About

Grubmarket is a B2B platform that connects farmers, food producers, and suppliers directly with businesses like grocery stores, restaurants, and foodservice companies. It streamlines the food supply chain by offering an ERP solution that enhances inventory management, order processing, and logistics for wholesale food operations.

Problem

Our legacy catch weight solution was insufficient to meet the needs of pure protein wholesalers, leading to inefficiencies and customer dissatisfaction. Designed primarily for broadline wholesalers with limited protein operations, the system lacked the flexibility and accuracy required for protein industry workflows. Key issues included:

• Tracking limitations: Users had to choose between tracking in weight or cases, losing the ability to handle both simultaneously. Fixed ratios between lbs and cases prevented adjustments for individual cases, causing inaccuracies.

• Inventory discrepancies: Selling partial cases with specific weights often resulted in mismatched ratios, compounding inventory errors over time.

• Inefficient labeling: Weights from manufacturer labels could not be integrated, requiring manual data entry for each box, which reduced efficiency.

• No partial-case support: The system couldn’t handle sales of partial cases by weight, a critical requirement in the protein industry.

These limitations led to operational inefficiencies, error-prone workflows, and dissatisfied customers, making it clear the legacy solution couldn’t support the demands of high-margin protein accounts.

Action

Discovery

The project began with comprehensive discovery efforts to ensure the solution addressed customer needs and industry requirements.

• I coordinated discovery calls with internal subsidiaries and current customers using the 1.0 version, inviting design and engineering teams to gather firsthand insights on limitations and pain points.

• Collaborated with customer success to perform competitive analysis and collect requirements from the new protein customer, whose business hinged on robust catchweight functionality.

• The discovery process emphasized understanding critical workflows, such as tracking weights at different stages of operations (e.g., receiving and selling inventory), to ensure the solution aligned with customer expectations.

Solution

Designing and implementing the solution required extensive collaboration, prioritization, and iterative development to meet tight deadlines and strategic goals.

Segmenting and Validating Designs

• The solution was broken into distinct areas of the product requiring updates, such as inventory tracking, labeling workflows, and weight-to-case ratio adjustments.

• Over several cycles, the team ideated, designed, and validated prototypes with the customer to ensure alignment with operational workflows and expectations.

Balancing scope and deadlines

• Negotiated with engineering to define a v1 slice that delivered critical functionality for the customer’s go-live.

• Coordinated regular syncs with stakeholders, including design, engineering, and customer success, to maintain transparency and alignment.

Managing technical complexity

• Worked closely with product managers overseeing concurrent backend and frontend migrations to avoid duplicating work and ensure consistency across teams.

• Prevented regressions by maintaining clear communication across teams and aligning dependencies.

• Collaborated with our quality automation team to work alongside developers to build into E2E test flows.

Key UI enhancement: Workflow flexibility

• Discovery revealed the need for flexibility in balancing speed and accuracy across workflows.

  • Receiving Inventory: Allowed for quick entry of approximate weights to prioritize speed.

  • Selling Inventory: Enabled precise weight tracking for accurate invoicing.

• This flexibility ensured operational efficiency without sacrificing long-term accuracy, addressing a critical shortcoming of the previous system.

• This later proved to be the stickiest portion of our product, winning praise from the customer and overshadowing other product bugs.

Over the next six months, we ran tight development cycles to keep customer success informed and align the product with go-live training needs.

During training sessions, we gathered feedback directly from users to refine the product prior to general availability (GA), ensuring it met both customer expectations and industry standards.

Result

• Go-Live Success: The new protein customer adopted the feature and remained in green status, reflecting high satisfaction.

• Lead Generation: Showcasing the feature to prospective protein distributors led to a 20% increase in leads within the protein segment.

• Strategic Growth: The solution positioned the company as a competitive player in the protein market, unlocking future revenue potential in this high-margin industry.

Key challenges and resolutions

Managing customer expectations with an incomplete product

The product was marketed as “complete,” but the catchweight solution required significant development to meet the new customer’s needs. Balancing discovery with implementation while maintaining customer trust was a delicate process.

Resolution:

• Collaborated closely with sales and customer success to ensure clear and consistent communication with the customer. By framing the ongoing development as part of a collaborative solution, we managed expectations and maintained confidence throughout the process.

Balancing Speed and Accuracy in Workflows

The protein industry requires flexibility, where speed is prioritized for receiving inventory, but accuracy is critical for selling and invoicing. Designing a system to balance these needs without overcomplicating workflows was a key challenge.

Resolution:

• Pushed for multiple iterations and customer validation sessions for configurable workflows allowing users to toggle between speed and accuracy, such as entering approximate weights for receiving and precise weights for selling. This approach ensured efficiency without sacrificing long-term accuracy that aligned with the customer’s workflow.

Lessons learned

• The complexity of migrations: Large migrations can significantly impact the velocity of new feature development. Proper planning and alignment are critical to minimizing disruptions.

• Alignment with Sales and Customer Success: Misaligned expectations early in the process can adversely impact customer perceptions. Clear communication and a unified front across sales, customer success, and product teams are essential for success.

• Industry insight - Flexibility in manual operations: Designing for flexibility in industries requiring both speed and accuracy ensures broad usability without overcomplicating the product with one-off requests. Identifying operational ranges creates scalable solutions for key demographics while preserving engineering resources.

• The power of solving acute pain points: Solving an extremely painful problem (such as how we built in flexibility in when accuracy was required for catch weight) can make a product indispensable. By addressing a critical need exceptionally well, the product became “sticky” enough to offset other concerns, increasing customer loyalty and overall satisfaction.