In June 2019 I joined goPuff to build out their SCM and fulfillment technologies, in order to accommodate the exponential growth of the network of warehouses as they anticipated closing their next couple of rounds of funding.
Discovering
While designing the MVP of our warehousing softwares, I was afforded the opportunity to visit warehouses for design research to validate the effectiveness of the UX and processes we were creating. The results were phenomenal. Since the existing tooling was part of a preexisting monolith not informed by user interactions, the employees abilities to move through the new app was like night and day.
Optimizing
Confident in the first iteration of our software we moved forward to rapidly build and deploy the backend portions of the system as well as the UX prototype we used in the research phase. Throughout the next year we continued working with groups within operations leadership in order to continue tweaking the system and nailing down all the brass tacks needed to become a “complete” system within the four walls.
Scaling Up
In a matter of weeks after our last release of core functionality and completion of full network rollout, the COVID-19 pandemic happened and goPuff became part of the center stage nationally as we delivered essential items to customers all over the country. My teams really put our new application to the test to accommodate the exponential growth the company had been planning for this whole time.
By refocusing the teams’ efforts to APM, SRE, and IAC for the time being, we were able to get the application to a point where it easily handled all of the transactions easily, including the various sync processes with the rest of the logistics chain. By doing so we were able to to continue our initial mission of improving inventory accuracy, allowing goPuff to become one of the few companies to keep its delivery times at an hour or below in most of its major metros, despite the global supply chain issues.
This was instrumental in proving that goPuff had the world class logistics chain which allowed us to to raise the investment capital we have today, continuing our exponential growth.