How We Build Together — Communities at Essent & Rabobank

Would you like to learn more about communities and their contribution to collaboration and organizational learning? Organised by Young Agile Consortium & LeSS NL, hosted at Essent. Robin Jonker and Jesse Schlienkamp from Essent are sharing their insights about engineering communities and how they are a fundamental part of faster software delivery at Essent. They create space for engineers to solve problems at scale, exchange ideas, and collaborate beyond their regular day-to-day work.

While Essent does not operate with LeSS, their experience with engineering communities offers valuable lessons for organisations exploring or adopting LeSS. Many LeSS environments rely on strong communities of practice to support learning, knowledge sharing, and technical alignment across teams.

The TypeScript Backend community has been such a success that its members are now reflecting on what makes it work so well. In doing so, they’ve identified structural patterns that could be applied to other communities, helping engineers collaborate effectively in ever larger groups.

Chris Stapper,our second speaker from Rabobank, where they have over 100 communities, will share how communities are set up, what contributes to their success/scalability. He will touch on the relation to the Simplify@Scale operating model and how communities contribute to knowledge sharing and transparency. This is your opportunity to ask him questions about differences with LeSS.

In this meetup, the speakers will share what they’ve learned and open the conversation to others who are building or scaling communities themselves. Together with the audience, they will explore what it means to build and sustain engineering communities at scale, and learn from each other’s successes and challenges.

Date: Thursday March 26th

• 17:30 Walk-in
• 18:00 Pizza & drinks
• 18:30 Introduction
• 18:45 Communities @ Essent
• 19:45 Communities @ Rabobank
• 20:30 Q&A, networking & drinks

Location: Essent Headquarters, Willemsplein 4, 5211 AK ‘s-Hertogenbosch
Parking available, easily reachable with public transport

NOTE: Amount of seats is limited as we expect many Essent people as well. We will increase the amount closer to the date if possible.
Please manage your RSVP real-time to give others on the waiting list a chance 😘