CONFERENCE DAY ONE - Wednesday 21st October

Early Morning Sessions

8:00 am - 8:45 am Registration & Breakfast

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

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

Leo Bardelli - Global Head of Product Engineering, Saint-Gobain
Jean Burellier - Principal Software Engineer, Sanofi

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

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Leo Bardelli

Global Head of Product Engineering
Saint-Gobain

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Jean Burellier

Principal Software Engineer
Sanofi

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

Andrew Page - IDP Lab Technical Product Owner, Lloyds Banking Group
Tony Phillips - DevOps Engineering Lead, Lloyds Banking Group

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

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Andrew Page

IDP Lab Technical Product Owner
Lloyds Banking Group

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Tony Phillips

DevOps Engineering Lead
Lloyds Banking Group

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

Joachim Karlsson - Head of Developer Experience, SEB

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

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Joachim Karlsson

Head of Developer Experience
SEB

Morning Speed Networking and Coffee

10:30 am - 11:00 am Morning Networking and Coffee

Late Morning Sessions

Stream A: Platform Engineering & Developer Experience

11:00 am - 11:30 am Presentation: Talk Details to be Announced


Stream A: Platform Engineering & Developer Experience

11:30 am - 12:00 pm Presentation: When 70% of Your UI Is AI Generated: Re Architecting Frontends for Control, Trust and Scale
Vikesh Mittal - Head of Digital Experience Engineering, State Street

As LLMs, autonomous agents, and AI-assisted development tools reshape user interfaces, traditional frontend architectures are buckling under the weight of runtime assembly, probabilistic flows and unclear governance. Drawing on deep architectural research and practical system design, Vikesh Mittal explores what changes when large portions of the UI are composed dynamically by AI, and why existing component driven models are no longer sufficient. This session introduces a new way of thinking about frontend platforms as controlled orchestration layers, where intent, capability and policy guide AI generated experiences without sacrificing usability, accessibility, security or trust.
• Redesigning frontend platforms to support AI generated and agent driven interfaces safely at runtime
• Separating intent, capability and presentation to give AI flexibility without losing control
• Embedding governance, observability and human in the loop safeguards directly into the UI layer

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Vikesh Mittal

Head of Digital Experience Engineering
State Street

Stream A: Platform Engineering & Developer Experience

12:00 pm - 12:30 pm Panel Discussion: Cutting Through the AI Noise: Choosing the Right Tools Without Falling for the Hype
Ionel Condor - Director of Engineering, RWS
Mark O'Brien - Director of Product, Shutterstock
Michael Solan - Senior Product Manager, SBB CCF FFS

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

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Ionel Condor

Director of Engineering
RWS

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Mark O'Brien

Director of Product
Shutterstock

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Michael Solan

Senior Product Manager
SBB CCF FFS

Stream A: Platform Engineering & Developer Experience

12:30 pm - 1:00 pm Presentation: Engineering the Future: IKEA’s Evolution into a Platform of Platforms
Maj-Britt Christensen - Vice President of Platform Engineering, IKEA
Harish Sankar - Senior Software Engineer, IKEA

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

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Maj-Britt Christensen

Vice President of Platform Engineering
IKEA

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Harish Sankar

Senior Software Engineer
IKEA

Stream B: Roundtables

11:00 am - 12:00 pm Roundtable Discussion: Moving Faster Without Breaking Things — Risk in AI Accelerated Engineering
Parthiban Rajasekaran - Principal Engineer, Capital One

AI tools like GitHub Copilot and Claude are accelerating delivery speed, but many teams are seeing reliability incidents rise alongside velocity. This workshop examines why AI assisted development exposes new failure modes and how platform teams can introduce safeguards that preserve reliability without slowing progress. Drawing on examples from regulated FinTech environments, the session focuses on observability gaps, risk signals and quality first practices that help teams recognise when speed becomes unsafe.
• Observability gaps introduced by AI generated and AI assisted code
• Signals that indicate when velocity has crossed into unsustainable risk
• Quality first patterns that protect reliability without creating bottlenecks


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Parthiban Rajasekaran

Principal Engineer
Capital One

Lunch

1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Lunch

Early Afternoon Sessions

Stream A: Platform Engineering & Developer Experience

2:00 pm - 2:30 pm Presentation - Session details to be Announced


Stream A: Platform Engineering & Developer Experience

2:30 pm - 3:00 pm Presentation: From Tickets to Tracks: How Platforms Keep Switzerland Moving
Michael Solan - Senior Product Manager, SBB CCF FFS

