The Full Package: How Route architects its all-in-one post-purchase platform
Sep 19, 2023
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Learn about Route's post-purchase platform and their impressive customer retention rate. Discover the power of customer-centric product development and the importance of using and improving your own product. Hear about the significance of selecting the right tech stack, the benefits of a comprehensive post-purchase platform, and the importance of continuous learning and effective communication.
Route's post-purchase platform offers package insurance and transparent tracking information, resulting in a high customer retention rate.
Route chose CockroachDB for scalability and strong consistency in their critical order system.
Route prioritizes continuous deployments, rapid feedback, and adopting technologies that enhance agility and drive value for the company.
Deep dives
The Cloud Journey
Route has always been on AWS and adopted cloud as the hosting platform from the beginning. They started with manual deployments and later moved to continuous integration. Their infrastructure design currently operates within the US with two regions, US East and US West.
Choosing CockroachDB
Route's decision to use CockroachDB was made by the CTO. They chose CockroachDB for its easy-to-use SQL interface, distributed compute, and relational matching capabilities. With CockroachDB, they were able to scale the loads they were experiencing and maintain strong consistency for their critical order system.
Keeping Up with Technology
To stay on top of technology, Siddhartha reads research papers, which helps him understand difficult concepts. By focusing on understanding fundamental concepts, he is able to quickly grasp new technologies and make informed decisions. Siddhartha also emphasizes the importance of understanding the value and benefits of different technologies and maintaining up-to-date knowledge.
Delivering Value to Customers
Route focuses on delivering value to their customers through continuous deployments and rapid feedback. They prioritize adopting technologies and practices that enhance their agility and enable them to stay ahead of the competition. This includes trunk-based development, collecting real-time consumer feedback, and quickly iterating on their products.
Advice for Tech Professionals
Siddhartha's advice for tech professionals is to read research papers to solidify their understanding of fundamental concepts. He also emphasizes the importance of being able to effectively communicate complex ideas in a simple, understandable manner. Additionally, he recommends focusing on technologies and practices that drive value for the company and keeping up with industry trends and knowledge.
A purchase may seem complete after a user checks out, but the package itself still needs to make the voyage to the customer’s doorstep. Route’s post-purchase platform is designed to handle every step of this journey from offering package insurance to providing transparent tracking information, and is currently used by big companies including Alo Yoga and Cotopaxi.
Route’s astounding 98.1% customer retention rate is the result of a feedback-driven and cross-departmental culture that translates data into actionable improvements. To learn about the engineering and architecture that makes better customer experiences possible, our host David Joy sat down with their Engineering Manager, Siddhartha Sandhu.
Join as we discuss:
The power of customer-centric product development
Why the best way to improve your product is to use it
How to choose tooling that will enable faster product growth
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