How to drive people-centric technology change

Andreas Westendörpf knows that successful digital transformation is people-centric. From his early days as a software developer to leading transformative teams in retail and real estate, to his current role as chief technology officer at Emma Sleep, he’s learned that the most radical technology changes happen alongside a shift in company culture.

“The role of the CTO is 50% knowing the technology and 50% being an evangelist,” Westendörpf said. “It’s important to make your business peers understand what is so special about software, what is different from other real world examples of work and of collaboration.”

Westendörpf recently spoke with us about how to structure tech and teams for hypergrowth, creating an environment that fosters motivation, and advice for other enterprise leaders at scale-up organizations.

Break the bottlenecks

Westendörpf didn’t come into Emma Sleep set on overhauling the company's technical architecture. His early agenda was to understand where the business stood, which levers moved it, what the ambition of the organization was and what needed to be done to get there.

“I realized quite quickly that this company is on a really exceptional trajectory and growth path, essentially doubling its business every one or two years,” Westendörpf said. “It became clear that with the intensive scaling of the business, the platform and the teams that are running the platform did not scale as well.”

At that time, the team was working with a tightly integrated, monolithic e-commerce platform. While this worked well for them in the startup phase, as the business became more complex the platform had become highly extended and customized to meet their needs. Making changes meant dealing with a waterfall of dependencies and long timelines.

“It’s a problem that a lot of CTOs in commerce and other industries experience, that their teams are becoming the bottleneck of business development in the company,” Westendörpf said. “In order to avoid that you need to take the leap and really rethink the entire technical and organizational architecture, as they have so much influence on each other. ”

“For us, that meant going to a setup where we can design teams and technology in a way that is less dependent on other parts of the organization or the technology landscape,” Westendörpf said, explaining that Emma Sleep now works in a model where empowered product teams take ownership of different business domains such as pricing or order fulfillment.

“Looking forward, there’s so much innovation that we can apply, and apply faster, with the setup we now have,” Westendörpf said.

Make change a part of the plan

“There’s a lot of misconceptions in the business world about software, one being that software is finished,” Westendörpf said. “Software is never finished until it’s being decommissioned.”

This is especially true as businesses turn to technology to solve new problems and create new value, and as companies increasingly adopt a composable approach to do so.

“If you’re replatforming to a composable architecture you’re essentially rearchitecting your entire landscape and building it in a way that allows you to easily attach and detach things. Making the effort of replatforming not a big thing you need to do every couple of years but something you do on a daily basis,” Westendörpf said.

This gives complex organizations the flexibility to solve problems quickly. “That’s the difference,” Westendörpf said. “The amount of work it takes to change in a composable architecture is way less than in a highly integrated one.”

Challenge what’s possible

While most commerce companies now see digital as a core part of the business, many of the large software vendors still operate like they did when technology was seen as a behind-the-scenes utility that was outsourced to a network of consultants.

“There’s some resistance to be overcome from business models that are rooted in 1980s and 1990s sales behavior,” Westendörpf said. “It’s not a technical requirement; the systems are ready for that. It’s now the commercial collaboration we need to change.”

For instance, Emma Sleep uses a Microsoft platform for finance and operations. In many companies this platform would be the integral, central source of truth, but for Emma Sleep it’s just another component in their stack and the internal product team wanted to work with it in the same agile way they work with other components.

“Fortunately, we convinced Microsoft this was an important case to unlock a different characteristic of company,” Westendörpf said. “A company that wants to take ownership, wants to take care of their core processes and also wants to build the capabilities and the know-how internally.”

Ultimately, this created a strong partnership between the two companies and allowed the Emma Sleep team to work with the platform in a more agile, faster and cost-effective way. In five months they were able to launch the first country on the new platform, where the original project plan had projected a simple sandbox in that timeframe.

“You can have business value after weeks and months; you don’t need to wait years for these kinds of things anymore,” Westendörpf said.

Put in the work to build culture

Moving to a model where innovation happens in-house, and across parallel parts of business, takes a culture where teams are empowered to work independently and at full speed.

“It’s OK to not always be 100% aligned. If you get consent from everybody all the time, you’re blocking the organization,” Westendörpf said. “You need to trust your people to make smart decisions.”

Trusting your people also means clearly framing responsibilities and expectations.

“You need to make sure that you’re running the right metaphor for your culture,” Westendörpf said. “For us, the metaphor is not family, it’s a sports team.”

Like a sports team, at Emma Sleep it’s a given that everyone was brought on because they are smart, capable, and enthusiastic — and while everyone is oriented towards high performance, it’s important for people to enjoy their work and enjoy working together.

“If you enter a room at Emma Sleep and throw a ball it won’t touch the ground, somebody will play it,” Westendörpf said. “There’s so much ambition and energy in the room and there’s definitely going to be a lot of fun.”

A high performance culture comes from both hiring the right people and setting up an environment where they can thrive. Westendörpf recommends the three principles of motivation laid out in the book "Drive" by Daniel Pink: autonomy, purpose and mastery.

As a leader, Westendörpf works to create this environment by giving people autonomy to follow their own creative process, finding a shared goal that requires a collective team effort to succeed and encouraging mastery by finding opportunities for team members to grow their talents.

“If you combine those three things — the autonomy, the purpose, the mastery — and create an environment that fosters them, then you’ve done a great job already,” Westendörpf said. “It’s a hard thing to do, to be honest, but it’s very much my ambition to create such a workplace.”