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

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 says.

Before: Blocked by dependencies and stuck waiting

Despite its robustness, Big Cartel’s codebase, which predates the iPhone, has limited documentation. While this dynamic works for tenured developers on the team, it creates significant hurdles for new hires and code-adjacent teams like product management, who frequently need to reference the codebase for their work. Trevin explains, “Given our lean size, product management often wears multiple hats, picking up code-adjacent responsibilities like investigating bug reports or writing Help Center content. However, these tasks require an understanding of specific feature 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.”

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, implementing the additional instrumentation would risk disrupting progress on critical, high-impact projects. “Even minor instrumentation changes take longer than we think,” Trevin explains. “The context switching, along with the back-and-forth to clarify details, turns a 30-minute task into an hours-long process. These interruptions accumulate, jeopardizing our ability to deliver on the roadmap."

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.”

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: "At first, I asked Unblocked basic questions like 'Where is the code for this feature?' Once it pointed me to the right snippet, I often got stuck trying to understand specific parts, especially Ruby-specific conventions. Instead of struggling alone, I decided to leverage Unblocked further. I asked more detailed questions like 'Where is this function getting these values?' 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.”

Seeing Trevin's success, other product team members adopted Unblocked to investigate bugs, enabling faster resolution through improved collaboration with engineering. He shares an example: "One of our product managers was looking into an issue with our CSV import tool, which allows sellers to bring in products from other platforms. Using Unblocked, we swiftly pinpointed the problem: the source platforms had changed their column names. Instead of waiting days for an engineer to look into it, we had a root cause in minutes."

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 has expanded its use of Unblocked beyond helping product management and engineering teams with their work to accelerating onboarding of new team members. A Slack channel allows new hires to ask Unblocked questions about the product and codebase. “It not only provides answers but also links to relevant tickets, documents, and other resources. This comprehensive approach helps new hires build a robust understanding of our systems from day one,” Trevin explains.

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's a small time investment that pays off significantly by enhancing Unblocked's ability to help our team,” he says. (Check out our docs for a comprehensive list of supported integrations.)

As Trevin looks to the company’s future, he sees Unblocked as a key velocity driver. "There's a wealth of knowledge embedded in our code that often leads to misunderstandings,” Trevin explains. “For instance, someone might believe the product functions one way while the code tells a different story. Unblocked has democratized access to this code knowledge, enabling our team to independently and quickly uncover the truth and make decisions more quickly.”

Get in touch with us today to see how Unblocked can help your team.