10 years of Meet Magento DE! 13 editions of the event! Five different event locations in Leipzig. Two events in Frankfurt at the beginning.

Meet Magento DE is one of the oldest Meet Magento events and thus the “Mothership” of the event series. In 2009 for the first time organized by Netresearch GmbH, especially Thomas Fleck and Rico Neitzel, the event went on to Meet Magento Association and now into the hands of the TechDivision GmbH. In the last five years, around 3,000 participants have passed through the Meet Magento gates – only in Leipzig. Since 2016 the MMDE has been supported by more than 290 speakers and 260 sponsors, exhibitors and partners.

10 years Meet Magento DE – but not only in Germany the event format is well-known. Meet Magento is understood worldwide as a platform for networking and exchange between all players in the Magento ecosystem. In more than 30 countries worldwide a Meet Magento event has been organized. This shows the unique spirit of the Magento community.

For the tenth anniversary, we were able to present the participants an exciting program with renowned speakers from business, technology and the international Magento community, where the entire Magento ecosystem got its money’s worth. Besides many well-known "Magento faces" such as Carmen Bremen, Christian Münch, Riccardo Tempesta or Jisse Reitsma we could welcome representatives of Adobe, Microsoft, PayPal and Google as well as Magento customers like Amorelie, Navabi and Design Bestseller on our stages. This year a jury of six experts advised us on the selection of the talks. The aim was to select jurors with different backgrounds in order to receive the broadest possible feedback representing all participant groups.

As in the previous year, the talks were assigned to different tracks or topic blocks. In addition to Business Strategies, B2B, Technology and Best Practices, the track “Innovations”, which was dedicated to new ideas and developments, was added this year.

Agency Meeting on Sunday, June 2

Together with our lead sponsor PayPal we organized an agency meeting for all German-speaking Magento agencies on Sunday before Meet Magento DE. The aim was to create a space to exchange ideas and discuss current challenges and developments. After Stefan Willkommer shared facts and news from Magento Imagine, which took place from 13th to 15th May, we went to various discussion and workshop rounds on topics such as migration to Magento 2, Adobe & Magento – Future, exchange of initial experiences, Magento B2B, recruiting and much more. We were very happy about the good exchange and would like to take this opportunity to thank PayPal for sponsoring this pre-event.

To thank the sponsors and speakers who are the foundation of a Meet Magento event, we invited to the annual Speaker & Sponsor Get Together at pentahotel Leipzig on Sunday evening after the agency meeting. During a tasty barbecue the first contacts could be made in a relaxed atmosphere and we got in the right mood for the upcoming days.

Also on Sunday we made the final preparations for Meet Magento DE 2019. The Meet Magento team welcomed the exhibitors, who came to KONGRESSHALLE am Zoo Leipzig to build their booths, glued wings and floor stickers, packed goodie bags, moved furniture, installed gobos, assembled furniture, moved them again…

The First Event Day

After moderator Tobias Niebergall (COO, e3N GmbH) and Anna-Maria Müller (Head of Meet Magento DE, TechDivision GmbH) opened Meet Magento DE 2019 on Monday morning, the Adobe/Magento keynote followed. Instead of Jason Woosley, who unfortunately was unable to speak at short notice, we were delighted with the keynote from Peter Sheldon (Senior Director Strategy, Magento, an Adobe Company), who focused on Cloud, AI and PWA with corresponding product innovations in these areas.

In his keynote, Peter addressed the acquisition of Magento by Adobe, which was about a year ago. According to Peter, this is the opportunity for Magento and the Magento ecosystem to gain a foothold in large companies. With Magento in its portfolio, Adobe can now map the entire customer journey.
In addition, Peter reported that Progressive Web Apps are already a strategic focus for Magento and that a lot is planned for the future. He asked the participants to try out the PWA Studio and give Magento feedback.

