Robin Joseph

When I was in a Junior Enterprise, I dreamed of having a screen in our office that would display the monthly objectives of each team with the progress rate, team news, and most importantly, would play Gloria Gaynor every time we signed a new client. Automatically, I mean, directly connected to our CRM.

So, I looked to see if it existed, and it was a young Bordeaux-based company that had just entered the very select circle of the 12 best Google partners. So, I contacted them, we got along well, and a year later, I joined them to participate in this adventure. I spent 3 months with one of their partners in Stockholm, I went to Berlin to meet Google, in short, I learned a lot.

I learned one thing in particular: "you have to do what works rather than apply dogmas".

Passionate about IT and sports since my childhood, when I learned that I had been accepted for an apprenticeship in the "Google team" at Decathlon, I couldn't have dreamed of anything better.

Our job was to enable all those who sold basketballs and tennis rackets to do so under the best conditions. We were the IT HR, in other words, we provided IT tools to the teams so that they wasted as little time as possible.

If Decathlon is known for having the most passionate salespeople in every sector, it's perhaps partly because they have the time to do their job well, and we strive to put them in the best conditions.

It was here that I discovered both the well-oiled functioning of a development team, and above all, the Google environment.

In fact, Decathlon had been the first European company to choose Google over Microsoft for the management of a large part of its IT infrastructure. It was a choice between simple software (Google) and software that does everything (Microsoft), between software available all the time (Google) and powerful software (Microsoft), software loved by its users (Google) and software that causes anxiety for its users (Microsoft).

I would probably have made the same choice. Moreover, it's the one I make today for my clients.

In 2020, I participated in a competition called INSAkatHon during which we spent 24 hours thinking about technical solutions for problems related to disabilities. Our topic was: "Connected housing, adapted housing".

We first met people with disabilities who presented us with the difficulties they encountered in their daily lives, and then we tried to think of innovative solutions to address them. One of the proposals was selected at the end and funded by EPNAK, an institution that helps people with disabilities.

I have never been so struck in my life. Knowing the definition of disability through some awareness sessions, and meeting smiling people who are going through hell, is not the same thing.

We chose to tackle the problem of perishable goods that people with cognitive impairments might not recognize in their refrigerators. We designed a system based on RFID technology, which would identify the food items and associate them with an expiration date to warn users not to consume the product if it was expired.

The idea must have pleased the juries, because in addition to winning the competition, we were even admitted for an internship to develop the project.

The project was gigantic: to succeed, we would have had to convince large retailers to transform their barcodes into RFID tags, which cost between 3 and 5 cents each. It was an impossible mission, but yet, everyone supported us. Almost more to give us the chance to embark on the project, despite the assured failure to come, than to see the final result, which seemed quite unrealistic.

It was beautiful, and that's where I understood that benevolence should always be at the heart of future projects, because there is no greater source of motivation.