About Salomon

Salomon is a global leader in outdoor sports gear, known for its high-performance products in trail running, skiing, hiking, and more. Headquartered in Annecy, in the heart of the French Alps, the brand sits at the intersection of innovation, technology, and user-centered design.

Internship Scope

During this 6-month internship, I joined Salomon’s IT team as a software engineer intern, contributing both to product delivery and early product exploration for a new mobile application.

This role gave me the opportunity to work across two complementary dimensions:

  • Engineering delivery: mobile development, backend management, environments, and deployment automation
  • Product discovery: user research, competitor analysis, and ideation workshops with runners

Engineering Contribution

I contributed to the development of a beta mobile application for both iOS and Android. Initially tested by a small group of users, the app was later released internally to gather structured feedback.

My main responsibilities included:

  • Leading the end-to-end development of several mobile features (Flutter)
  • Managing backend integrations and serverless infrastructure (AWS, Node.js)
  • Setting up three separate environments (dev / staging / prod) for the front-end
  • Working with Auth0 authentication, environment configuration, and release workflows
  • Automating Play Store deployment using GitLab CI/CD pipelines and Fastlane

This part of the internship gave me strong exposure to delivery processes and production constraints.

Collaboration and Teamwork

This experience was markedly different from my previous internship because of the variety of profiles involved in the project.

I worked closely with:

  • A Senior Software Engineer, who mentored me throughout the internship and also acted as Product Owner
  • A UX Designer, with whom I collaborated continuously to connect technical choices with user needs
  • PhD students, whose AI-based training plan research required future data collection integration inside the app

I also participated in:

  • Daily Agile stand-ups within the broader IT team
  • Cross-team discussions with developers, DevOps engineers, architects, data scientists, data engineers, analysts, and product owners

These interactions gave me a much broader understanding of how a large company structures product and technical decisions.

Product Discovery and UX Work

Working with UX added strong context to the features we were building and helped us make better decisions before implementation.

1. Competitor Analysis

We conducted a benchmark of existing running and outdoor mobile applications such as Strava, Nolio, Kiprun Pacer, and Adidas Running.

The objective was to identify:

  • strengths and weaknesses
  • positioning
  • UX patterns
  • feature gaps in the market

We distinguished several product categories:

  • coaching-focused apps
  • route discovery apps
  • brand-first ecosystems
  • community-driven platforms

This work helped define where a Salomon product could create value.

2. Interviews with Trail Runners

We then ran 10 qualitative interviews (30–45 minutes each) with trail runners.

The interviews explored:

  • training habits
  • current tools
  • frustrations
  • expectations for a future training app

From this, we identified 3–4 recurring runner profiles, which later helped prioritize feature scenarios.

3. Ideation Workshops

Based on interview insights, we organized ideation workshops with runners.

Typical structure:

  • 10 min introduction
  • 15–20 min individual idea generation
  • 10 min collective sharing
  • 20–30 min discussion and refinement

Together with the UX designer, I helped synthesize outputs and identify the most promising feature directions.

4. Prototyping Roadmap

Although the prototyping phase was planned after my internship, we prepared next steps for:

  • transforming concepts into UX mockups
  • reviewing them with Product Owners and Designers
  • iterating through future testing

Reflection

This internship was particularly valuable because it showed me how technical implementation and user-centered thinking constantly influence each other.

Beyond writing code, I learned how much product value depends on decisions made long before development starts.