Gopuff · Marketplace & Delivery Ops · 2021–2022
Building the company's first
real-time order platform
from nothing.
Gopuff operated 600+ micro-fulfillment sites across the US and UK with no unified view of what was happening to an order after it left the shelf. Late deliveries were invisible until a customer complained.
80%
Reduction in P90 deliveries over 60 minutes
1wk
Time from kickoff to working MVP
600+
Sites on platform within one month
The Challenge
Gopuff had no real-time visibility into the order lifecycle after dispatch. Drivers, dispatchers, and operations managers were flying blind — they couldn't see where an order was, why it was late, or when it would arrive.
The result: a P90 late-delivery window (deliveries over 60 minutes) that was both large and invisible. The business couldn't fix what it couldn't see.
The Approach
I scoped an MVP deliberately narrow: one team, one site, one question — can we surface real-time order state in a way that actually changes dispatcher behavior? We went from kickoff to a working product in one week.
The key decision was treating the first pilot as a learning instrument, not a proof of concept. We defined explicit success criteria up front, ran tight feedback loops with dispatchers on site, and used what we learned to rebuild the data model before scaling.
Full productization shipped within the month. We then ran a structured rollout — one region at a time, with clear readiness criteria before each expansion — until the platform covered 600+ sites across the US and UK.
The Outcome
P90 late deliveries over 60 minutes dropped by 80%. Operations teams went from reactive firefighting to proactive intervention — they could see a delivery at risk and act before the customer knew.
The platform became the operational backbone for all subsequent delivery optimization work, including the Uber integration that reduced costs during low-supply periods.
"The hardest part wasn't building it — it was resisting the urge to build everything at once. The MVP worked because it answered one question clearly. Everything else came from that."
What I owned
Product strategy & scope — defined the MVP boundary, success criteria, and phased rollout plan
On-site pilot design — embedded with dispatchers to test and iterate before scaling
Technical partnership — collaborated with engineering on data model decisions that made scale possible
Nationwide rollout — led phased expansion across 600+ sites with regional readiness gates