Earlier this month, ZGSF hosted its first Winter Summit, a peer-led internal conference for Zillow Group San Francisco engineering, product, and design team members. The event featured a series of practical talks, panels, and workshops designed to share key learnings, support personal growth and foster cross-team collaboration.

Tim Correia kicked off the event with a keynote titled Engineering an End-to-End Experience, detailing Zillow’s efforts to create a more integrated real estate transaction. In the talk, Tim shared some of the research his team conducted about the pain points consumers feel when buying or selling a home.

Other mainstage presenters provided deep-dives into what their teams are working on. Employees learned about transaction technology, Zillow’s AI platform, UX design for loan officers and closing agents, Zillow Closing Services, the Premier Agent Platform, and how we are growing our rentals marketplace.

ZGSF employees could choose from more than 15 different breakout sessions throughout the day. Topics included Understanding Multi-Stage Docker Containerization, Leveraging Machine Learning to Reduce Manual Testing, Semantic Search, Conversational AI, and more.

Our third-floor game area was home to a series of moderated panel discussions. Director of Platform Engineering, Mike O’Brien and Rental Platform VP Matt Corgan debated the role of the modern infrastructure team in an aptly named panel titled Why no Go? Software Engineer, Tatiana Ensslin, moderated a Women in Engineering panel, discussing how to navigate career challenges and celebrate successes with three of her colleagues.

The event also offered attendees the opportunity to attend hands-on workshops including TDD – Pair Programming Ping Pong, Improv – Say Yes to Team Building, How to be a Talent Magnet on LinkedIn and Cypress.io – The Good, The Bad and The CI/CD Environment.

A workshop on the ITX (Integrated Transaction Experience) Starter Kit offered the opportunity to learn about a deployment-ready base project to jump-start ITX web application development. Based on learnings from Project Islands, (which you can read about here) the interactive session taught attendees how to enable instantaneous self-service deployment to the ITX Kubernetes platform.

The day ended with a social hour, and was by all accounts an overwhelming success. The positive feedback we received from attendees and presenters has been incredible. I’m proud of how hard a small group of organizers and 60+ speakers and panelists worked as a team to build an event that lifted employee morale and promoted collaboration. Their work embodied our core values ZG is a Team Sport and Turn on the Lights. It will serve as an inspiration for the 2020 Summit and similar events at other Zillow offices.