Logbook of a journey: Building a platform team in a 150-year-old logistics company

This talk presents how a company with 150 years of history formed a platform team to enhance developer experience, speed up cloud-native development, and drive digital transformation in logistics.

One year ago, Hellmann Worldwide Logistics, a company with over 150 years of history, established a Developer Experience & Platform Team to improve developer productivity. We provide technology and best practices to significantly ease and accelerate cloud-native application development and reduce time to market. Our shift from traditional IT to a developer-focused approach was facilitated by adopting cloud, Everything as Code, GitOps and managed services. During our journey, we faced unexpected challenges, especially non-technical ones, when building a platform engineering team from scratch in a traditional IT environment. This talk aims to share our experiences from last year when we built a technical foundation to deliver innovative products and drive the digital transformation in logistics.