Our Shop Applications Team constantly improves the ABOUT YOU App, Mobile Website, and Desktop Website. These big-scale products are each visited by over 15 million users every month. The team’s focus is to provide the most inspiring, convenient, intuitive, and easy-to-use shopping experience for our customers. They constantly challenge themselves to raise the bar of what is “state of the art” in customer-facing products.

Philipp, one of our frontend engineers in our Desktop Team, is responsible for developing new features of our desktop frontend, optimizing load times, and the scalability of the product. Philipp has an interesting journey to tell on how he joined ABOUT YOU. After his 3 months coding boot camp, he joined us and managed to grasp up quickly as he was ready to go the extra mile. Check out his whole story on Youtube on how he got on board.

The vision of a company and the internally lived culture play an increasingly important role for applicants and especially the satisfaction of employees. Especially tech professionals take a look behind the external facades of companies and are interested in the company’s inner life: How do employees treat each other, what is the motivation of the company and how does the company define success beyond numbers?

The latest survey of the German weekly magazine “stern” and the market research company “Statista” provides insights into the employee’s satisfaction of German employers — and awards ABOUT YOU as one of the most popular employers in Germany. …

In our recent article “How Work Is Really Done at ABOUT YOU Tech” we promised that you will get to know our teams & processes better. Today is the day! We invite you to meet the CRM TECH Circle — the team is part of the Business Intelligence & Customer Relationship Management Unit at ABOUT YOU.

What are Units & Circles

Teams are called Units and Circles here at ABOUT YOU. Units are divided into small circles each with their own specific objective. Every circle acts as a fast agile startup — changing the size and focus when needed. …

Supporting our employees with regular internal training sessions

We believe people should join ABOUT YOU based on our vision, our team, and our company culture, but of course, we provide some additional benefits for our employees — one example is the ABOUT YOU Academy. The ABOUT YOU Academy is a platform to actively and critically assess our work and performance in the framework of training, workshops, meetups, presentations, and discussions.

Why we started the ABOUT YOU Academy:

In a fast-growing company like ABOUT YOU, employees need to quickly adapt to changes, new structures, responsibilities, and tasks. Exciting new challenges keep the backlog full and the workload high. And at the same time, we strive for efficiency & great results. Our open company culture allows every employee to gain new experiences and learning on the job. This article intends to give you insights into our approach to active learning. Active learning is defined as a form of learning in which teaching strives to involve participants in the learning process. For us, this means active learning arises through practical implementation. With the ABOUT YOU Academy, we support employees with a variety of hands-on training that boosts their personal development and professional skill set. New employees (no matter if experienced seniors or young professionals) acquire high responsibilities directly from the beginning of their ABOUT YOU career. The company grows constantly and we are facing the big challenges that come with it. We believe in the saying, that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. …

There is a large selection of different developer conferences. Since you can’t go to all of them, for time, money or whatever reason, you have to decide which conference to go to or choose even only one for the whole year. This decision should be well considered because everyone wants a good mix of what the program is about. For most developers, good talks, the exchange between conference participants, food and the supporting program are especially important.

Promises are made by many conference organizers but not everyone keeps these promises and in the end, you sometimes don’t get much of your money. …

In our last article, we introduced our way of constantly improving in a customized way and introduced our Lean Process Development team shortly. Now we’d like to get into the details.

As mentioned in part 1 of this mini series, we try to be most efficient by cutting down to the phases, that seem to be most important to us:

• A starter activity to set the stage,
• going through former action items or action points the team worked on,
• gathering new data and setting new action points for the team to tackle,
• a closing activity to end the retrospective.

Here’s a short overview of some of the most used exercises and the goals we try to achieve with them. This is not a complete list, of course, but an overview of the ones we find ourselves using more often and with great results. We didn’t invent these exercises (see for our inspiration below) but we tweak them, to cater to our team's needs and get to the bottom of issues we see. …

Agility as the ability to respond to change in a fast way and adapt processes is at the core of our companies value system. ABOUT YOU is a tech company at heart driven by the passion to develop the best products. Our tech teams constantly need to adapt to new technologies, social changes or changing customer needs. We always strive to find solutions that are smart and straightforward. We focus on solutions instead of problems. To us, the glass is always half full. We communicate honestly and clearly, no politics or hidden agendas. …

When one thinks of ABOUT YOU, the first things that come to one’s mind are the online store, clothing and the latest trends. Yet, we are way more than just another online shop for fashion. With one-third of our staff working in IT, we are a true tech company driven by the passion to create the best product. To provide you with a better understanding of how our company works, we are starting a series telling you more about our tech staff, how they work and what they all have in common. …