Lessons from 2 years as Production Manager at Decathlon Digital

For two and a half years, I stepped away from code to manage data production for sales at Decathlon Digital. A role I discovered upon arrival — the job title said "Production Expert", and I quickly realized it was going to be a full-time commitment. Here's what I learned from switching to the other side. Context: Perfeco and sales data Perfeco was the data product that served the company's economic performance and sales data. In practice, it meant: An ingestion pipeline built on Talend and Redshift — data was processed and stored in Redshift, then pushed to S3 2 to 3 million sales per day ingested Data exposed in the datalake and via an API consumed by multiple business teams Kafka messages with XML payloads converted to CSV before loading A scheduler (OpCon) to orchestrate ingestion jobs My role: make sure all of this runs , every day, without interruption. What "Production Manager" actually means day-to-day Coming from development, you'd think production is about monitoring and a few