Session: Scaling culture - How to nurture a coherent company culture amidst change and growth
At eyeo, we are a company built around a strong, inclusive culture. A blend of people who share a vision for a better online ecosystem, where content remains widely accessible, and all stakeholders of the internet can profit from a fair, sustainable value exchange. Thus, scaling that culture as we grow, preserving the pieces that make eyeo special, has been one of our most important challenges. The last ten years have seen us embark on the journey from start-up to grown up: we’ve gone from 2 to 14 products, from 16M to 225M users worldwide, from 6 to 250 people, coming from >35 nationalities. And we’re not done: we are working together toward ambitious goals to reach enough market scale to make a lasting impact, all while defending user control and an exceptional user experience.
Thus, we’d like to share some of the experiences we’ve gathered along the way, the complications, the successes, but also offer some insight into the pillars of that culture-scaling as we see it. How do we, as leaders and gatekeepers of the essence of the company's values, preserve what is important about our culture while scaling to accommodate necessary growth? For us, that has meant many things, though specifically four core elements: clarity, story telling, diversity, and breaking down silos with the support of organizational design. We also, more generally, had to learn to embrace change and allow people to grow with the company. Of course, there’s a lot more to it, as we would illustrate in further depth in the presentation. Knowledge is meant to be shared (as any open-source-minded company will attest), and we look forward to sharing what we’ve learned with others.
Bio
As a computer science graduate with over 20 years of experience in the IT sector, Jutta founded her own software development company and grew it over a decade. She then moved into IT consultancy and organizational transformation, bringing this experience to eyeo since 2017. Today, Jutta holds a double role (COO and CTO) at eyeo.
In organizational development, she aims for excellence in execution, based on high-performance, self-organizing, agile teams.
In technology, she explores what ad filtering can and will be in the future, moving from desktop to mobile and beyond.
And she ensures that all of this happens in a welcoming and friendly environment, where diversity is appreciated and people feel valued.