Supporting Lob’s Ambitious Growth and Social Goals

Lob helps businesses and organizations build the critical infrastructure they need to transform their outdated manual print and mail processes.

By simplifying and automating their direct mail marketing and address verification, Lob’s clients save thousands of hours in processing time. Lob also makes it easy to send mail faster and increase the ROI of offline communications.

Software Development Engineering Management Vue Node Staff Augmentation

The Challenge

Fostering an environment where engineers can focus on what truly matters

Lob has big goals. In addition to supporting their clients’ direct mail initiatives, the Lob team also recently launched Lob.org, which helps nonprofits free up valuable time to focus on more mission-driven work.

We were excited to partner with a team that shares so many of our values. Some of Lob.org’s recent initiatives include changing the stigma around hiring formerly incarcerated individuals, protecting and expanding voting rights, and improving the sustainability of the direct mail industry.

You can read more about Lob’s social initiatives on their blog.

To achieve their ambitious goals, Lob partnered with Cloud City to streamline internal workflows and improve their overall efficiency.

The goal wasn’t to just update Lob’s current dashboard so it was easier to add new features and make updates. Lob wanted to foster an environment where all current and future engineers felt empowered and supported.

The Solution

Find opportunities to improve workflow, efficiency and employee satisfaction

Cloud City Principal Software Engineer Mercedes Bernard was the first to partner with the Lob team.

She and Lob’s engineers worked together to finish building the company’s component library and implement the foundation for their JavaScript application.

Doing so helped internal teams spend less time on user tickets by reducing the number of places they had to update and maintain code.

This made the process more efficient — and enjoyable — for all involved.

Encourage inclusivity, communication and collaboration

In addition to leveraging her technical expertise, Mercedes also helped Lob advance their diversity and inclusion efforts.

Her management experience helped Lob create a culture that advocates for people from underrepresented backgrounds. She also helped Lob revamp their leveling guide to be more inclusive, remove bias and make promotion conversations easier for engineers.

To keep the momentum of the projects going, Lob brought on more Cloud City consultants to assist with other business, social and technical projects.

“After working with Mercedes, we knew we wanted more people of her caliber on our team,” said Morgan VanDerLeest, engineering manager for Lob’s dashboard and growth team.

Cloud City senior engineers Kevin Fitzpatrick and Logan Jewett joined the engagement.

Among other initiatives, the three Cloud City consultants helped Lob streamline their processes and improve the communication flow between internal teams.

They worked directly with Lob’s engineers to synthesize complex technical knowledge into simple and straightforward messaging that could be used to address and get ahead of common issues.

Instead of troubleshooting repeat issues, Lob could now concentrate on moving their growth and social initiatives forward.

The Outcome

Empowering a team of great engineers

By partnering with Cloud City’s senior engineering talent, Lob was able to stay proactive during the Great Resignation of 2021. Cloud City helped support the company’s goals of empowering engineers to be more effective and fulfilled by allowing them to focus on what truly matters.

Cloud City also brought added value to Lob in ways they initially didn’t expect, including how their team communicates. Thanks to Cloud City, they’re now more direct and collaborative, which leads to a better work culture and improved efficiency.

Lob’s employees have also become more confident communicators and contributors, thanks to the support of Cloud City’s consultants. This has led to at least one internal promotion so far.

“Cloud City has legitimately shifted the culture of my teams. Now, everyone feels like they’re in this together,” said Britt Fritsch, Lob’s senior PM of rendering and routing.

Used core model concept to focus content strategy

For PLOS.org, the audience was public — heavily focused on researchers and scientists, but also targeted at folks who may have just heard of PLOS that morning on the radio. Where the CMS that drove publishing to PLOS.org was bare bones, the actual website design moved past minimal and into the blue sky territory.

We tested homepage and menu layouts at UCSF with the unsuspecting public. We tested our designs on all device sizes, from the smallest of iPhones to tablets, laptops and large desktop displays. We iterated until we found a design and interface that met the needs of users and stakeholders alike.