Chanel.com: driving the delivery of profitable features on a high-traffic e-commerce site
Context
Chanel.com is one of the most demanding luxury e-commerce sites in the world. It combines the house's own standards of excellence — aesthetics, seamless experience, brand consistency — with the operational constraints of a globally high-traffic platform. Every product page carries the brand's image as much as it drives conversion.
In 2024, I joined Chanel's digital teams as a project manager, with a core focus on the product pages of Chanel.com. These pages represent a strategic touchpoint between the brand and its customers. They concentrate user experience, commercial, and technical challenges all at once — on an infrastructure where even the smallest regression is immediately visible.
Several teams coexisted within this scope: front-end developers working on ReactJS interfaces, back-end developers responsible for the SAP Hybris platform, QA teams, and business and product stakeholders. Coordinating all these players on such a sensitive site is, in itself, a full-time job.
The challenge
On an e-commerce site of this scale, delivering features is never trivial. The challenge goes far beyond "build and deploy": it means consistently shipping high-value features without ever compromising the stability of a business-critical site.
This entails several simultaneous challenges:
- Maintaining a steady delivery pace, without accumulating debt or falling behind on the roadmap.
- Coordinating teams with different working logics — front-end, back-end, QA — who must move in sync without creating bottlenecks.
- Scoping requirements with precision to avoid costly back-and-forth between technical teams and stakeholders.
- Managing risk at every release: on a high-traffic site, a production bug is simply not an option.
This is the environment in which I operated. Not a startup context where you iterate freely on a product under construction, but a live production environment, subject to the constraints of an international group and the standards of a luxury brand.
My role
My role was that of a project manager in the operational sense: making sure the right things happen, in the right order, at the right time, without teams getting blocked on each other.
In practice, this covered several dimensions:
Roadmap prioritisation
Working alongside product and business stakeholders, I helped arbitrate priorities for the product pages. Which features to deliver first? What scope is realistic for a given sprint? Which topics should be deferred to protect critical deliveries? These regular decisions kept a clear direction in place for the teams.
Requirements scoping
Before a feature reaches development, it must be well enough defined for teams to work without ambiguity. I owned this scoping work: clarifying expectations, resolving grey areas, and aligning stakeholders on a precise scope. This upstream effort is often underestimated, yet it directly determines the quality and speed of execution.
Team coordination
On a stack like SAP Hybris / ReactJS, dependencies between front-end and back-end are numerous. I organised and facilitated coordination between the front-end, back-end, and QA development teams, so that dependencies were anticipated, blockers were resolved quickly, and every release went out under the best possible conditions.
Delivery tracking and releases
I maintained rigorous oversight of development progress, keeping clear visibility over what was delivered, what was in progress, and what was at risk. The regular production releases on Chanel.com required careful coordination between technical teams and constant attention to quality.
Working on Chanel.com's product pages means understanding that technology serves a broader ambition: that of a brand that never compromises on perceived quality.
Agile coaching in parallel
Alongside this operational project management, I conducted agile coaching work with two separate teams:
- The e-commerce team, directly involved in site evolutions.
- The immersive experiences team, working on more experiential digital formats.
For each team, I played a facilitation and structuring role around Scrum practices: organising ceremonies, clarifying roles, continuously improving team rituals, and supporting the path to greater autonomy.
In addition, I contributed to onboarding 120 consultants to agile ways of working. This large-scale training and awareness effort requires the ability to adapt the message to very diverse profiles — technical, business, and managerial — and to build a shared culture around concrete practices.
This coaching work reflects a reality I encounter in most large organisations: agile transformation is not just a matter of methodology, it is a matter of adoption. The method may be perfectly documented; if teams do not make it their own, it remains a dead letter.
What this case demonstrates for your organisation
If you lead an e-commerce or retail organisation, this context may resonate directly with you. Here is what this engagement illustrates in concrete terms:
Delivering quickly without breaking what works. On a critical site, velocity cannot come at the expense of stability. I have learned to drive regular releases in environments where mistakes are costly — and to put in place the conditions for teams to achieve this reliably.
Coordinating cross-functional teams. Front-end, back-end, QA, business, product: bringing all these people in the same direction, at the same pace, without creating frustrations or bottlenecks, is a real discipline. It sits at the heart of what I do.
Building agile maturity within teams. Agility is not an end in itself; it is a lever for delivering better and faster. But teams need to experience it as a useful tool, not as an imposed constraint. This is what I support, with a pragmatic approach tailored to each organisation's context.
With 11 years of IT experience and more than 25 teams coached, I have developed a quick-read ability for complex environments and the adaptability to meet the specific constraints of each organisation — whether a large group, a scale-up, or a mid-sized company in transformation.
Twenty brings large-group expertise with the closeness of a true partner.
Let's talk about your project
Are you managing an e-commerce site, a digital transformation, or looking to structure your deliveries and build agile maturity within your teams?
Let's connect directly:
- WhatsApp: +33 6 34 42 50 56
- Email: contact@twentyconsultancy.com
A first conversation, with no commitment, to see whether my profile matches your challenges.