Fetch: “Unblocked transformed our internal support model.”

June 24, 2025

Fetch is a consumer engagement platform that rewards users for scanning receipts and interacting with brands. Behind the scenes, a 350-person engineering org powers the product— working fast, operating autonomously, and shipping across dozens of parallel projects.

That autonomy is intentional. More than 40 distributed teams at Fetch work independently, using their own tools, languages, and workflows. It’s a model that drives innovation but also creates friction. With limited shared conventions and context scattered across Slack, GitHub, Confluence, and more, engineers spent hours just to get up to speed.

“When people can find answers on their own, teams can ship without months of onboarding.” — Wade Bruce, CTO at Fetch

Autonomy at scale requires access to answers

Fetch’s teams are organized by projects. Engineers often rotate between projects, jumping into unfamiliar codebases and tools as needed. The flexibility is by design, but it made onboarding slow and support unsustainable. Slack became the go-to system of record, but critical context got buried as chats piled up. Engineers bounced between chats, wikis, and repos just to answer basic questions like “When was this deployed?”

“Documentation gets outdated fast. The answer might be in Slack, in a wiki, or nowhere at all.” —Wade Bruce, CTO at Fetch

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Unblocked connects the dots

Unblocked helped Fetch engineers turn scattered knowledge into actionable answers. It connects to Slack, GitHub, GitLab, Confluence, Jira, and other tools to pull insights grounded in actual code, recent deployments, and team history.

“Unblocked brings everything together. You don’t have to go digging through tools. It just works.” — Wade Bruce, CTO at Fetch

Real impact across engineering workflows

Since adopting Unblocked, Fetch has seen clear wins:

Auto-responses in support channels like #ask-devops reduce load on senior engineers.
Incident summaries help leaders quickly assess root causes and status.
New hires ramp up faster by self-serving answers on acronyms, past decisions, and project history without needing to ask around.

“New engineers feel confident asking questions and figuring things out without worrying about bothering someone.” — Wade Bruce, CTO at Fetch

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A foundation for fast-moving teams

Unblocked didn’t require Fetch to change how they document or operate. Instead, it made existing knowledge accessible at scale.

“We didn’t need more documentation. We needed a better way to find what was already there. Unblocked made that possible.” — Wade Bruce, CTO at Fetch

Engineers now have the answers they need to move fast and stay self-reliant. Unblocked has become a foundation for scalable internal support, reinforcing the speed and autonomy central to Fetch’s engineering culture.

“With Unblocked, engineers can jump into unfamiliar contexts, ask a question, and get an answer without waiting on someone to respond.” — Wade Bruce, CTO at Fetch