Lukasz Niedzwiedzki

Hello everybody. It's a great pleasure and honor for me to be here, and I'm super humbled that you decided to join this and participate in the discussion: the story of how we built the DevOps practice inside of SoftServe in 2022.

It's been a super great conference, two days. So I came here to get inspired. I did. To meet a ton of great people: checkmark on that. A lot of those great people I can see here today. And to give this speech.

So I'm Lukasz. I come from Poland, from the lovely town of Tychy, where we produce beer. Maybe you've had the chance of trying that. I'm a happy DevOps freak, and last year I helped my company earn an extra five million, and I'm going to walk you through the journey. Hope you'll enjoy it.

But let's start with a short welcome.

IT people. It's run by the people, and it's the community of great people working together, trying to achieve one goal and having fun.

Our mission is principal. We want to grow people, we want the business, and we want to total people practice like magnets attract relationships.

Recruiters technically were able to build the, which helped us to quickly and effectively distribute our talent, project-ready, and also reach their full potential.

The practice is a place for challenged professionals to grow, best practice. People I work with here practice, I'm able to work, technology I have to work with, to be for the client.

Taking part in the different projects allowed me to have exposure for different technologies, different products, also, with much more experience. Also working with different people helped me to grow myself in best competencies, helping people.

The best thing in the practice is that we're growing, but we're still a relatively small entity. So it means that everyone and the way we operate.

Practice, you work with business stakeholders to drive amazing results. Professionalism connected with them works. So are amazing, hardworking people who are unique field. So I know every time I come to customer, I count on professional skills on the market.

Helps my business because of all the time on technology community.

Last year we landed one of the biggest customers. Practice helps their flexibility, understanding of technical business, and ability, willing help, working together for technology, progress, expertise, community effort, cooperation, opportunities, excellence.

Right. So what you saw is the final outcome. Now let's go through the journey, how it started, because in December of 2021, there was no practice. It did not exist.

But first, who are we? Meaning, who am I representing? We're SoftServe. SoftServe is a 30-year-old consulting company where our HQ is in Austin. We have about 12,000 associates, have done over 20,000 projects, have a strong footprint all over the globe, and our centers are located both in Europe and in Latin America.

But for me, SoftServe is one word: it's a meritocracy.

Now, what is a meritocracy? A meritocracy, in my own words, is an organization where data-driven results matter, not politics. So you have an idea, you have a plan like I did, you can come to SoftServe and present it, and you most probably will get a chance to realize it coming. So that's our motto.

Now, of course, why build the practice at all? First thing, to identify a challenge. And back in 2021, when I was planning this with my boss, the biggest challenges were fight for talent. You probably remember those days where everybody was on this heated market. People wanted, people were switching jobs fast. Getting good talent that was capable of providing the value that you need was really, really hard.

And even if you had the talent, often people lacked some skills. They lacked some experience. When you were a DevOps inside of a big corporation, sometimes you landed in a project where you were just one person. So the knowledge sharing was limited to a great extent.

And our company was very rapidly growing. It was a global presence and a global growth. And as we are data-driven, we also discovered a lot about the culture differences that were hitting us. So old ways of doing things kind of didn't work in the new environment. You know, what works in Mexico doesn't work in Romania. What works in Romania not necessarily works in Poland. That was a challenge, and a pretty big one.

So at the same time, we had a lot of good things. We had a lot of things that we can offer. The company's great, 30 years of experience. We've got a super cool portfolio of projects. In SoftServe, you can work both with startups and with venture enterprises. You can get all flavors of projects and all flavors of technology that you can try.

We have our culture, so a meritocracy with a very strong perception of growing talent. For over 30 years, we've created our own university, our own career and growth paths. And also we had a ton of good unicorns, actually, because we did have a center of excellence, which I originally represent. We have our own frameworks where actually all the evidence matters. It's not about just certifications; it's actually showing code that we've done for particular tasks that can prove that you're on level.

So there's a lot of good things I identified that we're strong in: layers in technology, people, and business. But what we lacked in this rapid growth was a certain synergy and a spark. And that's how the concept of the practice was born.

But, you know, 2022 beginning was a very unstable time, an uncertain time. An uncertain time often means very failed transformations. I don't know how many of you have participated in a failed transformation. I've done it at least four times in my life, so a lot of pressure on that.

And that's why I positioned the practice in the center of those three areas, in the center of those three fields. From day one, we wanted to have our own P&L, full set of KPIs, full set of metrics, and the whole concept of creating one cloud and DevOps competence center with strong technological leaders was born and presented.

