Challenges
Bring the magic of classic Decathlon offline events online
my role
p
team
Product & Design (Me)
Head of Technology
1 Frontend, 2 Backend, 1 QA
timeline
Q2 2025 – Q4 2025
(Pre-Seed)
problem context
Bringing the magic of Decathlon’s local sports events online!
Decathlon India built a strong offline sports community through its All for Sports app and local stores, where Omni Leaders organized group runs, cycling events, and walking clubs around physical gathering points and shared milestones.
COVID removed the infrastructure overnight. But the community didn't disappear, it migrated to WhatsApp. Leaders started posting challenge targets, members submitted screenshots of their stats, and leaders manually tracked who completed what.
opportunity cost
248+
challenges run with almost zero infrastructure
248+
challenges run with almost zero infrastructure
The question was never "how do we get people to exercise?"
It was "how do we build infrastructure worthy of what they're already doing?"
The real design problem
The product experience depends entirely on data it doesn't own.
The product sits downstream of a multi-party data pipeline. A user's run exists in Strava. Strava passes it via API. Decathlon receives it, processes it, updates the leaderboard. Each handoff is a potential failure point — and none of them live in your codebase.
A Strava API delay of 20 minutes is technically within SLA. To a user who just finished a run and opens the app to check their rank — it's a broken product. The perception of failure and the reality of failure are the same event.
solution
Don't hide latency. Name it. Timestamp it. Make the wait feel like information, not absence!
Engineering could fix a bug in their own code. Design had to absorb the uncertainty of a system it didn't own.
Design decisions
❌ Error message on latency
✅ Named source + recency signal
❌ Hide status until complete
✅ Always-visible green/red pipeline state
Choosing challenges
Join challenges
Sycning state
Design decisions
❌ Error message on latency
✅ Named source + recency signal
❌ Hide status until complete
✅ Always-visible green/red pipeline state
Sycning state
Design decisions
❌ Error message on latency
✅ Named source + recency signal
❌ Hide status until complete
✅ Always-visible green/red pipeline state
Join challenges
Impact
75%
challenge completion rate. The pipeline held. Users trusted the data.
8K+
active participants. 400+ challenges created within 2 months of launch.
Gov.
India's Smart Cities Mission (MoHUA) adopted the platform for the national Freedom2Walk & Cycle initiative.