After the keynote the talks started at 11:20 a.m. in four single session rooms. Dr. Kai Hudetz, Managing Director of IFH Köln and one of the leading e-commerce experts in the German-speaking area, highlighted online trading in the age of platforms such as Amazon, Zalando & Co. Jaromir Fojcik presented in his talk 10 ways how to drive Magento projects against the wall and gave practical tips for a correct project management to prevent exactly this failure. The “Usability Pope” Johannes Altmann focused his presentation on “The MVP from Hell”. Dr. Matthias Orthwein, one of the leading German IT lawyers of the renowned law firm SKW Schwarz, provided clarity as to where the journey with digital transformation is heading from a legal point of view in the next few years.

The first day also provided some highlights for those interested in technology. We are still very happy that we could win PHP guru Stefan Priebsch as speaker for Meet Magento. Both Jisse Reitsma and Andrey Lipattsev from Google gave exciting insights into the trend theme Progressive Web Apps.
The successful “Merchant to Merchant” format introduced in 2017, in which merchants themselves stand on stage and share their experiences, best practices, project successes, but also challenges and fuck-ups, went into its third round this year. With talks from Amorelie, Navabi and Design Bestseller, the foundation was laid again this year for exchange and discussion from merchant to merchant.

Especially interesting was the talk by Dr. Cornelia Heyde from Microsoft entitled “New Work & Old Leadership? – The Transformation of Collaboration and Leadership in the Digital Age”, which highlighted the success of Microsoft especially in the recent past through successful transformation approaches by means of some very comprehensible approaches and examples.

Sonja Riesterer from integer_net again organized the Welcome Wagon for all Meet Magento newcomers in the morning of the first day of the event with the aim of facilitating the first contact for all and providing a contact point for questions and ambiguities. Thank you very much for the great organization and your contribution, Sonja. In general, so many requests from the community have reached us this year to help us with the organization. This is exactly what makes the work around Meet Magento DE so great.

In the evening of the first event day the after-show party took place in the Moritzbastei Leipzig. Also in 2019 we booked more rooms to react to the increasing interest in MMDE. So the participants could dance on the dancefloor and dine at the rich buffet, gamble at retro game consoles and serve themselves at the barbecue buffet in the inner courtyard. Many thanks to everyone who celebrated the tenth birthday of Meet Magento DE so exuberantly with us at the party – even though we couldn’t toast with every single one. And a big thank you to maxcluster, who sponsored the party again in 2019.

The Second Event Day

The second day of Meet Magento DE 2019 started with Christoph Kull (Vice President & Managing Director Central Europe – Adobe), who explained that Customer Experience is a crucial component and key to success in winning and supporting customers.

On the second day, the keynote talks were again followed by talks in the four session rooms. On Tuesday, the main focus was on topics for developers and the Magento community – but business topics were not neglected either.
The developers could look forward to topics like “The Phenomenon of Community Engineering” from the Head of Magento Community Engineering Max Yekaterynenko, “Asynchronus Import” from Alex Lyzun (Comwrap) or e.g. “Magento 2 Automated Testing with Docker” from Paul Siedler and Benjamin Heuer (Netresearch).
Other topics on the agenda on 4 June included a Tom Dixon Case Study, Agile Project Management, Headless Magento, How to Build a Magento Dream Team and much more.

Once again this year we have done a lot to attract more female speakers to the program. Nine female speakers out of a total of 54 are not yet a figure with which we want to be satisfied, but the proportion has certainly increased compared with recent years. We will continue to work on getting even more women interested in Meet Magento in general and the stage in particular. In the run-up to Meet Magento DE, the cooperation with “moinworld” – a non-profit association with the aim of increasing the proportion of female developers and employees in the IT sector to 50% – definitely helped us.
Many thanks also to Carmen Bremen and Claudia Teubner, who gave a talk on second event day on the important topic of diversity and also shared experiences of female developers and non-developers in the Magento environment with us.

For many who visited Meet Magento DE on June 3 & 4, it was already the 3rd, 5th or 8th visit. For some it was even the tenth time they were there. For some colleagues at TechDivision as new organizer the first time and for Anna already the fourth time that she has organized the event. We all agreed that Meet Magento is a very special event that is just fun and imparts a lot of knowledge.

Many thanks to everyone who has made Meet Magento a place for exchange, networking, fun and above all friendship since 2009.

Everything else, like photos, videos and much more about Meet Magento DE 2019 can be found here.