Building Products for Retail & Warehouse: My 8-Year Journey
Penning down some thoughts from my journey at GreyOrange. A few years ago, I co-created gStore with our CEO,a SaaS store execution product and also helped architect our robotics automation business
Note: this is not a promotional post for my company, but something I felt I could share with the larger audience. No marketing person put a gun on my head!
Introduction
I’ve spent the last 8 years at GreyOrange building and building two distinct product lines: a store execution product called gStore, now serving 2,000+ retail stores and a warehouse automation platform GreyMatter serving robotics fulfillment in 6 continents with $1M+ products shipped ever week.
I had the front-row seat to building B2B products for these industries as a product leader, software architect and as a an engineering leader
Scope of the article: I want to share my insights as a product leader — what’s different, what’s surprisingly similar, and what I’ve learned along the way. I will not cover the engineering challenges. This is also not a comprehensive guide of any sorts
Scope of my experience: I understand identifying the customer needs, solving them creatively and pragmatically with near-term/long term horizons, building product and getting it shipped out. Admittedly, I don't fully understand product pricing, competition and product marketing bits.
I have been in the warehouse / store many times to always have the reality hit in my face. Something about being in that boundary helps you understand what matters. It builds empathy with your user
Key questions
Who are the people involved?
In an enterprise B2B environment, it can feel like an endless list of stakeholders. However, my experience tells me that three key personalities that typically shaped the journey
Our buyer: the individual or group controlling the budget, setting high-level goals, and providing critical executive support
Our actual users: the frontline operators, store associates, or warehouse workers who use the product daily. If the product is not helping them, no amount of buyer support can save the day. Ultimately, operations own everything
You / you organization: this is me, you, with your leadership, product team and engineering teams, sales teams etc
The trifecta with continually evolving overlaps and shifts
All three groups influence the product in some way, and balancing their expectations is crucial.
How did we or do we identify the long-term direction?
"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward" — Steve Jobs
gStore (Retail)
We observed that there was a massive need of omni-channel execution support in the stores 4 years back. The technology was fragmented. We explored various markets within retail as an entry point. We ultimately, narrowed it to Apparel betting on RFID adoption. Our natural expertise in hardware-software integration was a market edge in our hypotheses. We did a pilot with a customer and went along with it
We did write an Amazon style PR/FAQ in the beginning. That's highly recommended to refine the offering
GreyMatter (Warehouse automation):
I have lesser insights in the initial journey as I joined GreyOrange few years after the founding. However, the acquisition of Kiva systems to Amazon sparked an interest in the "Goods-to-Person" market
We do keep an eye on the competitive landscape, but ultimately, we have deep accounts with more opportunities in expansion. Additionally, there are other interesting articles from Lenny's newsletter that are worth reading
Mission → Vision → Strategy → Goals → Roadmap → Task (Paid article)
Strategy Blocks: An operator’s guide to product strategy (Paid article)
How to build things correctly in short-term / medium-term?
Enterprise B2B product management is 50% relationship management—navigating the buyer’s expectations, user needs, and internal constraints
Identifying the real need
Users typically know they need help, but they can’t always predict exactly which solution will feel intuitive. They might request a specific feature but actually need something more fundamental. Observing them — rather than just relying on their descriptions — often leads to better ideas.
I have found the following frameworks / questions useful to identify
"What does this person does daily?"
"What will get this person his promotion?"
What works (and what doesn't)
Don’t chase perfection during early ideation: ultimately, the "what to build" and "how to build" is decided by some equilibrium of yourself and the buyer's team. However, perfecting at this stage has seemed futile more often than not, because there are radical changes when the product hits the actual users. However, this is dependent whether you can do incremental rollouts
Collaboration: during one of my leadership workshops sessions, I learnt that statistically the output of a few people collaborating is going to be higher than your individual output. To my own surprise, I have felt that is true
Prototyping: Closely tied up with collaboration, is prototyping on the fly. It has helped a lot in getting our creative juices flowing. Picture/visuals are a thousand words. We have used FigJam / Figma to quickly prototype
"Building is thinking" - My personal philosophy
Retail vs Warehouse: My thoughts
Below are some my own thoughts. They are not necessarily structured, but still paint a picture
Challenges unique to GreyOrange's products
Honestly, the list is endless, but these ones are top of my mind
Computationally hard real-time decision making: usually products are not limited by technology but ours is especially on the robotics automation. We have to make and execute countless real-time decisions which are computationally hard to solve
One has to think differently because our users interact physically: both in retail and warehouse, our users are moving in the field carrying the device or picking at the station. The challenges are broader in UX as there are more factors to cater to (e.g. fatigue, frustration with a false alert as the user has to move around)
Hardware is no joke: there are unique challenges to managing hardware namely, software-hardware integration, hardware development, reliability testing, deployment, maintenance. The list is endless
Man+Machine products are so much harder to think through: this is applicable to GreyMatter (our robotics). The number of interaction points increase, and one has to have a lot of "Systems thinking" to build robotics