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Transforming Decathlon's E-commerce Design Organisation at Scale

  • Led the transformation of Decathlon’s global Lower Funnel design organisation, spanning people, product strategy, and operating model.

  • Rebuilt the design operating model, embedding design and customer insight earlier into product discovery and strategic decision-making.

  • Defined a unified customer experience vision and aligned Product, Engineering, Design, and senior stakeholders around long-term priorities.

  • Elevated Design from a delivery function to a strategic partner to Product and Engineering, influencing product direction and investment decisions.

  • Defined the AI strategy for the post-purchase customer journey, identifying where AI could create meaningful customer and business value.

  • Led customer research, competitive benchmarking, and cross-functional co-creation to identify and validate AI-powered product opportunities.

  • Built a portfolio of evidence-backed concepts and strategic opportunities supporting business growth and the evolution toward AI-powered commerce.

  • Led organisational change while strengthening design leadership, collaboration, quality, and strategic impact at scale.

Executive Summery

I joined Decathlon Digital during one of the company's most ambitious transformations: unifying more than 50 e-commerce teams across 15 countries into a single global digital organisation capable of supporting €30B in e-commerce revenue by 2030.

 

I was brought in to co-lead the Lower Funnel organisation, covering the customer journey from purchase through post-purchase across a business worth €560M and growing 13% year over year.

My scope expanded twice during my tenure. After initially leading the Lower Funnel design organisation, I assumed responsibility for CRM and Identity following a leadership gap, before later stepping into the overall leadership of E-commerce Design after my manager's departure.

The Challenge

The business ambition was enormous.

 

The organisation was not: The design function lost 27% of its headcount, leaving just 15 active individual contributors to support a roadmap that required more than twenty-one. At the same time, the organisation was expected to deliver €31M in GMV growth and €1.7M in operational savings within a single year.

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Beyond capacity, the problems were systemic:

The organisation operated like a feature factory. Product teams received prescriptive OKRs, discovery happened too late, and design was often treated as the final execution layer rather than a strategic partner. Customer journeys reflected internal organisational silos instead of customer needs, leaving no senior owner responsible for the end-to-end experience. Meanwhile, the team itself was experiencing burnout, with no middle management, limited coaching, and reactive ways of working.

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The challenge wasn't simply improving design quality.

It was transforming an overstretched design organisation into a strategic product partner while continuing to deliver against aggressive commercial targets

My Strategy

The business, operational, and experience problems were tangled together, the team couldn't win back strategic autonomy without first having the capacity to think past next sprint, and it couldn't fix capacity without a structure that made sense. So I worked all three at once, treating org design, ways of working, and vision as a single system rather than three separate initiatives. This informed my strategy which was refined over time during my 2 year stay at Decathlon Digital under the following pillars

1. Rebuilding the Organisation

The team I inherited had no middle layer, no DesignOps, no clear management tier between ICs and me  which meant every escalation, every prioritization call, every people issue landed on one desk.

1. Organisation Map

I mapped the gap and proposed a structure built for the size of the mandate: a Director of Design, three Design Managers aligned to Product and Engineering counterparts, three to four Senior Design Leads acting as player-coaches, and six to seven Product Designers, plus dedicated UX Research and Content Design roles woven into the squads rather than pooled centrally.

2. Maturity Map

I paired that with a maturity map across all four domains  Upper Funnel, Lower Funnel, App, Circularity scored by business impact and design complexity, so headcount requests stopped being a gut call and started being a resourcing argument grounded in where the business actually needed design attention.

3. Capacity building

 Rebuilding structure meant rebuilding people alongside it. I ran a training budget that had been managed reactively. Each person had an annual allowance but no one could see it in real time into a centralized tracking system so managers could actually plan upskilling instead of approving it ad hoc.

4. Personal Development plans:

I pushed for 100% of the team to have a real Individual Development Plan by Q1 2025, with monthly check-ins and craft reviews, and used specific growth moves stretching a design-systems specialist into a generalist, more strategic role, for instance as proof that career paths existed even inside a team that was underwater.

5. Crisis and resource management

And because burnout was the honest starting point, not a footnote, I put a named plan in place to cut overtime by 20% by building roadmap capacity planning that included actual breathing room in the sprint, alongside smaller, unglamorous fixes quiet workspace, regular retros, ways for a distributed team to actually know each other.

6. Raising the floor on craft

Alongside the big strategic bets, I pushed process maturity that doesn't show up in a highlight reel but changes how a team actually works day to day: splitting UX research into strategic (owned by researchers, sitting in roadmap and OKR conversations) and tactical (democratized to designers and PMs, so research stopped being a bottleneck for simple validation), and building accessibility into the default workflow  checklists, annotations, and design reviews ahead of the EU Accessibility Act deadline, rather than treating it as an audit response after the fact.

1. Redefined team allocation

I rewrote how the team's capacity was allocated and made that allocation the actual narrative I took to leadership: roughly half the team's effort went directly at business outcomes: conversion, localization, the metrics leadership cared about with the rest split across team health, finishing the long-term vision, and closing compliance risk (the EU Accessibility Act deadline chief among them). 

