FFC NL 2025 TALKS
FFC NL 2025
From Bottleneck to Enabler: Our Journey to Platform Engineering
At DHL eCommerce Benelux, we scaled our Digital department from 15 to 140 engineers in a few years. This rapid growth exposed cracks in our ability to support fast flow. In this talk, we'll walk you through our journey starting from siloed DevOps teams via a centralized infrastructure team towards a platform organisation with a product mindset.
What painpoints were we experiencing and why would platform engineering be the right solution? From getting a grip on TicketOps, re-organising teams around value streams, shifting control and ownership, to dealing with technical debt, we'll dive into four interconnected domains that contribute to the success of a platform organisation: organization, culture, technology, and processes. We will demonstrate how thinking about growth paths continually guide our decisions and actions in these domains.
Whether you're grappling with scaling complexities or exploring platform engineering, this session offers practical takeaways for engineering leaders and practitioners on aligning people, tools, and processes to accelerate value delivery in dynamic, fast-growing enterprise environments.
MEET THE SPEAKERS
Marc Rooding
Director of Architecture & Digital Strategy - DHL eCommerce
With a background in computer science and consultancy, Marc thrives on building innovative products. He is passionate about technology, craftsmanship, and team-building. As a software architect and polyglot developer, he has experience as a blogger, occasional conference speaker, and open-source contributor. Marc is dedicated to delivering scalable, high-quality, distributed, and highly-available solutions.
Currently, Marc is the Director of Architecture & Digital Strategy at DHL. Over the past two years, he has focused on collaborative architecture, platform engineering, and enhancing developer productivity.
Roel Kerkhofs
Product Manager Platform at DHL eCommerce BNL
Roel is an experienced technology leader with a proven track record in enterprises, startups, and scale-ups. His diverse background spans IT, platform, and product roles, including Managing Director, CTO, Engineering Manager, Product Manager, and Product Owner. He excels at designing and executing visions for internet-scale technical architectures and has extensive experience initiating DevOps cultures and driving quality improvements within organizations.