Design Manager – New Business Models (f/m/d)

In a Nutshell

• Location: Lille or Paris
• Role Level: M1 / M2 (Design Management Track)
• Timing: 1st of Sept
• Contract: Full-Time / Permanent
  
  

Context & Project

Decathlon’s mission is to bring people together through sport and make wellbeing accessible for all. To ensure this mission thrives in the future, we are rapidly scaling our New Business Models (NBM), including Rental, Second Life, Buyback, Repair, and B2B models like Wholesale and Leasing.

Our goal is ambitious: to transform these sustainable models into the future "business as usual" for Decathlon, embedding them deeply across the entire company ecosystem—from production and logistics to in-store operations and digital commerce. To achieve this, we need a visionary leader to bridge the gap between complex business ecosystems and seamless user experiences.

Your Mission

As our Manager for New Business Models, your mission is twofold: build and nurture a world-class design team, and continuously define the omni-experience strategy for our customers, partners, and internal teammates.

• Vision & Strategy

You will partner closely with business leaders to translate Decathlon’s New Business Model 2030 vision into actionable design strategies. This involves driving a deep, foundational understanding of our users by establishing robust personas, user journeys, and Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) frameworks. Ultimately, you will translate complex, integrated customer and employee journeys into concrete, high-impact design artifacts that seamlessly bridge physical and digital touchpoints.

• Collaboration & Roadmap

In strong alignment with Product and Tech leadership, you will co-build a strategic three-year integration roadmap. You will act as the ultimate ambassador for New Business Model experiences within the wider Digital organization, building strong cross-functional bridges and actively sharing design knowledge. Additionally, you will establish the necessary frameworks to monitor, measure, and continuously optimize the user experience across all new business models.

• Team Management, organizational design  & talent Development

You will build, structure, and scale a high-performing design organization tailored to meet our evolving business challenges. As a people manager, you will mentor, coach, and develop the design talents of tomorrow, fostering a culture of psychological safety, collaboration, and excellence. Your leadership will also involve proactively identifying key design roles and creating realistic growth and succession scenarios within your team.

Role & responsibilities

We are looking for an experienced leader with a proven track record in digital product design and experience managing teams, ideally in complex, omni-channel, or retail environments. You are a systemic thinker who excels at mapping out service design blueprints that touch both digital interfaces and real-world employee operations. As a strategic partner, you know how to speak the language of business, product, and tech to turn high-level goals into tangible experiences. Above all, you possess a people-first mentality and are passionate about helping designers grow while building a cohesive team culture: 

• Understand the holistic view of design from strategy to delivery and represent the view of the team at design leadership level.
• Support your team of Designers in their career development needs and people related topics (performance, feedback...).
• Partner with Design leadership and Ops to streamline management processes, drive AI upskilling, and elevate performance evaluations.

Strategy

• Lead the creation of Experience Design value propositions within your area of responsibility that are backed up by data from various user research, testing and analytics sources for strategic and priority projects or initiatives in your scope of influence.
• Lead the continuous update of value propositions of existing experiences in the light of new insights. Lead the optimisation of user-facing digital solutions within your area of responsibility for priority initiatives in your scope of influence.

➜ Discovery

• Demonstrate awareness of the monitoring of design, digital trends and encourage others to learn about that.
• Leverage consumer insights and analysis to understand the value drivers for the consumer and encourage others to do so.
• Demonstrate an understanding of the larger context of business and users areas than just on a product level.

➜ Delivery

• Lead the delivery of concepts related to key projects or initiatives for your team in the form of information architecture, user journeys, concept maps, flows, sketches, wireframes or prototypes based on the area needs.
• Validate if the solutions delivered by internal teams and vendors meet the desired user experience.
• Drive consistent adherence of the Design System across all teams and ensure great understanding of its principles.

➜ KPIs & objectives settings 

• Lead the definition of a continuous improvement process to assure that insights are incorporated into the different product backlogs on an incremental basis.

➜ People Management 

• Create a psychologically safe environment in which employees are coached, trained and provided with career opportunities through development.
• Continuously monitor and evaluate team workload and organisational efficiency with the support of data and team feedback and make appropriate changes in order to meet business needs.

➜ Organisational design 

Support the identification of needs in terms of headcount and work with design leadership in order to fill those needs.

➜ Ethical design (eco-design)

• I design taking into account the needs of the planet through educating customers around the sustainable choices they can make.
• I educate others around accessibility guidelines and the impact it has on our customers/users.

➜ Emotional intelligence

Enhance brand perception and Influence behaviours; create digital experiences that contribute to build a strong brand identity that increases brand loyalty. Recognise the emotions of people you work with to create a safe environment.

➜ Growth/agile mindset 

You have a long-term plan for your growth and understand exactly where you stand with your plan as well as how to achieve your goals.

➜ Leadership

• You inspire, elevate and empower people across the product teams.
• You are responsible for actively accelerating the growth of Product Designers and the design literacy of your product counterparts.
• Translate and evangelise as a compelling story for business and tech that UX is as important to customer value as an underlying functionality


➜ Managing up and across 

• Be the key contact for Senior GPM counterparts and Senior Engineering Manager to optimise current digital experiences.
• Collaborate with senior roles to ensure an optimal alignment of experiences with the brand strategy and ecosystem evolution.
• Striving when working with product teams internationally.

➜ Collaboration & consulting

• Drive a consumer centric view along the experience. Collaborate with Product Domains and other stakeholders to ensure the delivery of consistent, cross-functional and complete experiences.
• Consult major stakeholders (non exhaustively Senior GPM counterparts and Senior Engineering Manager) in implementing User Centric Thinking.
• Spot when new collaborative processes between teams are needed and collaborate with Ops to provide continual direction in design.
• Document design decisions as an example of impactful and high quality design/problem solving work.

➜ Inclusivity

• Create an environment that helps everyone to have their ideas heard and valued.
• Foster a psychologically safe environment in the practice by spreading the values of active listening and empathy.
  
  

Why join the New Business Models adventure?

Here are a few challenges you may tackle if you join the “NBM” adventure

• Improve end-to-end teammate experiences - ensuring new tools, processes or digital solutions support both efficiency, purpose and pleasure at work

Operating as a transversal entity, you will orchestrate cross-functional synergy between diverse units including Value Chain, E-commerce, and In-Store operations.

New Business Models might be a perfect match for you if…

• You thrive on serving a wide diversity of personas: You enjoy deeply understanding and describing various user profiles, from individual contributors to business representatives 
• You have a bit of a "pirate" mindset: You love hacking through complex, cross-functional challenges and finding unorthodox solutions to tough problems.
• You love collaborating and aligning a wide variety of expertise & stakeholders: You excel at bringing together Product, Business, Skills & Process, design peers from InStore & Value Chain, and various country teams.
• You love connecting with different people: Building strong, meaningful relationships outside your immediate domain comes naturally to you.
• You embrace uncertainty and a high-growth environment: You view ambiguity not as a roadblock, but as an exciting opportunity to scale and innovate.