Otherside at Work is growing rapidly. New customers, developments in our product, more employees. This growth creates opportunities. For example, we can further develop our platform into a more complete Employee Sustainability & Wellbeing (ESW) platform. This enables us to help organizations create a holistic view of the sustainable employability and wellbeing of their employees. However, growth also brings challenges. How do you prevent that growth from turning into becoming a “large, slow organization”? Large organizations are often accompanied by sluggishness and endless coordination. The result is frustrated customers and employees.

At Otherside at Work, we believe that you must truly give employees space and control. And that is not just a matter of “saying” it—you also have to work proactively to remove dependencies. We do this not only in how we develop our product, but also in how we collaborate with customers, partners, and suppliers. In this blog, Stef Roskam, VP Engineering at Otherside at Work, explains how we approach this.

Why less dependency is so important

Stef: “When you grow as an organization, dependencies naturally come with it because responsibilities are split across more people. These are dependencies between teams, between departments, between you and your customer, or between you and an external supplier. If you don’t actively manage and minimize these dependencies where possible, you will slow down. You have to coordinate, wait, consult, and that costs time and energy—both for your customer and your own people.”

Dependencies lead to:

- Delays in development and implementation

- Less agility in your product and organization

And as a result, you face more frustration, both internally and externally.

“We actually want customers to be able to change things themselves wherever possible, for teams to work as independently as possible, and for us to have control over our software,” Stef adds.

Dependencies within software teams: autonomy as an accelerator

“An important principle in our product development is that teams are end-to-end responsible for their own domains. Each team—consisting of a product owner, developers, a business analyst, and a tester—works on specific, functionally defined parts of our product. This enables them to operate independently, with as few dependencies on other teams as possible.

Architecture plays a key role here. A monolithic application is fine when you have only a few developers. But with 40 developers, you’re just getting in each other’s way. That’s why we’ve split Xpert Suite into smaller, independent modules—domain services that can run independently and are managed by a single team.

We also look for balance in how we compose teams. Where possible, we don’t split roles (e.g., frontend and backend development), as this increases speed. We also provide a strong frontend component library, so more backend-oriented developers can work effectively. But some functions, we deliberately split. A business analyst and tester in one person? That does not work well, in our view. You end up caught between the beginning and end of an iteration, and testing can crowd out preparation for the next cycle. We also see development and testing as separate roles. Good testers spot bugs that others don’t notice—it really is a specialist skill.”

As a result of these choices, teams can deliver faster with less need for large-scale meetings. Stef: “We consciously avoid organization-wide events like Product Increment Events. I have never heard anyone genuinely enthusiastic about SAFe. For example, you might be in a room with fifteen product owners, coordinating who will do what. That’s not agile, because adjustments during the process are nearly impossible. In our view, that is often the result of too much technical division instead of business-domain focus. If the backend sits with one team, frontend with another, APIs with a third, and ERP integration with a fourth, then to deliver value for customers, you’re entirely reliant on each other. That leads to those major coordination meetings, and the process becomes slow with long lead times. We actually want teams to be able to work independently, be end-to-end responsible for delivering value in their own domain, and not have to wait on each other. Of course, you can’t avoid all dependencies, but they should be solved between teams as much as possible—not with a giant planning session for the whole organization.”

Less dependency on engineering: customers and consultants take the lead

We also continuously work to reduce dependencies towards customers and customer success. That starts with how we have set up the Xpert Suite: as a flexible platform where many things can be managed by customers and consultants themselves.

“If a customer or consultant needs an engineering specialist for every little configuration change, you’re going to slow down,” Stef says. “You’ll hear things like, ‘The sprint is full, come back in three sprints.’ That’s not what you want.”

He continues: “That’s why we make sure that both consultants and customers can increasingly manage things on their own. Think of adjusting workflows, setting up integrations, creating email templates, or managing notification settings. Functions that previously could only be changed through code can now be adjusted directly by customers. This level of self-service means less waiting and more control. We’re also expanding self-service possibilities on the API side. Customers can decide themselves what data they want to export to their BI platforms, and how often. In this way, they maintain control over their data streams—and can, for instance, change underlying technologies without having to wait for us.

We also keep making progress to improve the independence of our Xpert Service Partners (including worldofwork, How2Wow, and Baker Tilly). They are now fully autonomous in setting up the system for customers. We’re working hard on the last steps so that partners can also carry out the more complex and major conversions. But for customers of average size, this is already possible.”

Less dependency on suppliers: end-to-end ownership

At Otherside at Work, we also want to be as little dependent on external suppliers as possible. That’s why we manage a large part of our technical infrastructure ourselves.

“We manage our firewalls and the virtual infrastructure on which our software runs ourselves,” Stef says. “In larger companies, you often see IT management outsourced—sometimes to a company that, in turn, outsources things again. You end up in endless coordination but have less insight into how things work in detail. We want to be able to act quickly and, above all, fully understand exactly where any issue may lie. This makes us independent of external parties for changes in set-up and for adjusting the virtual infrastructure ourselves.”

Fewer dependencies, more benefits

Whether it’s our software architecture, our way of working together, or the structure of our customer environments—everything is focused on minimizing dependencies. Because less dependency means:

- More speed and flexibility

- More autonomy and independence for customers and partners

That results in less frustration and waiting, and more job satisfaction for our teams.

That makes Otherside at Work not only a great partner to work with, but also an attractive place to work yourself. Stef: “People come (back) to us because of our way of working. Because here you have ownership and agency over what you build, and because you can really make an impact.”

The Xpert Suite

The Xpert Suite is a data-driven portal for Employee Sustainability & Wellbeing (ESW). It supports organizations in setting up processes within five HR domains: Prevention, Vitality, Absence, Job Fit, and Engagement. By combining and connecting data from these domains, a unique overall picture of the employee emerges. This enables organizations to work in a more targeted way on sustainable employability and to support happy professionals.

The portal is for employees, managers, HR professionals, occupational physicians, proxy holders, and insurers. Every user gets access that is fully tailored to their specific needs.

Want to learn more about the Xpert Suite or work at Otherside at Work? Contact us.