Global collaboration, self-organized: The 2nd Global Tech Festival by Porsche Digital

Porsche Digital
#NextLevelGermanEngineering
3 min readNov 30, 2021

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Bringing together a global community of Porsche Digital employees is a challenge — but also a great chance to use our multicultural network. At the 2nd Global Tech Festival, Porsche Digital colleagues from all over the world worked together on solutions, helped each other — and proved how valuable a global team is.

The wallpaper of the Global Tech Festival underlines the festival character visually

250 Porsche Digital colleagues on different continents in different time zones: decentralized teams are a challenge. We have so many talented colleagues in our offices around the globe, but in our day-to-day job, sharing knowledge often comes up short. We wanted to find a way to share our learnings, problems and solutions with each other — without it becoming a boring mandatory lecture.

In March, we piloted our Global Tech Festival. Half a year later, we’ve made the event even bigger. Developers from all locations were able to dial in online and use a barcamp format to plan for themselves which topics they found interesting. For three days, they could hold their own sessions or attend those of others.

Inspiration beyond the day-to-day work

Quantum computing, machine learning, cybersecurity, and open source: we were all eager to learn more about the latest trends and developments in tech. Besides open discussion, colleagues also showcased their work in presentations and shared their learnings with the crowd. The developer community in particular thrives on sharing solutions and mistakes and learning from each other, and this is exactly where many of the presentations kick in.

The biggest success of our Global Tech Festival is to bring people together and share their experiences from their daily work with others — and thus find new solutions together or take inspiration from other markets back to their daily work.

Our special guest, Denis Grahovac, Software Development Manager at Rimac Automobili gave a keynote “Rimac connected vehicle ecosystem”. He presented what products make up the Rimac’s connectivity strategy and shared insights of the development process. From infotainment, through the telemetry system to the accompanying mobile applications and diagnostics software, built using a dozen different modern technologies.

Kick-off with an agile workshop

However, our Global Tech Festival was not only about technical details, but also about the way of working. As a kick-off to our three-day festival, an Agile coach held the very first workshop on the topic: How do I design a remote workshop? Agile methods did not only inform our festival, they are already part of our everyday work: The operating system of the digital transformation at Porsche is agility — it allows more creativity and freedom — in essence, everything that defines a music festival. To underline the festival character of the Global Tech Festival visually, we based the shared wallpaper on the Lollapalooza festival map.

Everyone had a great time at the Global Tech Festival — and we hope that in the future even more colleagues come together to talk beyond their day-to-day work. After all, as with real music festivals, it’s not just the best performances by your favorite artists that you remember, but also the people you shared the moment with. And so we also hope that many of the encounters at the Global Tech Festival will resonate in everyday work — and maybe we’ll see each other again soon at the third edition of our festival!

Alice Chan, Technical Product Owner at Porsche Digital
Axel Hodler, Senior Software Engineer Technical Lead at Porsche Digital

About this publication: Where innovation meets tradition. There’s more to Porsche than sports cars — we are developing new digital products and services — always with our customers in focus. On our Medium blog, we tell these stories. It’s about our #nextvisions, emerging technologies, and the people that drive our digital journey. If you want to know more, follow us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

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Porsche Digital
#NextLevelGermanEngineering

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