Communities within a community
“When I started working at bol in 2019, our tech community was ‘only’ 500-600 people. Now there are almost a thousand.” Michaela remembers that time well. “At first it was a kind of search. The desire within the community to start initiatives was there, but it was up to me to streamline the processes and make them work. So, I started by communicating with our engineers.”
Michaela began to map out ideas and wishes. “It quickly became clear to me that data engineers and scientists have an immense intrinsic drive to share knowledge and information. For this reason, we have created several subcommunities. Think about the Women in Tech community, Stream Processing Guild, and the GO community. Each community has its own group of “starters”; bol employees with whom we determine the monthly calendar of activities and organize events. These could be roundtables, hackathons, or knowledge exchanges. Our motto? Engage, grow and attract. “We want to continually encourage our technology employees, provide them with good onboarding and training, and also excite talented IT professionals outside of Bol.”
Incorporation of specific technology
Providing a specific onboarding just for technology has been only a recent development. Michaela explains: “The methods used in the technology are quite specific and we have created many tools tailored within our bowl landscape. For this reason, we develop multiple workshops with our engineers as part of the overall bol incorporation. In these workshops we cover our processes, but we also pay attention to communication methods, tools and of course, the community. We find that this form of onboarding builds trust from the start and new colleagues now feel confident enough to start working immediately with bowl-specific tools.”
With the addition of onboarding tasks to her workload and a significant influx of new engineers, Michaela found herself in need of help. A new colleague joined, quickly followed by another. “Now I have moved into a leadership position, where I deal with much more than just community orientation,” he reflects. “No day in the bowl is the same for me and my role knows very few limits. That’s what really excites me about my job: I have the freedom to shape it according to my vision. The trust they have given me from day one is incredibly rare and special, and I value it immensely.”
