Jutta Horstmann

Keynote for AKDB (Anstalt für Kommunale Datenverarbeitung in Bayern), Munich:
AKDB invited me to open their yearly Entwickler:innentage (developer days) with a keynote on diversity in agile teams.
With a staff of several hundreds in technical roles, developer days are one of their means to share knowledge, learn about best practices, and improve their agile collaboration.
Diversity for sure is a key topic here - both as a challenge and as a success factor - and I was happy to see that this was appreciated by leadership and staff.
In my talk I shared "10 einfache Tricks für mehr Diversität im Team" (10 easy tricks for more team diversity), which were strongly enriched by the engaged audience, sharing their best practices, learnings and struggles.

Keynote for DIGITAL FEMALE LEADER BREAKFAST, Cologne:
In a conversation with Ursula Vranken, I shared my experiences in making a career in tech, building and scaling companies like eyeo and Data in Transit.
We discussed the need for a Feminist Transformation in today's companies and how the system needs to change - not the women.

Keynote given for FGS Global (internal), Berlin:
The keynote introduced young leaders to agile concepts of lateral leadership and cross-functional teams.
Leadership principles like servant and situational leadership highlighted approaches to motivating teams and individuals.
We defined leadership as "The ability to enable a group of people to reach a shared goal."
The keynote closes with checking into the resilience and mental health and well-being of the young leader.

Presentation given at Chief in Tech Summit 2022:
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.

Presentation at the Digitale Leute Summit 2021:
Jutta Horstmann took part with her presentation, “From start-up to grown-up. The pleasures and pitfalls of scaling an industry disruptor”, detailing her experiences in helping eyeo grow from a small player with a vision to disrupt the way online advertising works, to establishing eyeo as a large company branching into partnerships and fruitfully carrying through on its promise to help sustain a fair and prosperous online value exchange between users, advertisers, publishers and content creators.

The topic specifically showcased the elements that are important to focus on when scaling in the categories of business, product, organization, and culture. The powerful thing about this formula of scaling is that it has allowed eyeo along with its employees to move from start-up to grown-up without losing a sense of identity, for as she notes, “There’s one thing we don’t want to change, no matter how big we become, and that is that we want to keep disrupting”. She noted how essential change is for a company as it grows, but also how vital it is to stay true to your identity and to growing up together.

Opening Keynote for the 2021 Ad Blocker Dev Summit (Remote edition):
During my presentation at this year’s Ad Blocker Developer Summit, I’ll explore eyeo’s holistic approach to ad filtering, taking you on a tour of the engine room powering our products and examining challenges and opportunities facing the business model.

Presentation given at FrOSCon 2020:
Open Source communities organize themselves for remote, distributed, and asynchronous work.
Companies predominantly prefer colocated and synchronous collaboration.
Keeping offices closed due to Corona, provides a challenge - and opportunity - to combine best of both worlds.

Open Source communities naturally organize themselves for remote, distributed, and asynchronous work. Companies, on the other hand, predominantly prefer colocated and synchronous collaboration. Keeping offices closed due to Corona, provides a challenge - and opportunity - to combine best of both worlds.

At eyeo, we create the Open Source software Adblock Plus. Organizing work as an Open Source community is deeply ingrained in our company's DNA.
Still, as a company, this is not necessarily the best way to collaborate. In the last years we became more agile, more synchronous, and more team-focused.
We try to balance both worlds. With nearly half of our staff working from home, distributed world-wide, we continuously improve remote collaboration. At the same time, we strongly invest in frequent get-togethers and colocated team building.

With Coronavirus hitting Europe, we were very early to close all offices and ban all business travel. With our rich experience in organizing remote work, the crisis hit us by far less than others.

My talk will cover our best practices in combining remote work with an agile mindset, and how we addressed Corona's challenges regarding international collaboration during crisis, supporting staff tasked with homeschooling and child care, and overcoming mental health issues.

Panel discussion at Running Remote conference 2020, with Jennifer Farris, CHRO @ Terminal, Ali Greene, Founder @ Cohana, Jutta Horstmann, COO @ eyeo.

Presentation given with Sabina H. Schmitz as part of Creative Mornings Cologne:
“It does not have to be crazy at work!” - At eyeo we want to ensure that our people feel energized and focused. That’s why we constantly improve our ways of working, and provide opportunities to practice mindfulness. In our talk we want to provide some background on why mindfulness is an important concept in a business context. We will also share some personal stories on how we apply mindfulness practices like yoga and meditation in our professional lives.

With GDPR taking effect in May, it is upping the ante for privacy violations.
How does GDPR affect Open Source Projects? Specifically, how to provide Privacy by Design?
Our talk will provide insights from both the legal and the technical viewpoint.

With GDPR taking effect in May, it is upping the ante for privacy violations.

While most of the discussion around GDPR focusses on companies, we want to present the Open Source projects side of things.

There are a few variations, such as a software company running a community, and a non-profit organization, i.e. an open source software project and its community. We will focus on the first one, while also providing some advice for the latter.

How does GDPR affect Open Source Projects? Specifically, how to provide Privacy by Design?

For some time already, organizations (both companies and Open Source projects) started looking for best practises on how to implement one core concept: Privacy by Design.
Privacy by Design has been around since the Nineties, devised back then by Ann Cavoukian, Canadian Privacy Commissioner. It is about anticipating and preventing privacy issues before a single line of code is written.

This is a concept that is easy to grasp, but hard to implement. Nevertheless, there are plenty of best practices that we can share based on our experiences, implemented in our Open Source software and IT infrastructure, and want to share with a wider audience.

Our talk will provide insights from both the legal and the technical viewpoint.

Presentation at Drupal Business Days, 2017