How Tomorrowland Built A Reliable Single Sign-On System by Rebuilding Their Digital Foundation

01 — CHALLENGE

Scaling the Tomorrowland Account, its Single Sign-On System

Tomorrowland's digital platform had evolved organically since 2018, managed in-house by a dedicated team focused on day-to-day operations. While the team maintained the platform effectively, the growing complexity of the SSO system called for additional strategic support.

The platform needed to evolve into a comprehensive digital solution, but several constraints blocked progress:

• Technical modernisation needs: As their platform had grown organically over several years, documentation and testing practices needed updating. Manual deployment processes, although reliable, created bottlenecks.
• Development bandwidth: Operating in the fast-paced events industry, Tomorrowland's team expertly handled time-critical tasks, but needed additional support to focus on long-term platform evolution.
• Resource expansion: While the team excelled at maintaining festival operations, they recognised the need to expand their product development capabilities to match their growing digital ambitions.
• Operational workflow optimisation: The existing content management process required a technical team even for routine updates.

The resource constraints were particularly critical, as the internal development team was already fully occupied with day-to-day operations, making it difficult to tackle such a complex transformation project.

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02 — SOLUTION

A Strategic Rebuild Beyond Quick Fixes

Tomorrowland reached out to In The Pocket to help build a comprehensive digital transformation that addressed both immediate technical needs and long-term strategic goals. Following workshops with all stakeholders, we’ve identified five critical quality attributes to guide development: reliability, security, observability, recoverability, and usability.

Our proposal involved two main phases:

Phase 1: Creating a stable platform foundation

• Rebuilding the system using modern technologies (TypeScript, NestJS, AWS)
• Automating infrastructure management with Terraform
• Implementing comprehensive testing and 24/7 monitoring
• Organising code with Nx monorepo structure

Phase 2: Strategic feature development

• Account invites for seamless ticket sharing
• Enhanced bot protection systems
• Self-service content management
• Redesigned "My Events" user experience

Beyond technical delivery, the last phase focused on organisational maturity development. Our mission was to support Tomorrowland in expanding their development capabilities, further strengthening their product-led approach to sustain long-term digital growth.

03 —APPROACH

Strategic Partnership for Rapid Growth

Tomorrowland reached out to rapidly scale their account system with new features. However, our audit identified an opportunity to strengthen the technical foundation alongside feature development. To align our collective expertise, both teams conducted comprehensive discovery sessions—mapping codebases, infrastructure, and dependencies to ensure seamless collaboration. The process involved extensive collaboration with stakeholders across the organisation who regularly interacted with Tomorrowland Account.

Rather than the traditional agency-client approach, In The Pocket embedded senior engineers and a solution architect directly into Tomorrowland's team. This integration ensured knowledge transfer without losing agility. The collaboration was based on a unified team environment, breaking down traditional barriers between external and internal teams.

The collaborative approach extended to feature discovery. Instead of prescriptive delivery, teams worked together to define requirements and solutions. We also introduced automated CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions), comprehensive testing (Jest), and infrastructure as code—modernising deployment practices for enterprise-scale reliability.

04 —OUTCOME

From Technical Transformation to Cultural Evolution

The new SSO system has proven significantly more reliable than the previous version. Key wins include zero-downtime transformation during peak festival season, test coverage eliminating deployment stress, and bot protection for high-demand sales.

We streamlined the group ticket purchasing experience with an improved ticket-sharing system. Now, main buyers only need to provide email addresses for their group, rather than entering full personal details for each attendee. Recipients then claim and personalize their tickets through their own accounts, improving the user experience for both buyers and attendees while driving account creation. Internal efficiency improved through CMS updates that enabled operations teams to work independently without developer intervention. The platform redesign also consolidated event information chronologically.

More significantly, the partnership enhanced Tomorrowland's digital capabilities. The team expanded their existing development practices into a more comprehensive product planning approach, growing into an even more robust, cross-functional team. This growth came with comprehensive knowledge transfer and onboarding processes, ensuring sustainable long-term development.

This transformation exemplifies how strategic technical partnerships can catalyse organisational evolution. Tomorrowland's digital journey demonstrates that with the right partnership, brands can revolutionise their technical capabilities while preserving their identity and core values.