Learn how Postmates unifies data to deliver a world-class customer experience

Postmates is an on-demand delivery platform with the largest delivery fleet in over 45 major US cities. Unlike traditional delivery services, Postmates can power local, on-demand logistics from any store or merchant for a variety of products.

  • 1000+
  • Hours
  • Saved thousands of hours of engineering time
  • 50%
  • Faster
  • Tested and chose a new vendor 50% faster
  • 14
  • Tools
  • Unified data from 14 separate tools

Postmates is an on-demand delivery platform with the largest delivery fleet in over 45 major US cities. Unlike traditional delivery services, Postmates can power local, on-demand logistics from any store or merchant for a variety of products.

The challenge

To keep pace with their meteoric growth, Postmates Lead Product Manager Tanner McGrath and his growth engineering team had a few challenges to tackle:

  • Their customer data was spread out across 14 different tools making it difficult to unify data for a single view of their customer’s journey from beginning to end.
  • Testing, onboarding and maintaining new integrations such as a new marketing automation platform drained engineering resources and bloated their app with 3rd party vendor code.

Our team relies heavily on mParticle’s ability to manage data equality across all mobile tools, which helps us stay consistent and move quickly.

Tanner McGrath

Lead Product Manager, Postmates

The solution

Centralized mobile data collection

Through this meteoric growth, mParticle has served as a central mobile hub that consolidated multiple vendor SDKs & event logging. The mParticle SDK provided a simple wrapper for all other vendor SDKs and a single implementation of web and app events which created data equality across the entire marketing and analytics stack. This allowed Postmates to stop hunting data inconsistencies and bugs, and focus on pure product development.

In addition, Postmates enabled Feeds to extract data from services such as Zendesk and Branch and forward it onto their marketing and analytics tools such as Amplitude and Appsflyer. With the ability to combine support data from Zendesk with other customer data into a single customer profile and forward to Amplitude’s analytics engine they were able to identify how product changes could impact the customer’s user experience.

Tested and onboarded new tools faster

Postmates was able to save thousands of hours of development and engineering time by testing new vendors with mParticle User Splits. For example, while in the market for a new mobile marketing automation provider they were able to switch on Localytics, Mixpanel and Braze and stream mutually exclusive data to each vendor without requiring engineering resources. They were able to expedite testing, choose a new vendor and onboard them 50% faster than if they integrated directly.

Gained instant access to query data

Like most high-velocity startups, Postmates wanted to remove the technical burden of making manual queries, but also wanted the flexibility and granularity they would have if they built their own custom data solution. mParticle offered cluster streaming for Redshift, direct SQL access, and an Amazon Web Services integration which allowed Postmates to answer complex data questions around segmentation, churn detection, uplift modeling, and fraud modeling without having to wait in the engineering queue.

Check out this video to hear from Tanner first-hand on how mParticle helps Postmates integrate and orchestrate their growth stack.

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