated pilots, but the real breakthrough happens when organisations transform them into hardened, production ready capabilities. This session dives into the architecture patterns, automation layers and governance controls that turn experimental tech into high reliability, high throughput platforms capable of powering complex enterprise environments.

• Implementing maturity models that define reliability, observability and compliance thresholds

• Hardening AI and platform tooling with versioning, security controls and operational guardrails

• Standardising integration pathways so new technologies can scale without destabilising core systems

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

3:30 pm - 4:00 pm Presentation: Making Developer Experience Pay - Turning Engineering Effort into Business Value

Developer experience has become a priority across enterprises, but too often it's discussed in isolation from cost, funding and commercial reality. This session cuts through the noise, focusing on how DevEx initiatives can be shaped, measured and prioritised so they meet financial targets. Leo Bardelli, Head of Product Engineering at Saint Gobain & Author of the book Bridging the Gap: Turning Agile and DevOps Initiatives into Board-Level Wins explores how teams can move beyond buzzwords, apply the right metrics and strike a practical balance between innovation and viability, turning developer experience into something leadership is willing to invest in and scale.

• Translating developer experience improvements into outcomes the business will fund

• Measuring value using delivery, stability and cost reduction indicators

• Balancing innovation with financial feasibility in DevEx and platform initiatives

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

Stephane Di Cesare - Senior Platform Engineer, SOP Experience, DKB | Deutsche Kreditbank AG

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.

Stephane Di Cesare

Senior Platform Engineer, SOP Experience
DKB | Deutsche Kreditbank AG

See Bio

4:30 pm - 5:00 pm Presentation: Rationalising Tooling: Eliminating Sprawl to Reduce Cost and Complexity

Tooling ecosystems often grow faster than governance, resulting in duplicated services, overlapping capabilities and rising operational costs. This session examines how to consolidate, standardise and mature tooling choices to achieve both financial efficiency and a cleaner engineering environment.

• Auditing existing tooling landscapes to surface redundancy and under utilisation

• Standardising approved tooling through platform boundaries and lifecycle ownership

• Reducing cost through smarter procurement, deprecation strategies and consolidation

CONFERENCE DAY ONE

Day 1 Sessions