Big Cartel: “Unblocked is like having a smart colleague available 24/7.”

October 29, 2024

Big Cartel's ecommerce platform helps artists and small businesses like jewelers, printmakers, and clothing designers launch and grow their online stores. Established in 2005, they have helped millions of independent shops sell more than 2.5 billion dollars in goods.

Big Cartel operates at this impressive scale with a remote-first team of just 30 people. This setup depends on a startup-like environment where team members often cross functional boundaries to support one another. This is particularly true for engineering, where code-adjacent teams like product management help boost the team’s velocity by picking up tasks like investigating bug reports. But with incomplete documentation, product managers struggled to complete these tasks independently, forcing them to seek support from — and unintentionally disrupt — the engineering team.

Chief Product Officer Trevin Chow brought in Unblock to help the product team navigate and gain context on the Big Cartel codebase, enabling them to tackle code-adjacent tasks independently.

"Unblocked is like having a smart colleague available 24/7. It empowers our product team to dive into the code for answers, reducing dependence on engineers." — Trevin Chow, Chief Product Officer at Big Cartel

Before: Blocked by dependencies and stuck waiting

Despite its robustness, Big Cartel’s codebase, which predates the iPhone, has limited documentation. This creates significant hurdles for cross-functional partners such as product managers who frequently need answers about their application.

Given the company's lean size, product management often wears multiple hats, picking up code-adjacent responsibilities like investigating bug reports or writing Help Center content. Additionally, as the product and business scaled, the team wanted to build upon their basic data analytics to make more nuanced, data-driven product decisions. However, these tasks require an understanding of feature-specific logic, which is rarely well-documented and difficult to recall from memory. "We could ask engineers for help, but it’s inefficient—it disrupts their focus and leaves us waiting hours for a response.” Trevin explains.

Trevin and his team tried to dig through the codebase independently to complete these tasks, but quickly encountered obstacles. "I’m one of the more technical folks on the product team, but I can't navigate the codebase because I'm unfamiliar with Ruby on Rails, our primary tech stack. Even if I managed to turn my confusion into a question I could Google, I didn’t know if the answers were reliable or current.”

"Even minor instrumentation changes take longer than we think. The context switching, along with the back-and-forth to clarify details, turns a 30-minute task into an hours-long process." — Trevin Chow, Chief Product Officer at Big Cartel

After: Empowered to navigate and resolve technical issues independently

Trevin initially experimented with Unblocked to locate relevant code when investigating bugs but quickly recognized its potential to accelerate the end-to-end bug resolution process. He explains: "Unblocked's clear explanations encouraged me to dig deeper, guiding me through the entire code snippet. Within minutes, I not only grasped the code but also identified the root cause of the bug.”

Unblocked's impact extended beyond routine tasks, helping the team ship a critical project on time despite unforeseen challenges. Trevin recounts: "During an important project to expand new categories in international markets, we missed addressing an important edge case, which wasn’t caught until close to the deadline. The engineers familiar with that part of the codebase were on vacation. Instead of delaying our launch or shipping a broken experience, I used Unblocked to find the relevant code snippet and implemented a simple conditional statement to fix the issue. We shipped a great product experience without disturbing the vacationing engineers."

Building on their success with Unblocked, Big Cartel expanded its use of Unblocked to accelerating onboarding of all new team members. A Slack channel allows new hires to ask Unblocked questions about the product and codebase.

“Unblocked not only provides answers but also links to relevant tickets, docs, and other resources. This helps us build a robust understanding of our systems.”— Trevin Chow, Chief Product Officer at Big Cartel

Democratization of code knowledge

A year into Big Cartel’s journey with Unblocked, Trevin attributes their success to the team’s robust integration and setup. “We connected Unblocked with our entire tool stack, including Slack, Linear, and Notion. It took a little time upfront, but the payoff has been huge in how effectively Unblocked supports our team.” he says.

As Trevin looks to the company’s future, he sees Unblocked continuing to boost team momentum by uncovering and retaining valuable, often overlooked knowledge.

"Someone might believe the product functions one way while the code tells a different story. Unblocked enables our team to independently and quickly uncover the truth and make decisions more quickly.” — Trevin Chow, Chief Product Officer at Big Cartel

Get in touch with us today to see how Unblocked can help your engineering team scale internal support.