Reimagining Decathlon's Lower Funnel
Building a unified 3-year experience vision across identity,
checkout, payments, loyalty and post-purchase.
Summery
Organisational Impact
Opportunity Solution Trees driving the 2026 roadmaps. Continuous discovery implemented in LF product teams. Cross-team alignment via shared experience principles.
Role in the work:
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Business case definition
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Research and insight direction
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Design sprint leadership
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Design direction
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Cross-functional alignment
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Executive storytelling
Financial Impact
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€8.63m
PDP improvements to product detail hightlights (+1% ARPU).
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€8.7m
From delivery method redesign in checkout.
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€144m
Projected opportunity size for the Decathlon Wallet concept.
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€2m
Apple Pay UK A/B test scheduled Q3 2026 (projected revenue).
01 — Context
Decathlon aimed to grow e-commerce from 14% to 30% of revenue (€3bn → €6.2bn), making Lower Funnel critical to growth.
Teams were shipping improvements, but without a shared vision connecting basket, delivery, payment and post-purchase. Organisational boundaries were showing up in the customer experience.
I led the creation of a 3+ year Lower Funnel vision to align teams around a shared customer experience and shift the organisation from feature-led delivery toward customer-led continuous discovery.
02 — Building the business case
I developed the business case for a unified Product & UX vision, connecting three priorities: digital growth, a more coherent customer journey, and stronger product direction.
The case highlighted a systemic issue: teams were optimising individual parts of the funnel without a shared view of the experience we ultimately wanted to create.
Success meant turning the vision into a decision-making framework, not a conceptual design deck: aligning teams around the future experience, guiding prioritisation and technology choices, and connecting near-term delivery to our longer-term strategy.
03 — The process
Over nine months, I led the team in executing a three-phase, customer-led vision process spanning checkout and post-purchase.
We started with domain-wide discovery, then moved into three focused design sprints that produced multiple prototypes and future experience concepts.
Using Opportunity Solution Trees (OSTs) and Continuous Discovery practices, we created a shared framework for Product, Design and Engineering to move from customer opportunities to solutions together giving product teams both inspiration and a repeatable way to shape future work.
04 — Understanding what should shape the vision
Before designing the future, we needed a shared understanding of the present.
I led a domain-wide discovery across eight markets, combining UX research, analytics, design knowledge, market insights and stakeholder expertise to map the journey from basket through post-purchase.
We used this evidence to distinguish local issues from systemic problems and translate customer pain points into opportunity spaces using Opportunity Solution Trees (OSTs).
The work included an 8-market UX audit, research and analytics synthesis, expert interviews, journey evaluation, and cross-functional prioritisation workshops.
The outcome was a customer-grounded opportunity framework, aligned with Product, Engineering and leadership before the design sprints began, allowing the next phase to focus on exploring solutions rather than debating the problems.
Four interconnected experience areas
The evidence changed how we framed Lower Funnel. This wasn't simply a checkout problem. Four interconnected experience areas emerged across the journey.
The biggest opportunities were also not where we initially expected. Basket abandonment was 55% and delivery-page abandonment 75%, while payment conversion was comparatively strong at 87–92%.
Beyond checkout, 35% of customers dropped off after only 1–2 orders, while post-purchase NPS stood at 64.3.
The evidence shifted our focus: some of the greatest opportunities existed before payment and after purchase—not at the transaction itself.
05 — UX Audit highlights
The audit revealed an experience that was reactive rather than strategic, high information density, inconsistent journeys and dead-ends where customers needed guidance. The underlying problem wasn't a lack of effort or ideas. It was the absence of a shared direction.
To change this at scale, I shifted the focus from feature delivery to continuous discovery, giving product teams a shared vision and the framework to continuously identify, prioritise and solve the right customer problems.
Basket
The audit surfaced recurring experience issues rather than isolated UI defects:
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Clarity & guidance — Critical information such as delivery eligibility and timing was unclear or surfaced too late.
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Visual hierarchy & consistency — Inconsistent spacing, product-card structures and payment layouts made the experience feel fragmented.
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Interaction quality — Small tap targets and poorly prioritised actions created unnecessary mobile friction.
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Commercial discoverability — High-intent features such as vouchers and promo codes were visually treated as secondary.
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Individually these looked like UI issues. Together, they revealed the absence of a coherent experience direction across the Lower Funnel.
Delivery and pick-up options
The delivery audit revealed recurring issues beyond individual UI defects:
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Poor discoverability — Store finding and critical delivery information were difficult to locate or hidden behind unclear interactions.
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Inconsistent interaction patterns — Links, buttons and selectors behaved differently across the journey, making important decisions harder to understand.
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Information hierarchy — Essential delivery details were often concealed while secondary or redundant features occupied valuable space.
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Lack of market relevance — Legacy experiences remained across markets even when they were no longer relevant.
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The pattern was systemic: customers had to work too hard to understand their options and make confident delivery decisions.
