Internal Conferences at Tillo

Cultivating Alignment and Innovation Through Internal Conferences at Tillo

Naomi Gotts, Lead Engineer at Tillo

Photo by Chloe Hashemi - TilloTech 2025

Results:

• Cross-organizational alignment

• Shared language and mindset across business and technology

• Greater organizational adaptability

• Increased staff engagement

• Helped a 4x increase in staff

Tillo makes gift cards, rewards, and incentives simple, efficient and profitable and is challenging the market with a best-in-class, plug-and-go API that offers businesses seamless connections to 4,000+ global brands that their customers and employees love.

Naomi writes:

I joined Tillo in 2021, during a pivotal period of growth and transformation for the business.  During the COVID-19 pandemic, demand for digital gift cards rose sharply and Tillo grew quickly. At the same time, we played a part in supporting the distribution of Free School Meals across the UK, helping families access essential support during a critical period. When I arrived we had around 40 employees. Today we are approaching 160 people across the UK, the US, Australia, and South Africa. Throughout this time we have broadened our product line, introducing offerings such as a multi-brand digital gift card, an open-loop product, and a white-label B2C solution.

The challenge of rapid growth: coherence and standards

Rapid growth was good for the business, and it also brought internal challenges. Much of our scaling happened during a period of remote work, so our expanding team lacked the in-person connections that build social capital. On the engineering side, growing the team quickly brought the challenges familiar to any fast-growing platform. With new engineers arriving regularly, we needed to embed consistent shared standards, such as Test-Driven Development (TDD), and evolve our ways of working so that our engineering practices kept pace with how fast the team was growing. A common technical language mattered more than ever.

Finding a blueprint for alignment and sharing

I came into the industry from a non-traditional background. I have a geography degree and am largely self-taught as an engineer, and so I have always cared about sharing knowledge. I could see we needed a dedicated space to align our engineers, share best practice and tackle these challenges together. That was the spark for our first internal tech conference, which we called TilloTech.

To bring the event  to life I leaned heavily on the book ‘Internal Tech Conferences’ by Victoria Morgan-Smith and Matthew Skelton. The "purple book" became our blueprint. It gave us the structure and the practical toolkits we needed to plan, run and get value from our own event, and it was especially useful for looking after our first-time speakers and putting the right support in place.

Photo by Chloe Hashemi - TilloTech 2025

Photo by Chloe Hashemi - TilloTech 2025

Pivoting to a company-wide event

The original remit for TilloTech was simple: an event run by engineers, for engineers. As we developed it, though, our wider focus began to shift toward stepping up and scaling and we knew that working in silos would not get us there.

So we made the decision to open the invitation to the whole company. Because Tillo's core product is a highly technical API, it is important that our non-technical colleagues understand it as well. Our new business team needs real confidence when they talk to prospects about our technical capabilities, and our People Team needs to understand our engineering culture to screen and hire strong developers.

Opening the doors had a real positive effect on the engineering team too. Speakers had to rework their talks to make them engaging and accessible to a non-technical audience, which built a genuinely useful skill: explaining complex technical ideas clearly to the rest of the business.

Driving business value and AI alignment

TilloTech is now an annual fixture in our calendar. We hold it every October, just before our busy Q4 period begins. The main value it creates is alignment. It brings a distributed workforce together, breaks down barriers between teams and builds a shared story across business and technology. For a fast-growing, geographically spread company, that alignment is worth a great deal.

This cross-functional alignment also supports the vision of our CTO, David Kavanagh, who champions for Tillo to become a fully AI-native company. The rapid emergence of AI is pushing modern businesses to become genuine learning organisations, and AI adoption only succeeds when people are already collaborating and sharing knowledge. We are not bolting AI onto our systems; we are building it into how we work and create value.

This is part of what we think of as The Tillo Difference™. We have always seen ourselves as more than an infrastructure provider, and a real part of that is how readily we share what we learn, both inside the business and beyond it. Thought leadership is one of our core pillars, and events like TilloTech are where a lot of that thinking is shaped before it ever reaches the market. The same instinct that makes us open up an engineering conference to the whole company is the one that makes us want to share our perspective on where rewards, incentives and gift cards are heading. 

Running company-wide internal conferences has helped us build that habit of collaboration, which speaks directly to one of our company values: Collaboration is Key. We even integrated workshops into TilloTech, including company-wide AI prompt battles, to keep the learning hands-on, practical and fun. Internal conferences have helped Tillo become a more adaptable and better-aligned organisation, and they keep us connected as we continue to scale.

Authors’ commentary

This story demonstrates the power and vitality of bringing people together in person to learn, share, collaborate, and explore. The evolution from tech-only to cross-organization learning event mirrors exactly what we advocate for with Adapt Together, because we’ve both seen the huge benefits from this approach. The technology department becomes a true partner for business, and the whole organization benefits from the increased innovation and staff engagement.

Kudos to Naomi and her colleagues at Tillo for such an inspiring and exemplary approach.

Matthew Skelton and Renee Hawkins

Techniques used

• Internal tech conferences for alignment and building trust

• The book Internal Tech Conferences by Victoria Morgan-Smith and Matthew Skelton, published by Conflux Books, 2019

About the author

Naomi Gotts

Naomi is a Lead Engineer and has been working with PHP professionally for the last 20 years. Alongside a passion for Test Driven Development, helping others to learn via means such as mentoring, book clubs and internal tech conferences, working with the code is still very close to her heart. Outside of work, Naomi is a big F1 fan and is likely never far from a crochet hook, especially in winter time!