Case Study: Big Cartel boosts team autonomy and speeds bug resolution with Unblocked

Big Cartel - Customer Case Study

Big Cartel, an ecommerce platform for artists and small businesses, faced challenges with its legacy codebase. With a lean team of 30, product managers often performed code-adjacent tasks but were blocked by incomplete documentation and unfamiliarity with the Ruby on Rails tech stack. This forced them to constantly disrupt engineers for answers, creating inefficiencies. They turned to the vendor Unblocked to help their team independently navigate and understand their code.

By implementing Unblocked, Big Cartel empowered its product team to independently investigate bugs, resolve issues, and gain crucial code context. This reduced dependencies on engineers and prevented launch delays, as demonstrated when a critical edge case was fixed without interrupting vacationing engineers. Unblocked also accelerated the onboarding of new hires. The solution helped Big Cartel democratize code knowledge, improve decision-making speed, and maintain its team's velocity.

Big Cartel

Trevin Chow

Chief Product Officer