In one month, I designed from scratch the structure of the two products that hold up the last mile: an operation of dozens of hubs, across several cities.
The migration off the platform running the operation shipped within the contract deadline, with a lean squad, and the structure I designed that month is the one the teams still evolve today.
01 — My role
At the time of the merger with the global group, last-mile management ran on a third-party platform: a high license cost and zero room to customize features for an operation with very specific particularities, like the hub model. The company decided to replace it with an in-house tool.
What had to be born or change, in parallel:
- Raio web, the operation’s control tower: state of deliveries and trips, delays, riders en route and returning. Nothing existed.
- Raio app, the courier’s app, which already existed, but without the concept that was becoming the center of the operation: trips with stacking (route-based grouping of multiple deliveries), replacing single deliveries. Absorbing that shift required restructuring the entire navigation.
02 — What was at stake
If the migration failed, the operation couldn’t be left unsupported: the alternative was to extend the contract and pay dearly for it.
The deadline was hard: the end of the contract.
Act I · 03 — Product decision
I led design. Scope definitions belonged to my product counterpart and the CTO.
What I brought to those decisions was the learning from discovery: what the operation actually used on the platform, what it ignored, what it needed and didn’t have.
Act II · 04 — Leadership and craft decision
When the squad’s lead designer left mid-project, I took on execution too: I led and I designed.
A context decision, not a habit: with a hard deadline and the squad without its lead designer, being both leader and contributor was what the moment demanded.
In one month, I stood up the first foundation of information architecture and navigation for both products (the organization of trips, deliveries, and tracking), conceived with the PM and validated with couriers on site, in the stores.
05 — Relative result
migration within the contract deadline, with a lean squad
the third-party platform’s license cost eliminated
the operation absorbed the switch with no productivity drop
The functional results came in the following evolutions, built by the squads on the structure I designed, which is still the foundation today.
Years later, the Delivery Experience universe, born on that foundation, came to report to me as product leadership.
06 — What I’d do differently
I’d have looked earlier at the mobile vs. desktop dynamic at the moment of the operation inside the store. Part of the adaptations we made later, with learnings from the operation, could have gone into the foundation already.