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Hosted by Joe Weltz, our Senior Project Manager, we held the latest DrayNow Webinar, titled “Digitization in Action: Identifying & Developing Intermodal Tech Solutions.” Joe has been with the company before our product was even live, so he’s seen it all and it was only fitting for him to help lead this charge.

What goes into feature on the platform? In this webinar, Joe goes through the entire development process behind each and every DrayNow feature. Before the tech team even begins working on a new project, an opportunity must first be identified.

Where does that come from? Feedback from customers that post loads, carriers that haul the loads, and the DrayNow team that manages the loads. All product feedback is consolidated through Zendesk and noted for future projects. For customers, they can even submit product feedback through the instant chat feature right on the platform.

How do you turn the ideas stemming from this feedback into a tangible product? That’s where product management comes into play. We follow an agile management style, which calls for continuous improvement of each feature, breaking things down into smaller tasks, and rolling out features as they’re ready rather than waiting for a big release. No tech feature in any company will ever be perfect from the start, so you might as well release it and continue to iterate on it to make it the best it can get.

We set up our releases through two-week sprints, where you hyperfocus on those specific tasks until the next sprint. With DrayNow having an operations background, these sprints are very focused on solving problems rather than just creating a new feature.

And of course, you cannot release a new tool without testing it first. Testing is done within the engineering team, the rest of the DrayNow team, customers and carriers depending on who would be impacted by the feature. Before release, customers and carriers are invited to try out features through beta testing. A very recent example that customers are testing is a new multi-stop feature, which lets them add and subtract the amount of stops in each drop, allowing for one way and multi-stop trips.

Once a feature is implemented into the DrayNow product, it’s never completely done. Features are continuously developed based on any feedback we get post release. A great example of this is our location services feature, which started out as mobile app tracking for drivers. To assist our customers in getting the best tracking data and making it easier for carriers to show trip progress, we added integrations with Railinc and geofences around rail yards to automatically update trip progress.

What does this all mean for our customers and carriers? Through feedback, developing and testing, we’re always finding ways to provide new solutions, while continuing to make current solutions better.

Digitization In Action: Identifying & Developing Intermodal Tech Solutions

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