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

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Michael Solan

Senior Product Manager
SBB CCF FFS

Stream A: Platform Engineering & Developer Experience

3:00 pm - 3:30 pm Presentation: Operationalising AI and Tooling for Enterprise Grade Maturity
Jean Burellier - Principal Software Engineer, Sanofi

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

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Jean Burellier

Principal Software Engineer
Sanofi

Stream B: Roundtables

2:00 pm - 3:00 pm Roundtable Discussion: User Centric SLOs and Resilience Testing: Measuring What Really Matters
Chris Skaaning - Senior Lead Site Reliability Engineer, JP MorganChase

Grounded in a decade of applying DevOps and SRE principles in real engineering environments, this roundtable brings together engineering leaders to discuss how to define SLOs that truly reflect user impact. The session focuses on designing user journey specific SLOs, selecting the right indicators, and testing assumptions through active resilience (chaos) testing, helping teams better understand, monitor, and own the reliability of their applications.
• Designing user journey driven SLOs that capture real customer impact when things go wrong
• Selecting meaningful indicators and signals that help teams understand and own their application behaviour
• Using active resilience (chaos) testing to validate SLOs, strengthen monitoring, and expose blind spots before incidents occur

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Chris Skaaning

Senior Lead Site Reliability Engineer
JP MorganChase

Afternoon Coffee Break

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

Late Afternoon Session

4:00 pm - 4:30 pm Afternoon Keynote Presentation: Software Factories: Scaling Agentic Delivery

Gus Shaw Stewart - Strategic Solutions Engineer, Port.io
As AI agents move from assistants to primary builders, teams face a new governance problem: how do you scale agentic workflows across hundreds of repos, multiple teams, and different tech stacks? The single-repository playbook breaks down. This session covers what enterprises actually need - orchestration, context management, cost control, and audit trails - to turn agentic delivery into a reliable, governed platform capability. We'll walk through the architecture of a software factory and show how platform teams can operationalize AI-native delivery without losing control.

The Shift
  • Code is no longer the bottleneck; planning, review, and governance are
  • Traditional SDLC workflows built around coding time need redesign
  • Agentic workflows flatten hierarchy- agents route work autonomously
What Breaks at Scale
  • Single-repo playbooks don't translate to multi-team, multi-repo environments
  • Context fragmentation (scattered docs, tribal knowledge, tool silos)
  • No visibility: cost per feature, agent behavior, artifact quality, audit trails
  • Governance defined at repo level can't enforce org-wide policy
  • Agent access control and permissions become critical
Architecture of an Enterprise Software Factory
  • Workflow orchestration (intent > spec > plan > build > test > deploy as automated pipeline)
  • Context layer (centralized knowledge graph vs. scattered markdown files)
  • Agent registry and governance (who can use what, with what constraints)
  • Observability tier (cost tracking, quality scoring, lead time, failure modes)
  • Human-in-the-loop decision points (where humans actually add value)
Live Demo
  • Feature request moves through intent > spec > plan workflow
  • Control plane shows org-level visibility across all teams, all factories
For Platform Teams
  • This is your next evolution - you now own agentic delivery governance
  • Start small: one workflow, one team, get the pattern right
  • Build incrementally: add repos, add teams, add policies as you scale


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Gus Shaw Stewart

Strategic Solutions Engineer
Port.io

4:30 pm - 5:00 pm Afternoon Keynote Panel Discussion: Proving Platform ROI: Metrics That Matter and How to Use Them

Elcio Abrahao - Platform Director, Syngenta
Uğur Başak - Director of Engineering, TomTom
Carlos Costa - Global Director of Data & AI Foundations, Adidas

It's no longer enough to say a platform "improves developer experience", leaders need quantifiable evidence of impact on delivery speed, reliability and cost. This panel unpacks how organisations define, measure and communicate platform ROI using hard metrics that resonate with technical and business audiences.

• Selecting performance indicators that correlate engineering activity with business value
• Measuring the impact of platform adoption on velocity, reliability and unit economics
• Communicating ROI effectively to secure long term investment and organisational buy in

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Elcio Abrahao

Platform Director
Syngenta

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Uğur Başak

Director of Engineering
TomTom

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Carlos Costa

Global Director of Data & AI Foundations
Adidas

5:00 pm - 5:30 pm Afternoon Keynote Presentation: Making the Developer Experience Pay - Turning Engineering Effort into Business Value

Leo Bardelli - Global Head of Product Engineering, Saint-Gobain

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

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Leo Bardelli

Global Head of Product Engineering
Saint-Gobain

5:30 pm - 5:40 pm End of Conference Day One

5:40 pm - 7:40 pm Drinks Reception