When joined in 2019, the company was set on a bold goal: to expand beyond its origins as a French premium TV channel and become a top-five global streaming leader. But becoming a leading player meant more than just expansion—it called for a focused strategy that combined the right talent and the most robust technology.
On this week’s episode of , Damien sits down with host François Ajenstat to share how Canal+ balances product integration on a global scale. His approach focuses on building trust and tapping into talent across regions, ensuring Canal+ can grow globally while staying rooted in local expertise.
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Canal+’s ambitious scaling strategy
Becoming one of the world’s top streaming platforms is no small feat. The plan? Acquire successful streaming services across three continents to reach 100 million users. Easy day, right? Not so much. Scaling through acquisitions isn't simple—it requires merging technology, people, and processes while preserving each product’s differentiator. Canal+ became all too familiar with this complexity as they expanded into new markets like Asia and Africa, where some of the acquired platforms were already flourishing.
“The idea now is to make one single product that is rebooted all over the world,” Damien explains. However, bringing multiple successful products into one platform isn’t straightforward. Each acquisition comes with its own established technology, team, and processes. “How do you convince people that by providing a new product and working together, we will do something better? That’s not easy,” Damien admits.
Building a global product through acquisitions
As Canal+ continues its global expansion, acquiring companies across Europe, Africa, and Asia, Damien focuses on what really drives success: people. While it’s easy to get caught up in the technical side of scaling, Damien is clear that the real challenge isn’t about merging technologies—it’s about tapping into the strengths of the teams behind them.
“Tech is not the only issue. It’s about which skills we have and how we distribute the product. It’s about finding who’s the best at what.”
Instead of centralizing all operations in one place, Damien assesses where expertise already exists within his global teams.
This approach avoids a one-size-fits-all mentality. “For me, it’s more about who is the best at iOS, and then saying, okay, iOS will be done here because we have the best people,” he says. By playing to each region’s strengths, Canal+ has created a unified global product without sacrificing quality or efficiency.
It’s about creating human connections that unite teams spread across different continents. Damien believes trust is built face-to-face, so he prioritizes meeting teams in person. “There is one easy way, but it’s expensive: just meet people. That makes all the difference,” he says. Whether it’s during a meeting or over a casual dinner, those interactions help create the bonds that make distributed teams work.
“Meeting people, traveling, having a drink or a dinner with them—that makes all the difference because when you come back, you know them,” Damien adds. For him, these personal connections are crucial as Canal+ integrates new teams into its broader vision.
Of course, Damien recognizes that not everyone will see themselves in the organization’s evolving structure.
“You see that people were very good at something, and now they don’t see themselves in this vision. This isn’t a failure—it’s an inevitable part of change.”
For Damien, understanding and empathy are just as important as technical expertise when leading through periods of transformation.
Turning setbacks into growth
Growth often comes from the most unexpected places. One such moment happened during a high-profile Champions League soccer match, a key event for Canal+ and its millions of viewers. It should have been a routine broadcast. Instead, the platform went dark, leaving fans staring at black screens.
The platform crashing during one of the year's biggest sporting events was a worst-case scenario. Viewers had planned their evenings around the game—friends gathered, food was prepared, all for a moment that suddenly wasn’t there. The stakes were high, and the outage left Damien’s team scrambling for answers.
“You see problem A happen, and you know problem B is right behind it. Then C, then D, and suddenly you’re dealing with a cascade of issues,” It wasn’t just one technical failure—it was a perfect storm of overlooked fixes, technical debt, and strained infrastructure.
But for Damien, the crash wasn’t the end of the story—it was the beginning of a major turning point. The incident exposed critical areas where the platform needed improvement, prompting Canal+ to confront longstanding issues head-on.
This wasn’t just about fixing the platform but about future-proofing it. Damien and his team immediately invested in a more robust, resilient infrastructure. It was a hard lesson but a necessary one. It became clear that prioritizing performance and reliability wasn’t optional—it was essential to ensuring a seamless experience for their global audience.
Through it all, Damien’s approach was collaborative. Rather than assigning blame, he encouraged the team to see the crash as an opportunity to learn and improve. This mindset—focusing on resilience and adaptability—became a cornerstone for how Canal+ would operate going forward. By addressing the technical and organizational gaps exposed by the outage, the company strengthened its platform and its culture.
“We learned a lot from that night. It changed almost everything in our tech,” Damien notes. What could have been a disaster instead became a critical learning experience. By taking decisive action in the crash’s aftermath, Damien and his team ensured that Canal+ was better prepared for the future—stronger, more resilient, and ready to scale.
How Canal+ innovates globally
Leading product at Canal+ isn’t just about making data-driven decisions; it’s about finding the right balance between using data and fostering creativity. As the company grows, Damien emphasizes data-informed decision-making, where numbers guide the process but don’t limit the potential for innovation.
“We are not data-driven; we are data-informed.”
Damien highlights the importance of balancing data, gut instincts, and team knowledge alongside analytics. In his view, the key to building something truly innovative lies in trusting his team's instincts as much as the data they analyze. Whether it’s prioritizing product features or determining how to approach new markets, Damien believes that creativity and data must work together to achieve the best outcomes.
The core of this philosophy is understanding that data doesn’t always tell the whole story. Take, for instance, Canal+’s ambition to expand into new regions like Vietnam and Africa. Though data enables leaders to understand broad user behavior and trends, on-the-ground insights from local teams reveal subtle cultural nuances that can make or break a product’s success. In Vietnam, for example, the team realized that the inability to seamlessly rotate the screen into full landscape mode was a significant pain point for users—a detail they might have missed with data alone.
“In France, you have no idea about these kinds of things. But in Vietnam, it’s everything,” Damien notes, explaining how this insight led to design changes that made the app more intuitive for Vietnamese users. These creative, localized adjustments help Canal+ adapt its global product to fit regional needs beyond what raw data could predict.
“Good UX is good everywhere,” Damien emphasizes, but understanding the nuances of each market is what sets a product apart globally.
While the focus on data remains strong, Damien believes creativity is essential to pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in a highly competitive streaming industry. He encourages his teams to embrace experimentation—even when the data might suggest staying on a safer path. This blend of data-informed decision-making with creative freedom enables Canal+ to explore new ideas, test innovative approaches, and adapt quickly when things don’t go as planned.
This approach is not about abandoning data but using it as one piece of the puzzle. By staying open to creative solutions and understanding that numbers can’t predict every outcome, Damien leads his team with a growth mindset. They don’t fear failure; they see it as an opportunity to learn and evolve. This openness to creativity and learning forms the foundation of Damien’s leadership style, enabling his team to thrive through both success and failure.
Tune into Damien’s story
As Canal+ continues to grow, Damien is confident that the hard lessons they’ve learned will help them succeed on a global scale. “We’re still learning, but we’re ready for what’s next,” he said.
Listen to the latest episode of the Next Gen Builders podcast to dive deeper into Damien’s approach to leading Canal+ through global expansion, and the valuable lessons he’s learned along the way.
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