Stabilizing Design Delivery
How I got a stalled redesign moving with a design team of 4 inside a 100-person program, and shipped france.tv across web, mobile, and TV in time for the Olympic Games.
A transformation that had stopped moving
Rebrand, cross-platform design system, product evolution, and technical restructuring, all at once. More than 100 people in motion, on a fixed clock: the Olympic Games Paris 2024.
More than a year in, delivery had stalled and design was the bottleneck. The causes weren’t about craft: no clear ownership across platforms, no shared definition of ready or done, and senior designers spread thin. I was brought in to restore predictability without destabilizing the program further, and restarting wasn’t an option.
The problem wasn’t the design. It was the operating system around it: ownership, standards, and sequencing.
Stabilize first, improve second
The strategy was to make delivery predictable before making anything better.
1 · Concentrate senior capacity on the critical path
I put the experienced designers on the initiatives that could sink the timeline and moved lower-risk work to juniors. The critical path stopped slipping, and the juniors built confidence without blocking delivery.
2 · Make the delivery rules explicit
I wrote one operating model for every team: a Definition of Ready, a Definition of Done, design-system-backed acceptance criteria, and daily rituals with Engineering. Nothing advanced without meeting the bar.
3 · Align sequencing with reality
I rebuilt the roadmap on honest estimates and explicit trade-offs, and re-cut planning from 3-month cycles to 6-week Program Increments. Engineering got a predictable signal; design got a sustainable pace.
One system, holding three platforms together
I led the build of a design system from scratch with a dedicated team of six: three product designers, three design system specialists. It carried the rebrand onto every surface, holding structure, art direction, and interaction consistent across web, mobile, and TV. Governance, not a component library.
Rebuilt for the living room
The TV home after the redesign: one of three platforms rebuilt on a single cross-platform system.
I put continue watching in the first row: on a remote, the shortest path back beats the most relevant thing to start.
The front door
The web home: the front door of France’s #1 free streaming platform, roughly 36 million visitors a month.
I kept the home editorially programmed: a public broadcaster has to be accountable for what it promotes.
Art direction, systematised
Editorial collections carry premium art direction, held by the design system, with no one-off custom builds.
I made art direction come out of system tokens: custom builds would have looked better by the third collection and been unmaintainable by the tenth.
One player, every surface
One player serves france.tv, franceinfo, and the regional platforms: built once, governed centrally.
I governed one player instead of one per brand: each brand loses some individuality, and every accessibility and performance fix lands everywhere at once.
Mobile, on the same bones
The mobile program page sits on the same information structure as web and TV: one model, three form factors.
I kept mobile on web’s structure rather than a mobile-native one: it gave up a shorter first screen for one model the whole organisation could reason about.
Structure over speed, then scale
- I got delivery predictable again across every platform, and cross-team escalations fell to near-zero.
- I set up the CX research practice on the acquisition and retention funnels around the video player, and user retention doubled.
- I grew the team from 4 to 9 on a structure I defined, and moved ownership from platform to features.
- I moved design from UI execution to an organization Product and Engineering trusted again.
Voices from the transformation
In parallel, the platform carried the Olympic Games Paris 2024: over 200 million video views, its highest load ever, from the same team.