Lacoste

I run the technical architecture workshops that set the modernisation path for the back end and the front end. The chosen route is not a rewrite but progressive clean-up: decouple what can be decoupled, isolate the risky areas, and set conventions that hold when several teams work in parallel.

That choice is more demanding than a rewrite. It forces you to find, with every decision, the balance between what would be technically desirable and what can ship without interrupting sales.

I handle developer onboarding and ramp-up. The team has counted up to six developers and counts three today, through successive reorganisations. I provide the technical continuity across them.

That is where most of the value sits: on a proprietary platform and a codebase of that age, documentation is incomplete by nature and part of the behaviour is known only to those who wrote it. When a team is reshuffled, knowledge of the code is the first thing to disappear and the most expensive to rebuild.

Before I arrived, a developer took three weeks on average to become autonomous on the codebase. With the onboarding I put in place, it now takes a few days. It is the most measurable result of my role, and on a team that has been reshuffled twice, it is also the most decisive.

I act as the technical counterpart to the Product Owners. Turning a business need into a technical decision, estimating honestly, and explaining a refusal with its reason rather than with a deadline. That is where trust and the quality of trade-offs are decided.

A proprietary platform. Salesforce Commerce Cloud imposes its cartridge system, its deployment cycles and its limits. You do not freely choose your tooling; you have to get the result within the vendor’s frame.

A commercial calendar that governs the technical one. On a store of that size, change windows close during high-traffic periods. Modernisation is planned around sales peaks, not the other way round.

A superseded reference architecture. SiteGenesis has been replaced by SFRA in the Salesforce ecosystem. Continuing to evolve a codebase built on it means working with a foundation the vendor no longer moves forward.