Shippo · 2017
Owned roadmap, new carrier integrations, maintenance, feature expansion, and API version upgrades for Shippo's connected carrier network.
1
Problem
One of the early blockers to acquiring enterprise customers was the limited number of supported carriers — and it taking anywhere from 3–5 months to integrate a new one.
2
The Process
I established standard procedures for the Business Development reaching out to carriers and streamlined the technical integration such that it could be repeatable and parallelized:
3
Results
4
Unlocking Australia
One of my favorite efforts in expanding the carrier network was integrating with four Australian carriers at once. The BD team and I — often at odds about which carriers to tackle next — shared a conviction about the growth opportunity in Australia, and BD negotiated some of the best financial terms we'd ever gotten from a carrier partner.
I led an overhaul of Australia Post alongside a new integration with Fastway, and hired and trained an associate PM to oversee integrations with Couriers Please and Sendle.
5
The Complication
So much of Australia is remote that scheduling a carrier pickup is standard — so standard you can't retrieve a shipping label from the carrier's API without one. Shippo had no functionality for that.
Every carrier formatted pickup windows differently, from values like "morning" and "afternoon" to specific 2-hour blocks. With the lead engineer on the carriers team, I designed a new Pickups endpoint that let customers specify a start and end time in their own timezone, which we translated to meet each carrier's requirements.
6
Bonus
Pickup functionality was expanded to our integration with USPS and DHL Express
