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Going from a retail business to a global tech company — Julien Mangeard (vente-privee)

by Alban Dumouilla

vente-privee group is the French e-commerce company that pioneered the model of online flash sales (also called event sales).

  • Founded: 2001
  • City: Paris, France
  • Company size at time of writing: 4500+
  • Tech team: Growing from 300 to 500+ in the next few months

What’s on your pizza?

Pizza Regina ordered from a little shop down the street — vente-privee’s restaurant does not make pizzas, oops.

About becoming the CTO of one of the biggest, if not the biggest French startups

The goal of my arrival was to put tech at the center of everything. vente-privee needed to switch from a retail business to a tech business. The world is not about big versus small companies anymore, but about who will be the fastest.

What’s your background?

I went to Epitech, which I finished in 2007. During my time there I worked for what they call “Le Bocal”, a group of students that manage the network applications and sites there. We worked 16 hours days without vacations or weekends, and I quickly started managing about 15 people while learning all the basics of computing.

I then got hired by B3G (since bought by Completel) where I worked on VoIP. These were 2 hard years for me because the work was not as demanding as what I had lived at school — I was bored. It was the case of quite a bunch of people from the Bocal, actually.

I ended up moving to Rentabiliweb, where I quickly moved up the ladder, before being nominated as the CTO after 2 years. It was already a public company at the time! Another 2 years later, I became the CEO of Rentabiliweb’s Telecom subsidiary, during which I went through Epitech’s Executive MBA.

And how did you join vente-privee?

I received a call from the founder Jacques-Antoine Granjon who asked me to grab lunch with him, which I did. The feeling was great, and after a few discussions on what the job would exactly entail, I joined the company.

The goal of my arrival was to put tech at the center of everything. vente-privee needed to switch from a retail business to a tech business. This is something we really need to achieve because of the scale that the company reached and the growth rate we want to keep achieving.

For now, IT blocks and slows down everything in the company and the group is organized in silos. That’s where I come into play: we are basically revamping everything to make vente-privee an agile company at scale.

Can you describe your current job?

It’s about breaking the silos. We have bought a few companies in the past year or two and vente-privee became a group that needs to stay consistent. My job consists in cleaning up the technical debt coming from 12 years of high growth without any big redesign. It’s also a huge organizational challenge, as the world is not about big versus small companies anymore, but about who will be the fastest.

Vente-privée was becoming slower because of its scale and needed to focus on IT to be able to get back to speed. Jacques-Antoine Granjon and Charles-Hubert de Chaudenay (CEO) wanted somebody who would not only manage the IT department like big corporations tend to do, but someone who would be able to challenge decisions all the way down.

Tech in one of the biggest e-commerce sites in Europe

The teams present a budget with their objectives and move forward in full operational autonomy to multiply the value the group creates

Can you describe what’s happening behind the scenes?

We have a big monolithic architecture with big databases and applications talking to each other through these databases. We’re essentially based on ASP.NET and SQL Server, and my job is to make all of this architecture go faster by splitting it.

We are currently creating product-oriented multi-disciplinary teams where product people work along with developers and creatives. We took the high-level map of vente-privee and cut it in about 50 autonomous products that we will leverage to create teams around them.

This is very contradictory with the French way of thinking as there’s no clear hierarchy: the teams present a budget with their objectives and move forward in full operational autonomy to multiply the value the group creates altogether.

We’re basically flattening the organization and giving people more responsibility.

That’s a huge change — how do you manage it?

“A company revolves around the structure of its IT”.

It is a huge, impactful change for all of the 4500+ employees. It impacts operational budgets all the way to decisional teams. The real goal is to distribute entirely the organization as well as the creation of this organization.

For each of the 50 products mentioned, there is a product manager and a lead developer for the operational lead. They then take care of creating their team, and the directional branch of the company becomes a investment committee and a sourcing resource.

This is very brave from the founders because you rock the boat so hard you can potentially put the company under stress. This means a lot of hiring, doubling every team until the transition is finished, and planning on having enough work for your double-size workforce once the switch is done.

Any crisis ahead or in the past?

I joined to solve one! The group was and is still getting slower and slower because of our technical debt, and we’re revamping everything to make it a real innovation powerhouse.

For this, we need to have the full commitment of the top management, which we do. And the entire company is on board!

Networking for CTOs

Different types of jobs have a lot of structures and events to networks. CTOs don’t really have a place to exchange on their challenges I must say!

There’s in France an investment fund by CTOs called CTO Partners, which I’m a part of. I already coach quite a few of the companies that vente-privee bought recently so I don’t really have too much time for the rest for now. vente-privee also invests quite a lot of man-hours and money into the school system, as we are trying to help build the future. So if what we’re doing can benefit others, it’s a win for everybody.

The challenges of the biggest startup in France

I really believe we have an opportunity of creating an internet giant right here in Europe, able to compete with the GAFA

What’s your hardest challenge, right now?

Recruiting! I’m not hiring fast enough. We just hired a new HR Director and we have 8 HR people specifically dedicated to the IT team.

The company is planning 10 years ahead: we just opened to research labs in Ecole 42 and EPITECH schools with 20 students working on proof of concepts of products we could release in the near future. The students are paid, have great mentors and work on great projects.

We’re also opening an incubator in Station F with 5 startups in the first batch. The idea is to create a virtuous circle to attract always more talents.

I thought that 2 years after starting the reorganizationg, I’d be able to see a bit more where we are heading. I think now that because of the scale of the company it might take closer to 3 years, even if some parts will be a lot shorter.

My number 1 priority is to get great people on board. We’re separating lead developers from managers, as this can be two different personalities which work well together but few people can do both very well. Basically, a very good engineer can stay a great engineer throughout his or her career without having to manage people, like most other companies our size do.

That’s a big vision, any problems ahead to reach this size?

Time scares me. Other actors are huge and agile, and we can’t take too much time to reach the size we’re targeting. We have the means, the team and the budget but we need to accelerate as fast as the others do. This will be fixed through technology, with robotisation of our storage space, etc.

Most retail businesses have small margins and buy their traffic. We have millions of users flocking to the site daily for free and have bigger margins than the rest of the industry. We just need to leverage this power to explode.

For this, we need to enter 2017 when it comes to the user experience on the site, meaning personal recommandations and all that. People come to the site to browse around, because things are beautiful. They behave the same way they would in a shopping mall, so things need to be pretty and targeted.

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