Scale a design team within year: from 20 to 120 designers

Introduction

All entrepreneurs will be aligned on this statement: Scaling a company is challenging. This applies to every company department, including the design team. Sabrina Vigil (Lead design system) and Thomas Vidal (Thiga — acting as VP Digital Design) from Decathlon were on stage to talk about how they scale their design team from 20 to 120 design within a year.

For context Decathlon is a manufacturer and distributor of sports products operating in more than 70 countries. Focusing on the Decathlon digital team it is:

• 5 business units,
• 160 product teams,
• 200+ products
• 2,600+ teammates

Before scaling, the design team was pretty fragmented between product designers and researchers:

• no common repository
• designers had various aspirations
• a design system was already there

What if it was a marathon?

To introduce their scaling approach, they compared it to a marathon preparation: it requires to know your running performance, have a training plan, get the rights equipments… In the Decathlon environment, scaling meant maintaining an omnichanel experience while keeping offering a user centric approach. To run their marathon, they defined a framework to drive them to success:

• a vision and objectives
• an organisation
• a design culture
• measure the design impact
• work collectively beyond design

From there, they built their vision around those elements:

• make a state of art
• define a mission and vision
• set user and business objectives
• define a game plan
• measure at a local and global scale

With those elements in mind, they summarized their vision this way.

From vision to action

Now they had defined their vision, it was about translating it into objectives.

To turn this vision into an operational reality, they worked on several points:

• processes, tools and methods
• rituals, collaboration and feedbacks
• deployment vision
• organisation, career path and onboarding
• design system development at scale

Focusing on the organisation initiative, they shared their key ideas to make things work:

• at heart of teams
• transverse
• career path
• onboarding, responsibilities and training
• continuous iteration

Here is how the transverse and at heart of teams elements ****where reflected in their digital design organisation:

To go further, they updated their career path with a key idea in mind: value design manager roles as much as staff roles (design ops, Researchers ops…). Here what their career path looks like:

Recruitment and work-life experience

To make their recruitment campaign a success, they followed these rules:

• 70% had to be in-house hirings. The 30% remaining were consultants
• fast hiring but selective
• prioritize managers recruitment
• value Product Design and Soft-skills
• case studies per level

To make those design hirings a success an they also defined clear roles and responsibilies:

• onboarding: global, local and transverse
• responsibility sheet
• training and support
• roles within the product team

With the approach, the goal was also to create a design culture driven by excellency. To make this vision a reality, Design & Research Ops played an important role. They provided a canvas helping teams to align on key elements and practices:

• product discovery and delivery
• rituals, templates and common tools
• communities of practices, storytelling
• design system at scale deployment
• daily measurement and support

To make things more concrete, here is how they organise work within their business units:

In addition to the Design & Research Ops, Sabrina and Thomas also insisted on the key role played by Managers, to make this scalability exercise a success. Their responsibilities include:

• contribute to the design culture
• support the vision deployment
• ensure collaboration between staffs the product team

Results & Learnings

They targeted the moon and they ended up in space. Joke aside, following their marathon metaphor, they ran it in 4h which is not that bad for a first long run experience. Key results are:

• a transverse organisation with 120 designers, 7 managers and 8 Staffs.
• a vision deployed globally
• a common culture between the product and tech team
• metrics improvements (NPS > 60)
• design system: 50% of flagship products

Even if results are quite impressive, it did not happen without difficulties. Sabrina and Thomas shared with us what were the main ones:

• recruitment objectives have not been met, in term of internationalisation and in-house vs consultants hirings ratio
• international cooperation
• heterogeneous product maturity (measure, process)
• deployment and support is time consuming

Wrap up

As the Sabrina and Thomas experience demonstrated it, scaling fast a design team is possible. You will probably meet hurdles along the way but here their advice to make the experience smoother:

• set a vision
• anticipate a transverse and global organisation
• prioritize major topics
• support the deployment
• follow metrics and iterate