Now, you know, Rome wasn't built in a day, and no board would accept a crazy guy coming into an organization and changing everything they want. So first thing, I started with a POC. In that POC, the first challenge was to convince stakeholders that this is a good thing, that this is worth the change, that this is worth to kind of dissolve the silos, create something new.

I did that. Built the first team. So the original 30, 40 people, I recruited myself. I got them into the organization. I trained them to a great extent. We did a lot of good things, and we started creating new business value. That was not the core theme thanks to the synergy. There we go. This got us to the point that midyear, the organization said, "Okay, that's great," and the POC go into the proper phase.

That's how we started the synergy, growth, and leadership part of our journey here.

Our platform of technology and people cooperate with multiple projects. That's more or less how it looked. But the key unit that we have is a pod. I don't want to use the name squad; everybody uses it. So the Kubernetes affiliation here is also not by accident.

And each of those pods was to be centered around one leader, one technological guru who would be able to help his pod members, to help his colleagues in growing. So it's a technological leader, a business leader, but there is no burden of the people leadership and all of those things that are connected to them.

Which also gives a super cool option for any technological leader, or even any technological aspirational leader in our organization, to try it. You can enter a role of the pod lead, but then you can quit it. You can try: is this the thing that you like? And then go back.

And those leaders were the critical group because, you know, knowing 30 people, guiding them, is easy. But having a hundred people, things get complicated, right?

And I have an algorithm of success. That's my personal one, where I always repeat to people that 70% of success is motivation, 20% is personal responsibility, 5% is talent, we all need some, and 5% is luck. But of those, the critical thing from the leadership perspective is the personal responsibility. That's the key factor that distinguishes those leaders.

While we've been doing this for almost three years now, after those three years, I can say this is the distinguisher. This is what makes the difference for the good leaders versus the better ones.

We also have very clear rules and criteria. So for everyone now, it doesn't matter if it's a leader or an engineer, you have to know what you need to know for a given level, how you can grow. We're goal-oriented, and I'm super fixated on accountability. You already know that, which is basically almost the same thing as responsibility.

Now, when building this organism, what we established and what is part of our culture is, you know, like real Agile mindset. Not Agile theory. Agile mindset. People can fail fast. They can experiment. They can create their own leadership style within the organization, because as many as we have leaders, as many we have flavors of that leadership.

And empowerment, of course, in a consulting company, it's a tough thing to talk about because, hey, we always suggest to the customer. But from the organizational perspective of what we do, there is quite a lot of space for a leader to make his own decision.

A pod leader can make a decision to invest in one technology or another. He can make a decision whether we should engage our customers with some new proposals that he can see based on the portfolio of things that we do. So we're not narrow-minded. We're very much about the portfolio and broad perception of the services that we can provide.

And at the same time, I've done a ton of mentoring sessions with them, where each of the leaders can, at very perfect and good timing, decide that they need a session. Those sessions last one to two hours. We have films. We've got books. We've got a ton of materials, because not investing this incident would lead simply to the collapse of the whole thing, right? That's at least my kind of view.

And the acceleration that happened was pretty nice. Right now, as you can see on the hoodies, on the materials, or on the other swag that we've captured, over a hundred of us.

But the 2022 results in general were pretty spectacular. In times of crisis, we helped the company to earn more or less five million. There was zero DevOps on the 27th of January. On the 28th of January, that's exactly my birthday, the first one entered the practice. We're more or less a hundred now. We've had 34 clients then. Today the portfolio is over 70.

We managed to grow about 13 technological leaders, four people leaders, and four business leaders. And the fun part is that the engineers are more happy within the practice than anywhere else in the company because they have a sense of belonging. You know, post-COVID, this is one of the biggest, I would say, successes that we've got. People feel a sense of community in it.

Technology-wise, we managed to create totally new rescue problems. We've created our own set of tasks that people need to know and that people should know in order to grow. Have done a ton of certifications, but most of all, we've created a culture of continuous learning. And everybody in the practice has their own goals when it comes to learning, and they iterate upon it more or less on a quarterly basis.

And the whole thing got me and Simon, who was sitting somewhere there, an award for game changers in our company. But at the same time, it won us recognition in Poland, where I won the IT Manager of Tomorrow award. And as a reward for that award, I'm here. So thank you. She's sitting there. I love.

I want to say now what's next. And what we're doing right now is scaling. Since the model was so successful, the company said, "Okay, don't do it just in one country. Go global."

So we're growing in Mexico, Romania, Colombia, and Chile at the same time. The company in total is slowly transforming towards more of a practice model versus the traditional models that it had and that it operated in.

And that.