2. Design presence being non-negotiable

Alongside that, I made design's presence non-negotiable at the start of the process rather than the end: design now had to be in the room at Phase 0 of discovery for every key initiative, and nothing shipped as a "revamp" release without a design sign-off. That single change moved the team from being handed problems already half-solved by someone else, to being the ones framing what the problem was in the first place.

3. Unifying a fragmented customer journey.

Different, Customer Growth and Lower Funnel and Payments  had been designing overlapping parts of the same customer journey without talking to each other, which is a large part of why the product felt like several products stitched together. 

1. Discovery Sprints

I ran cross-team discovery sprints that put both teams' designers, researchers, Engineers and PMs in the same room, first to map where their work actually overlapped and where ownership was genuinely unclear.

2. Mapped Opportunities:

To align on what customers were actually trying to do using jobs-to-be-done framing, and finally to sketch toward a shared future state rather than two competing ones. 

3. Hypothesis and Validation

Underneath that sat real research, not assumption: an audit across eight markets, mapping qualitative feedback and hard analytics  login perceived as high-effort, a meaningful share of checkout abandonment, loyalty points sitting unredeemed for one in five members onto the actual journey, so every argument for what to fix next had evidence behind it, not opinion.

4. Defining the Experience North Star

Research fed into an "Experience North Star"  a small set of principles that gave every team, regardless of which silo they sat in, the same yardstick to design against.

  1. Put the user's real need first, 

  2. No decoration for its own sake

  3. Build trust through transparent pricing and policy, 

  4. Design for a future where the product itself is legible to AI

5. Defining the Big Bets

All the above fed three "big bets" for the next three years that was negotiated with and aligned with the product leadership. None of these shipped as finished products on my watch  this was vision-and-alignment work, not delivery but each was sized against real financial upside and used to shift budget and roadmap conversations from "which feature should we build" to "which of these opportunities are we going after. 

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  1. a unified digital wallet that turned scattered gift cards, refunds, and loyalty points into one spendable balance

  2. a universal, one-click checkout and a payments widget built to work identically across web, app, and in-store; 

  3. A single account hub that merged orders, membership, and support into one place instead of three. 

4. Building for what was coming next, deliberately.

With a team this stretched, the temptation with AI was to either ignore it or chase every shiny idea at once both would have been a mistake. 

1. AI Exploration

I made the call to focus AI exploration on one part of the journey, post-purchase, because it had the clearest evidence of customer pain (scattered, inconsistent information was driving people to contact support even when the answer existed somewhere), the most organizational readiness, and the clearest path to impact. 

2. Competitor benchmarking:

Before designing anything, the team benchmarked 22 competitors  Amazon, Nike, IKEA, and others to understand what "good" looked like, 

3. Co-creation workshops

Then ran co-creation workshops that turned that research into concrete concepts. All these were  anchored to one principle I insisted the team hold to: AI should amplify clarity, not replace it — which in practice meant refusing to let any of these concepts move forward until there was a single validated source of truth behind them, rather than an AI confidently making things up.

4. Defining longer term posture

I also used this work to start setting the team's  and my own  longer-term posture toward agentic AI, mapping where Decathlon would need to be ready for AI agents transacting on a customer's behalf, so that when that future arrived it wasn't a surprise.

Outcome

Some of this is measurable today; some of it is groundwork whose payoff is still ahead, and I want to be honest about the difference rather than blur it.

1. Design sign-off is now a mandatory gate

What actually changed and is running: design sign-off is now a mandatory gate before any revamp ships, not a courtesy step; design sits in Phase 0 of discovery for key initiatives instead of being briefed after the fact;

2. Active team development plans:

100% of the team had a real development plan, and the org has language and cadence for growth that didn't exist before; 

3. Tracked burned out

overtime and burnout are being tracked against an explicit target rather than absorbed silently; and the org design I proposed the management layer, the maturity mapping, the resourcing model became the working structure for planning 2026 headcount, not just a slide.

What's sized and in motion but not yet banked: 

1. The wallet, universal checkout, and unified account concepts represent a validated, evidence-backed set of opportunities  tens of millions of euros of upside apiece by the team's own modeling  that shifted planning conversations from feature requests to investment decisions, with proof-of-concept markets already identified

2. The AI work moved from "let's not build AI slop" to a validated, benchmarked set of concepts ready for feasibility work and a 2026 roadmap slot, anchored to a principle (evidence before automation) that the team can now hold future ideas against.

Taken together: I inherited a design function that had lost more than a quarter of its people, its senior craft leadership, and its seat at the table  and left it with a management structure built to scale, a portfolio of evidence-backed strategic bets with real financial upside attached, and a team that had stopped treating burnout as the cost of doing business.

2. Winning back strategic autonomy.

The teams’ OKRs had been handed down as feature lists, which meant "strategy" was really just "the backlog, with extra steps."

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