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

• The ERP system lacked the capability to manage inventory and finances across multiple warehouse locations, limiting scalability for customers with distributed operations.

• A single warehouse model was too simplistic for rigorous operations requiring individual inventory tracking at each warehouse, impacting both in-warehouse and back-office processes.

• A key customer required this functionality for their go-live, making it critical to deliver under a tight deadline while coordinating with ongoing migrations to a new front-end.

Action

Discovery

Supporting multiple warehouses required a deep understanding of customer workflows and a reevaluation of backend systems. During scoping, we:

• Engaged with the go-live customer to map their multi-warehouse requirements, focusing on inventory tracking, stock ordering, and sales workflows.

• Identified dependencies with other teams to ensure new features being developed concurrently were multi-warehouse aware.

• Worked with Sales and Customer Success to align the feature’s scope with long-term growth opportunities, including demo environments for sales leads.

• Balanced the need for immediate functionality with the technical design required to enable scalable, future enhancements.

Solution

To deliver the feature successfully, I collaborated closely with engineering, design, Sales, and Customer Success teams to:

• Develop core functionality: Designed backend objects to support the new warehouse conventions, including address field updates and multi-location inventory tracking.

• Coordinate across teams: Worked with feature teams to ensure new features were compatible with the multi-warehouse model and aligned with both legacy and new front-ends during the migration.

• Support sales and success: Delivered demo environments showcasing multi-warehouse capabilities to generate leads while providing Customer Success with the tools to support the go-live customer effectively.

• Iterate post-launch: Addressed day-one kinks to stabilize operations for the go-live customer, transitioning them from a “yellow” to a “green” status within a few weeks.

Result

Delivered the feature on time, enabling the go-live customer to conduct day-to-day operations smoothly and efficiently.

• Supported the customer’s distributed warehouse operations, ensuring inventory accuracy and stock management at individual locations.

• Expanded functionality post-launch, leading to a successful upsell for our largest customer, cementing the company as their key ERP vendor.

Key challenges and resolutions

Tight deadline with legacy constraints
Delivering the feature on time required balancing dependencies across legacy and new front-ends while meeting the go-live customer’s needs.

• Resolution: Collaborated with Sales and implementation teams to reduce scope, phasing out non-essential features to meet the deadline. A clear roadmap for future iterations ensured alignment with customer and sales priorities.

Technical debt
A prior version of the feature had significant technical debt, making scalability and usability challenging.

• Resolution: Advocated early for resources by negotiating roadmap adjustments with other product managers and gaining buy-in from engineering leadership. Regular updates to Customer Success and Sales maintained transparency and confidence in progress.

Lessons learned

• Strategic scope reduction drives success
  Phasing out non-essential features ensured timely delivery for the go-live customer while enabling future iterations. This approach also supported Sales in generating a 20% increase in tagged leads through demo environments.

• Open feedback loops enhance iteration
  Insights from user shadowing and Datadog RUM monitoring informed post-launch improvements, addressing pain points and refining usability effectively.

• Transparency strengthens alignment
  Regular updates to Sales and Customer Success ensured stakeholders were prepared for challenges, reducing friction and fostering collaboration.

• Early advocacy is key for addressing technical debt
  Securing resources to address technical debt required strategic alignment with other product managers and leadership, ensuring the solution was robust and scalable.