About the client
OTTO is one of the world’s leading multi-channel retail groups. Over the past 75 years, it has evolved from a mail-order catalog business into a global digital retail and services group operating in over 30 countries with 36,300 employees. In the year 2024/25, it generated revenues of €15 billion. As the largest online retailer of European origin, OTTO Group continues to shape the future of digital commerce and services.
Within OTTO, the OTTO Consumer Interactions (CI) division, responsible for the OTTO eCommerce platform, has expanded from four software development teams to 60 in just ten years. This rapid growth reflects strong success but has also created challenges in balancing innovation with efficiency in software development.
Challenge
The OTTO Consumer Interactions leaders recognized that, in challenging global economic conditions, optimizing software development processes was critical to remain competitive. The CI division needed to find strategies to optimize resources, reduce waste and improve development processes to empower dozens of teams to bring innovative customer experiences to market efficiently.
Faced with such a complex challenge, the CI leadership brought in Thoughtworks to conduct an impartial assessment of its current software development processes and provide expert advice on areas for improvement. Rather than immediately proposing generic solutions, Thoughtworks took a collaborative and data-driven approach, beginning by gaining a thorough understanding of the challenges.
Solution
As a first step to understanding the CI teams’ unique challenges and context, Thoughtworks conducted in-depth interviews with 35 people across diverse roles. This allowed us to identify key areas for improvement and determine the root causes of inefficiencies.
Next, Thoughtworks conducted value stream mapping to pinpoint areas where waste was most prevalent. We followed this with further deep-dive sessions and a survey of 177 employees to validate our hypotheses. We then explored various targeted solutions and distilled them into actionable initiatives addressing the five key recommended transformations we had identified:
Decentralized technical governance
Product thinking for internal platforms
Defining team boundaries using Domain Driven Design
Vision, strategy, and goals management
Value-based portfolio management
With those priorities outlined, we conducted a validation workshop to ensure these recommendations were implementable and aligned with CI teams’ needs.
The OTTO CI division now has a set of pragmatic and achievable recommendations for enhancing engineering effectiveness and optimizing software development processes, all tailored to its unique context and needs. Importantly, Thoughtworks’ recommendations were outcome-driven, and we provided examples of potential success metrics and how to track progress toward clearly defined goals. To guide OTTO CI’s efforts, Thoughtworks also created a clear implementation roadmap for the five recommended initiatives. This provides a strategic guide for prioritization and phased implementation of the initiatives to ensure they have the desired impact and to support continuous improvement.
While the primary focus was on reducing waste in software development, as part of this collaborative process, Thoughtworks recognized and celebrated OTTO CI teams’ existing strengths. In particular, we highlighted the high level of team autonomy, which demonstrates OTTO CI’s commitment to fostering a positive developer experience, a vital factor in strong development performance.
We were impressed with Thoughtworks’ structured approach to this engagement and the expertise the team brought to the table. It was clear that Thoughtworks had deep experience in solving the kinds of challenges we faced, and we’re confident that the recommended initiatives will enable us to enhance innovation and efficiency across our teams.
We were impressed with Thoughtworks’ structured approach to this engagement and the expertise the team brought to the table. It was clear that Thoughtworks had deep experience in solving the kinds of challenges we faced, and we’re confident that the recommended initiatives will enable us to enhance innovation and efficiency across our teams.
Outcomes
By implementing Thoughtworks’ recommendations, OTTO CI will streamline development processes and eliminate inefficiencies, helping it reduce costs and improve resource utilization while bringing new products and features to market faster. During a follow-up assessment where we kicked off OTTO’s “applying product thinking to platform teams” initiative, we provided a methodology for calculating the potential ROI of their platform products, to help prioritize which products to create or evolve. One key product was forecasted to save around 1,720 team member days in its first year alone. Addressing key areas of waste will also create an even more positive and productive working environment for OTTO CI engineers, building on the OTTO’s exemplary commitment to employee satisfaction. Ultimately, with more efficient development processes underpinning CI teams’ autonomy and innovation, OTTO customers will benefit from better products, services and experiences.
It’s always exciting to work with an organization that’s committed to continuous improvement, and we’re delighted to support OTTO Consumer Interactions in achieving a sustainable transformation to support its future success in the highly competitive e-commerce landscape.
It’s always exciting to work with an organization that’s committed to continuous improvement, and we’re delighted to support OTTO Consumer Interactions in achieving a sustainable transformation to support its future success in the highly competitive e-commerce landscape.
