Part 1: bol.com to the moon

This article is also published on https://techlab.bol.com/. Special thanks to Menno Vis, IT director Development at bol.com.

From a small online book store to an e-commerce platform with 6.9 million customers. That’s the short version of the story of bol.com so far. To create such a platform it is logical that IT is one of the most essential parts of the company’s success. But how did they get there? What are their struggles? And how will they keep up their success? I interviewed some people at the IT department of bol.com to find out. In this series of blog posts I will share my findings and focus on the IT journey bol.com experienced. In this first post you can read about some figures of bol.com, the troubles IT had when growing fast and the solution they found.

Who is bol.com?

Let’s start with some information about the company. 1999 is the year bol.com started in the Netherlands. At this point bol.com is an online bookstore in a small mobile building. There’s only a few people working here. In the years following, the company develops from a webshop to an e-commerce platform. It does not only sell its own products, but also products delivered by partners.

In the next seventeen years bol.com experiences a tremendous growth: nowadays the company has 6.9 million customers in The Netherlands and Belgium. On average the website has 1 million visits per day and 100,000 products are shipped every day. Currently the company counts 1,250 employees and 325 of them are part of the IT team. The IT department has grown from 10 to 50 teams in only a couple of years. Menno Vis, IT director software development at bol.com:

‘We are not only a web company or an e-commerce organization. We also consider ourselves an IT or technology company, because we do need technology to be able to be successful in the short and the long run.’

Growing pains

It is obvious that the company is growing exponentially, especially in the last four to five years. Of course growth is good, but it also introduces growing pains: growth leads to more complexity and dependencies between systems, teams, people and features and it introduces heaps of data. At bol.com the speed of innovation is accelerating and at the same time the company needs to excel in operational excellence. The people at bol.com experience that this fast growth is a challenge regarding scalability, productivity and motivation. That leads them to the conclusion that they need to make significant changes in their way of working and the way they design, build, deploy and operate all their applications.

Going to the moon

Hence during 2015 bol.com determines and implements its own vision, based on DevOps. In the DevOps mindset developers and system operators work together in one team to be more efficient. Also, the developers have more responsibility for their products and processes.

Bol.com’s own vision to become autonomous and embrace the DevOps mindset is called Man on the moon. The name is used as a metaphor for the challenging and interesting journey the company has made to team autonomy and the process is in full swing right now. ‘We had to adopt the way we work, how we organize ourselves and we invested in new technologies to ‘automize’ the (now) over 50 teams. Autonomy helps the company grow’, according to Menno.

‘’Autonomy helps the company grow’

So, did bol.com land on the moon yet? Yes, the company did make its first landing. Although not fully there yet, it has already come a long way. Right now the last teams are moving there and the necessary applications and tools are being moved as well, to make sure it’s going to be a nice place to live. The company is also actively thinking about new ambitious ideas. Maybe it can go even further than the moon.

The importance of individuals

Clearly bol.com is in the middle of a major leap forward. The first results of this journey already prove that the company is improving continuously: user stories per team and the amount of releases are increasing, the release cycles are shorter while incidents are decreasing. Those are good results, but implementing a change is never easy. It’s not only about implementing new tools and a way of working. Just as important, or maybe even more important, is the need to be sure that you onboard individuals: they need to be willing to change and stay with you.

John Kotter’s eight-steps model

A method I always believed in and which can be used to implement changes like this is John Kotter’s eight-steps model. I guided multiple companies with organizational changes and this model has always been a great help in these processes. During a change the model cannot only be used as an approach, but also as a checklist. When walking through the bol.com journey I realized they consciously or unconsciously applied parts of this model. For me this is another confirmation of the quality of this model. Therefore, in the following posts I will compare parts of bol.com’s journey with John Kotter’s model and use bol.com as an example how to apply these steps successfully and have a successful organization change.

About the author

Roy Gielen is an agile enabler, personal coach and change manager at Ctree BV. He is currently studying for an MBA and writes about successful responsive organizations. Thanks to this combination of skills he guides organizations and their individuals in their journey to responsiveness, keeping in mind that every change starts with the individual. He future proofs organizations so they are ready to adapt in this fast changing world.