Designing the Digital Future at Porsche: SAFe Customer Keynote

Learn how the separate worlds of vehicle engineering and IT came together at Porsche to reimagine the sports car of the future.

Revolutionary things can happen when pizza is being served. You’ll find out why when you join Porsche visionaries Mattias Ulbrich and Dr. Oliver Seifert for a candid discussion about transforming one of the world’s most iconic motoring brands into a digital-first pacesetter.

As huge technological advances usher in an automotive renaissance, Porsche is moving at top speed to meet the evolving needs of their customers. They are fully focused on making their cars a central element of their buyers’ lifestyle through digitalization, connectivity, and electromobility. This requires business agility, a new mindset, and a new way of working together. It also requires vehicle engineering and software teams to collaborate closely and to harmonize the differing speeds at which they traditionally work. This might have been daunting for any company that is as storied and successful as Porsche.

“The most important thing is that you shouldn’t underestimate that the digital world is totally different from the physical world,” says Ulbrich.

But Porsche didn’t let this slow them down. To build bridges between the groups, the company created new opportunities for people to talk, learn, and understand each other. They created the Porsche “Takt,” the heartbeat that synchronizes the teams. They focus on results and communicate the vision in a way that motivates people to visualize opportunities in change.

Says Ulbrich, “If you look right now in a team, you couldn’t distinguish whether a person is from R&D, IT, sales, or marketing. They work together.”

Presented at the 2021 Global SAFe Summit, October 2021 by:
— Mattias Ulbrich, Chief Information Officer of Porsche AG and CEO of Porsche Digital
— Dr. Oliver Seifert, Vice President R&D Electric/Electronics /Porsche AG
— Interviewer: Michael Clarkin, Chief Marketing Officer, Scaled Agile, Inc.