Payments
The payment audit revealed friction at the point where clarity and trust matter most:
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Unpredictable interactions — Auto-scroll, competing controls and inconsistent patterns made navigation difficult.
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Poor mobile usability — Small tap targets and oversized sticky elements reduced critical interaction space.
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Weak information hierarchy — Important payment information competed with unnecessary instructions and visually untidy content.
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At the moment of transaction, the experience was introducing uncertainty rather than reinforcing confidence.
Post Purchase
The post-purchase audit revealed friction at the moment customers needed reassurance and control:
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Critical information was hard to find — Order numbers and expected delivery dates lacked prominence immediately after purchase.
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Poor self-service discoverability — Customers missed key account navigation in testing, contributing to avoidable customer-support contacts.
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Inconsistent experience — Legacy styling and inefficient components made post-purchase feel disconnected from the rest of the journey.
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After earning the purchase, we weren't doing enough to earn the customer's confidence in what happened next.
06 — From pain points to opportunities
From problems to opportunities
I deliberately resisted the pressure to jump from problems to features. We consolidated hundreds of customer problems, business questions and ideas into a prioritised opportunity framework:
Desired outcome → Opportunity → Sub-opportunity → Potential solutions
Using Opportunity Solution Trees, we created a traceable connection between customer needs, business outcomes and future solutions, then brought in cross-functional SMEs to challenge and prioritise the opportunities.
The output wasn't a feature roadmap. It was a prioritised set of problems worth solving across 2025–2027 and the strategic input for our Design Sprints.
07 — Design Sprints: Turning opportunities into experience concepts
This is where we moved from understanding the future to designing it.
We translated the highest-priority opportunities into three focused Design Sprints, bringing Design, Product and Engineering together to explore the future experience.
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Sprint 01 — Basket & Delivery
Explored how we could simplify the path to purchase, surface delivery promises earlier and help customers understand their fulfilment options.
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Sprint 02 — Payment & Checkout
Explored a clearer, more trusted checkout experience—reducing interaction friction and bringing payment, vouchers and purchase decisions into a coherent flow.
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Sprint 03 — Post-Purchase & Account
Explored how order confirmation, tracking and account experiences could provide greater reassurance, transparency and self-service after purchase.
Each sprint produced multiple concepts and prototypes, with explicit customer, business and technical trade-offs.
Together, the strongest concepts became the building blocks for the 3+ year Lower Funnel experience vision.
Principles before solutions
We needed the future to feel like one experience
Before designing the North Star, we established three Lower Funnel experience principles:
08 — Design Production: Building the North Star
Before defining the Lower Funnel vision, I brought together designers, researchers and product partners from Lower Funnel and Customer Growth through a series of cross-team design sprints.
The goal was to move beyond organisational ownership and create a shared understanding of the end-to-end customer experience. We mapped current journeys, used Jobs-to-be-Done to align around customer needs, surfaced ownership gaps and tensions, and explored future-state possibilities together.
The strongest concepts from the Design Sprints became the foundation for a connected Lower Funnel experience.
Following leadership alignment, I directed the team in translating those concepts into high-fidelity, end-to-end journeys, continuously testing decisions against our prioritised opportunities and experience principles.
This wasn't about creating isolated hero screens. It was about showing how basket, delivery, payment and post-purchase could work as one coherent customer journey.
One Lower Funnel—not a collection of product domains.
09 — Sharing: Turning vision into action
I worked with Product and Engineering leadership to translate the North Star into product planning, supported by two tools:
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Strategic narrative & opportunity sizing — We connected customer evidence, prototypes and business value to a costed catalogue of initiatives, helping sub-domain leaders evaluate where to invest.
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Practical guide — We packaged the entire approach,discovery, OSTs, sprints and prototyping into a repeatable playbook that Product, Design and Research teams could adapt to create their own North Stars.
This turned the work from a one-off vision project into a repeatable approach for continuous discovery and product direction.
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10 — Impact — From vision to delivery
The vision didn't end as a North Star. It started influencing what teams shipped, what entered roadmaps and how Lower Funnel teams approached discovery.
€17m+ validated revenue impact
Concepts originating from the vision work moved into experimentation and production. Product Details Highlights delivered €8.63m revenue uplift (+1% ARPU), while the new Delivery Method Selection contributed €8.7m revenue uplift.
€146m+ strategic opportunity identified
The work helped re-engage leadership around larger opportunities, including Decathlon Cash / Wallet (€144m estimated impact) and Third-Party Checkout (€2m projected revenue).
Design began shaping roadmaps
Teams used our frameworks and prototypes to run their own discovery, influencing work across checkout, delivery, account and membership, with multiple experience improvements entering 2025–26 roadmaps.
Continuous discovery became part of how Lower Funnel worked
The OSTs remained active planning artefacts into Q2 2026, giving teams a shared connection between customer evidence, opportunities and delivery. Common experience principles—Convenience, Trust and Guidance—provided a quality bar across domains.