Our goal as a Tech team is to craft technology capable of improving with every interaction, connecting multiple communities and making movement more enjoyable and accessible for all – building solutions to work effortlessly and deliver the ‘Wow’ across our platforms, apps and services.
Find out more about On’s technology principles – building for impact, learning through experimentation and partnering for success – with Chief Technology Officer, Narek Verdian.
Everything we build fuels our mission to ignite the human spirit through movement and as a function, Technology is uniquely positioned to collaborate with all areas of the business and ultimately ensure there’s alignment.
In the technology space, it’s easy to focus on a specific task and lose sight of the bigger picture. But, we don’t develop technology for the sake of developing technology, rather to answer specific needs. As a technology function, we come together to build foundations that add value, are scalable, efficient and effective across the board.
So our technology principles reflect the ways in which we inform how we work. These came as the result of a series of sessions conducted with stakeholders within all teams in technology, which helped us get a better understanding of the day-to-day challenges as well as what mindset pushes us forward.
Building for impact
While On needs to be able to implement features quickly as the company grows, the most important aim is to build technology features that have a real impact. This means creating robust systems that are scalable, secure and reliable. The team is building systems to gracefully handle failures, adapt to user demands, and ultimately deliver a seamless experience.
The approach is rooted in developing our technology ecosystem in a way that facilitates easy use by others. So we focus on long-term product evolution and building incrementally while continuously evaluating against success criteria, delivering value early. As well as, building highly resilient systems, with techniques such as auto-scaling policies, rigorous load testing and using a testing framework in a pyramid format so we can access all different layers and adhere to strict standards for security and efficiency. Throughout all of the work, data is at the core, continuously analyzing the balance between speed and robustness, ensuring solutions meet all minimum requirements.
“In our effort to continually enhance user experience, we recently made a pivotal improvement to the performance of the On website. By optimizing the loading process and making minor adjustments, we managed to reduce the page size on load by nearly 20%. With over 800,000 sessions per day, this reduction resulted in noticeably faster load times for our users and a significant impact on our infrastructure, lowering operational costs. This improvement exemplifies our commitment to building robust, scalable systems that deliver value not just today but for the future.” - Yan Niznik, Staff Engineer
Partnering for success
The Team Spirit is one of the five qualities that define how we work at On – and with that, we believe that by collaborating, we can more effectively overcome challenges. So we always partner to achieve goals, valuing diverse skills, interdisciplinary cooperation, and the sharing of knowledge.
This means that technology is actively used as an accelerator, assisting functions in resolving their fundamental issues to eliminate key obstacles to progress. Our technology teams contribute to work across different teams and groups – and so across the business, feedback is shared along with best practices so the team can design effective solutions that can be adopted widely.
“A set of technical challenges affecting the Retail team recently surfaced, prompting a collaborative effort to address both immediate needs and long-term innovation aligned with their strategy. For instance, issues like slow transaction processing at the POS (Point of Sale) have been impacting the team's ability to interact with customers efficiently. To tackle these pain points, technology experts from different teams were brought together to work closely with teammates from Retail, focusing on optimizing system performance and enhancing daily operations to streamline the customer experience. This organized approach sets up the foundation to enable progress in fixing and improving current issues while ensuring a focus on innovation for the future. This collaboration highlights how cross-functional efforts can create impactful solutions that meet both immediate and strategic business needs.” - Marta Lopez, Lead Strategic Technology Initiatives
Our "We partner for success" principle resonates with me as it speaks to a mindset that drives how our technology team serves as the central hub within On. By breaking down silos and collaborating across departments such as B2B, in-store, online, R&D and sustainability we’re building solutions that don’t just support, but actively accelerate progress company-wide. One exciting opportunity lies in integrating data across all our channels. By unlocking a 360-degree view of product data, customer data and market trends, we can offer powerful insights to R&D, creating a feedback loop that drives innovation. The technology team aims to be a key partner in realising On’s vision. By actively engaging and aligning with stakeholders, we ensure that technology is an enabler and accelerator for everyone’s success. This collaborative, cross-functional approach ensures progress and sustains On’s momentum. - Will Funnell, Distinguished Engineer
Learning through experimentation
Learning through experimentation positions the team to be at the forefront of innovation, welcoming challenges, delving into the unknown and creating for the future. This principle exists to align with On’s Explorer Spirit, which is fundamentally centered on a natural curiosity and questioning of the status quo. This is actioned through some of the following methods:
- Striving to make data-driven decisions, by actively A/B testing and measuring the impact.
- Implementing rigorous monitoring to be first-to-know when an issue occurs, and learning from our failures to make future improvements.
- Innovating to build the future and adapt to a continuously evolving landscape, embracing change.
- Making decisions and having a bias-to-action approach so we can learn quickly.
" One standout moment for us was experimenting with conversational e-commerce through On Concierge, our AI-driven tool for pre-purchase assistance. We began by building a proof of concept and deploying it in production to observe how users interacted with it in real-time. This experiment provided valuable insights, which helped us refine and scale the conversational AI into a more impactful and innovative tool for the future of e-commerce. The lessons learned allowed us to build a more resilient and adaptive solution, aligning perfectly with our mindset of continuous innovation and learning through experimentation. ” - Yan Niznik, Staff Engineer
