Behind The Product with Evan Clearesta, The Product Manager of Cargobase

What are the main challenges behind the scenes? What’s your approach to tackle them?

Evan: Building a product is always a tricky affair. One of the key challenges is balancing the specific needs of a customer with the overall scalability of our product. Scalability is important so that many more customers can benefit from the cool features we build!

For each new requirement, we dive deep to actively clarify and understand the customer needs. We study existing industry processes, user feedback and competitor solutions, in order to build features that can add value to a wider range of customers.

More often than not, features that look simple on the surface can involve a lot of technical complexity to implement. This is why we have to plan carefully and ensure that we communicate technicalities in a way that business users and stakeholders can easily understand.

What’s a day like in Cargobase with your product teammates?

Evan: We have daily standup sessions to align on the team’s progress and highlight any roadblocks that hinder progress.

This is really important as many of our tasks are interdependent, hence open communication and resolving issues together allow us to tap into one another’s knowledge and work faster as a team.

Whenever new requests come in, we would have an additional session to scope out the requirements and provide an effort estimation before we begin.

What motivates you and your team to constantly push the boundaries of innovation in TMS development?

Evan: The supply chain industry, with its longstanding history and complex systems, has been relatively untouched by the tech wave until recent years, making it ripe for innovation.

Unlike other industries (e.g e-commerce, fintech and ride hailing) that have been disrupted, logistics is just getting started. There are plenty of players but no clear winner in freight tech yet.

There is so much potential for innovation and opportunity to make a real impact. And that's the best motivation for anyone building a product - solving problems, exploring possibilities and the satisfaction of leaving a lasting mark on this industry!

Describe a "Eureka!" moment where your team made a significant impact for Cargobase and its customers.

Evan: I won’t say that we have many “Eureka!” moments but positive feedback from customers definitely makes my day.

Building and supporting a business critical system like a TMS is a bit like running an electric company. It’s really quiet when everything is working well. But when something goes down, everyone is up in arms and complaints come from all directions. So I’ll take every compliment that comes my way!

What makes a great TMS in your opinion?

Evan: Like any great product, a great TMS should alleviate a problem that a logistics user faces regularly, and to accomplish it without adding more complexity to the end user.

That’s the whole mission of Cargobase TMS: to simplify the lives of logistics professionals.