Towards self-serve analytics: a year of data transformation at leboncoin

We migrated to Databricks. Here is what we really learned.

Leboncoin: sixty data people, twenty-seven million users, more than three hundred Tableau dashboards. In 2024 we took a decision: migrate from Redshift and Athena to Databricks, deploy Unity Catalog, document our domains in Coalesce, and make business teams autonomous. The kind of programme that makes beautiful slides.

A year later we are midstream. The stack is moving forward. What we really learned is that the technical problem was the easy one.

This talk covers what we concretely did, incremental migration, semantic layer, data products, an end-to-end real estate pilot, and above all what it revealed: tables with no owner for five years, four different definitions of the same KPI, data analysts who want autonomy but not accountability. And why solving all of that is also the only foundation on which AI agents can be placed without going off the rails.

Field feedback, first-hand, from the teams who lived it.