YOOX NET-A-PORTER: Coordinating five agile teams through a £1bn e-commerce re-platform
The challenge
Salmon was re-platforming YNAP's e-commerce solution to IBM WebSphere Commerce. The scale demanded tight coordination across five agile teams against strict client deadlines, while managing staff transitions and operational logistics.
What we did
We ran a dual Scrum Master and PMO model: facilitating agile delivery across five teams, managing onboarding logistics and equipment, streamlining communication between the client PMO and internal teams, and maintaining transparency through weekly reporting and travel coordination.
// run against The Tenhaw Way, published in full and free to adopt without engaging us
The outcome
The programme progressed efficiently, teams met client deadlines with a high standard of collaboration, and tight operational processes produced a well-executed project and strong client satisfaction.
Limits, and what is withheld
Multi-team coordination with a single source of truth is the same problem agentic transformation faces at scale: many actors, shared dependencies, one operating rhythm everyone trusts. What does not transfer is anything agentic. This was a Scrum Master and PMO engagement on an e-commerce re-platform.
Why a buyer usually lands on this one
Written for the person arriving mid-programme with a question.
Somebody else is building it. You still have to land it.
This is the clearest example of something we sell on its own: programme and delivery management over work another supplier is building. Salmon was re-platforming YNAP's e-commerce solution onto IBM WebSphere Commerce, and the job was to make five teams, a client PMO and a supplier delivery organisation produce a single view of progress both organisations could trust.
Most enterprise AI programmes are now this shape. There is a hyperscaler, at least one systems integrator, an internal platform team and a specialist vendor or two, and accountability for the whole sits with a programme manager who cannot personally inspect any of it. An AI delivery partner that will only govern what it is building itself is no use in that room, which is why we will run a programme we have no build stake in.
One source of truth, weekly, in front of both organisations
Transparency was maintained through weekly reporting across the client and the supplier, with the unglamorous logistics of onboarding, equipment and travel treated as delivery risk rather than administration, because at that scale that is what they are.
The test of a coordination layer is whether bad news travels at the same speed as good news. An agentic programme needs the same test for a harder case, because its failures are quiet ones: a model degrading, an integration rejecting a small percentage of records, an evaluation nobody has rerun since week two.
What this engagement does not claim
The same caveats the case studies hub carries, narrowed to this engagement so nothing here is a surprise to your analyst.
- 01
Not an AI engagement.
Scrum Master and PMO delivery across five teams. No models, no agents.
- 02
We were the supplier's delivery layer, and the £1bn is not a Tenhaw contract.
The re-platforming was run by Salmon for YOOX NET-A-PORTER, and the figure is the scale of the programme we coordinated within rather than a value attributable to us.
Other engagements
Sector first, because that is the next question. All twelve are on the hub, grouped into the two we would call AI work and the ten we would not.
Landing the Discovery+ launch on a CEO-set deadline
6, development teams on the launch, one of them the visual rebrand team James ran
Making a pandemic-era app team predictable, and trusted again
2, squads: Mobile App and Integration
Turning three merged teams into one delivery unit through workflow design
3, merged teams aligned
See how we did it
A real engagement walked through by the person who led it, then the same method applied to yours.
- The ways of working, published in full and free to adopt without hiring us.
- The target operating model James co-led at HSBC: designed and piloted for 500 teams, with global rollout due in 2026 and not yet rolled out.
- The AI build inside a live London specialty insurer: a working proof of concept, month by month, with the client anonymised to a market.
Everything the call covers about our work is already published on this site. What it adds is the person who did that work, and your own situation put through the same method.
The 30-minute discovery call starts with your problem. This one starts with our work.
Pick a time on cal.comWant the same thing, in your organisation?
A 30-minute call with James Rooney. We will tell you which parts of this we have done before and which we would be doing for the first time, and you will leave with a rough scope either way.
most start with a fixed-price AI Readiness Audit · £30k–£90k · 6–8 weeks
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