Cargomatic: carrier engagement from 8% to 90%+

The problem

Cargomatic runs a real time freight marketplace. Carriers were supposed to use our portal to post pickup and delivery updates and upload their documents. Only 8% did.

Everyone else waited for a phone call. Our ops team called carriers to get the information, then typed it into the portal on their behalf. Every load meant calls, delays and manual data entry, and ops couldn't scale with the business.

What I found

I worked from two sources: the data, to see where carriers dropped off, and interviews with carriers and our internal teams, to understand why. They pointed the same way. The portal wasn't intuitive, and it didn't match the way carriers actually worked day to day.

How I prioritized

One rule: the most impact for the least engineering effort, first. Changes that needed little or no new code went out before anything that needed a full redesign. That brought results early and earned the room for the bigger work.

What we changed

Onboarding and training. We rebuilt how carriers got started on the portal, so using it became the default from their first load instead of an afterthought.

A portal redesign, dead simple. With our designer, we stripped the experience down to what a carrier needs to post an update or upload a document, and nothing more.

The result

Over about a year and several initiatives, carrier engagement went from 8% to 90%+. Updates came straight from carriers instead of through ops phone calls. Along the way the team shipped 35+ features across onboarding, payments, tracking and daily operations, and lifted signup completion by 15% through funnel experiments.

What I took from it

Shape the product around how people already work, not the other way around. And start with the cheapest change that moves the number.