In this interview, we shared with Maxime Drouet, Cloud Center & Integration Manager. His personal and professional experience gives a good sense of the work experience and possible evolutions at La Redoute. He is based in France, working transversally within the IT and more globally at La Redoute. We let you discover his sharing.
Can you introduce yourself?
I work for 6 years at La Redoute. I started as a Cloud Architect and am now the manager of the Cloud, Devops & Network team since 1 year. Previously, I worked as an Architect at Techsys, an IT services company.
What do you do as a Cloud, Devops & Network Manager?
I have one main priority to manage the team: animating meeting, facilitating the on-boarding, develop the soft and hard skills, provide technical guidance and support. We act on both Private and Public cloud in the team. We define the roadmap of Infrastructure services in order to support the business transformation. Our work is structured into projects with an emphasis on proper design before implementation. Concretely, we organize the tasks in JIRA.
What do you enjoy more at La Redoute?
One interesting and enriching aspect is to work on a broad variety of transversal topics. We work on Security, Kubernetes, Kafka leveraging different Cloud services. This ecosystem is in constant evolution creating a need for constant evolution, projects and variety. Additionally, our work atmosphere is truly collaborative. We do valorize teamwork over individuals, share and help each other.
Can you describe your teams in 3 words?
Skilled
Motley (several different skills and ages)
Happy
What challenges do you encounter and enjoy solving on a regular basis?
Communication is a great one. We have teams in different locations, mainly in France and in Portugal. The remote aspect also adds complexity. We have a constant work to improve communication flows in general.
The second challenge is to improve quality overall. It can be on the Cloud services in terms of availability, performance, but also in terms of documentation for example.
Overall, our main common challenge is to deliver the La Redoute platform part of our transformation to the preferred family platform.
Which achievements are you prouder of (here at La Redoute)?
The GCP design and implementation. We setup proper Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with evangelization, pipeline standardization and documentation. It enabled the move of our web platform on GCP with success. The platform is business critical as supporting our ecommerce activity. The continuity of this project was the creation of the Cloud, Devops & Network team.
What are your axis of development and growth?
I am focusing on improving my delegation of the technical tasks, to focus more on the management and roadmap. Additionally, I am working on my English, management skills while keeping up with the technology landscape. It is important for me to stay up to date.
Any personal advice for someone who would like to do your job?
My first one is focus on a 3-year vision. From that point, we can progress step by step. It will take time; therefore, it is important to like your job. In IT, you always need to learn to stay in the game and relevant. The IT world is small so I would also advice to keep good contact with your network, internally and externally. I would also add that the best is the enemy of the good, reinforcing the need for soft skills. Improving soft skills is hard but a real investment in yourself.
With which La Redoute values (ambition, creation, high standard of excellence) do you feel most in line? Why? Can you give examples?
Creativity and the high standard.
Creativity because it is required in our business, transformation and especially in IT. The competition is strong in retail, fashion and ecommerce, hence the need to find innovation and different ways to serve our customers, leveraging IT.
The high standard of excellence drives the quality of our delivery. This exigence is a requirement to deliver a successful customer experience supporting our user attraction and retention. If we are not meeting the user expectations, they just switch to competitors.
Why would you recommend La Redoute?
First the work atmosphere and its culture that is positive. I feel very good working here. The second point of the dynamic and evolution of our IT perimeter. We are truly expanding our technology, driving projects, supporting the business transformation. Another point is the growth challenge of La Redoute. We are not anymore in a hard survival mode. This drive of expansion is challenging and full of perspective. And lastly, our CIO that arrived in 2021 has a strong experience, a good vision with a true desire to evolve the entire organization to accelerate the business transformation.
Diogo Gomes 
Gonçalo Venceslau