Kirsten Renner


Kirsten is Head of IT Switzerland at Credit Suisse, responsible for IT delivery, strategy and operations for the Swiss Universal Bank. She is also the executive sponsor for the transformation to an Agile @ scale organization for Credit Suisse Switzerland. Kirsten is a member of the Board of Directors for BANK-now and sits on the Board of Business Agility Day.
Kirsten joined Credit Suisse from ABN AMRO, where she held the position of CIO International, covering all IT for ABN’s businesses outside of the Netherlands. With an academic background in physics, Kirsten spent her career at ABN moving between IT and more commercial roles of increasing scope and responsibility to gain a solid understanding of banking both in the Netherlands and internationally. Kirsten began her career as a Java developer before moving on to implementing larger IT projects, driving digitalization and successfully leading ABN’s global Agile Transformation Program.
Kirsten is married and has 3 children. She holds a master degree in Physics from the University of Amsterdam.
Talk: DevOps@Scale: Fostering an Engineering Culture
In Credit Suisse’s Swiss Universal Bank IT, we envisioned our new way of working to follow the Agile Manifesto and work iteratively and in close collaboration with our business stakeholders. As we pushed the limits on strategic agility, we set a new organization in place: Flat hierarchies fostering empowered multi-disciplinary teams, capacity-based steering, instilling an agile engineering mindset and a culture of continuous learning and collaboration. As a natural next step, we evolved our journey towards efficient DevOps and Site Reliability.
Kirsten talks about her vision and imparts key take aways and lessons learned from transforming a large organization with over 1000 engineers. She will also share her thoughts on how engineers can become even happier and continue to develop and learn as individuals while supporting the team’s vision and mission.