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Product & Management Stage

Allegro delivery: when product delivery becomes a challenge

September 18, 2025 9:30 AM
Case Study
🇬🇧 English
Bratysława 1

About

The goal is to share how we built Allegro Delivery—turning a complex, undefined idea into a working service with multiple partners. We want to show how Agile, collaboration, trust, and honest communication helped us succeed under pressure. This topic is important because it reflects real product challenges and how strong teams can navigate change, priorities, and deadlines. The presentation will follow our journey from vision to MVP, through leadership change, scaling, testing (with a brick!), and ending with lessons learned and future plans.

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Talk by

Photo of Aleksandra Głowacka, Senior Manager Product and Engineering at Allegro
Aleksandra Głowacka
Senior Manager Product and Engineering at Allegro

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From the recording

Talk in brief

In this presentation from WaysConf 2025, Aleksandra Głowacka, Senior Manager of Product and Engineering at Allegro, shares the journey of building Allegro Delivery, an open logistics solution that integrates multiple carriers into a single-app experience. Głowacka details how her team navigated extreme complexity, starting from a vague corporate vision with no concrete plans and transforming it into a service used by over five million clients. She outlines key leadership interventions, including halting all development to align a 70-person team on a unified goal, pushing back against unrealistic executive deadlines with transparent data, and prioritizing core partner integrations over feature requests. Additionally, she explains how the team used a physical brick named Clemens to gamify logistics testing across Poland, which simultaneously resolved edge-case testing challenges and generated powerful internal PR.

Key takeaways

  1. 01

    Embrace Collaborative Product Design with Partners

    Building a logistics solution with external carriers requires combining product vision with their operational realities, which can even lead partners to adapt their own processes.

    Watch from 10:10
  2. 02

    Do Not Hesitate to Halt Work for Alignment

    When a team lacks a unified understanding of a product's goal and individual roles, stopping all development to align can prevent wasted effort and ultimately accelerate delivery.

    Watch from 14:14
  3. 03

    Communicate Delivery Realities Honestly

    When faced with impossible deadlines set before technical estimates, product leaders must present objective reasons for delays and provide consistent progress updates to build executive trust.

    Watch from 18:01
  4. 04

    Prioritize Core Architecture Over Feature Layers

    To scale effectively, focus on establishing the core service—such as integrating new carrier partners—before adding layers of feature complexity, while co-creating roadmaps to manage stakeholder expectations.

    Watch from 20:48
  5. 05

    Gamify Testing to Solve Operational Challenges

    Using creative, physical testing methods like tracking a brick named Clemens can engage internal teams, uncover real-world edge cases like locker flooding, and boost internal product awareness.

    Watch from 24:08
Read edited transcript highlights

These concise notes were edited from automatic captions and checked against the talk structure. They are not a verbatim transcript.

The Core Features of Allegro Delivery

Allegro Delivery is designed as a fully open logistics ecosystem that welcomes any carrier partner. It offers users access to over 60,000 pickup points, including 33,000 parcel machines and 37,000 pickup locations like local shops. By consolidating the entire post-purchase experience into the main Allegro app, customers can track packages from various carriers, such as DPD and DHL, without needing multiple external apps. Additionally, Allegro handles all customer support directly to ensure fast, high-quality resolution of delivery issues.

Watch from 5:45

Building the MVP Through Active Collaboration

When the project began two years prior to the talk, the team only had a high-level vision with no operational details. They partnered with Orlen Paczka, whose internal processes were initially a black box. Instead of dictating terms, Allegro worked closely with the partner to merge customer insights with real-world logistics constraints. This collaborative approach was so successful that Orlen Paczka eventually modified their own operational workflows based on Allegro's feedback, demonstrating that mutual cooperation yields better results than top-down demands.

Watch from 9:50

The Courage to Stop and Align

Six months into the project, Głowacka joined the team and noticed a critical lack of alignment regarding the product's ultimate goals and individual responsibilities. Recognizing that different sub-teams were moving in opposite directions, she made the difficult decision to halt all development, research, and design. She gathered the entire 70-person team in a room for two days to define their shared mission and clarify roles. Although stopping work was highly intimidating, it ultimately eliminated unnecessary tasks and significantly accelerated subsequent development.

Watch from 13:05

Navigating Unrealistic Deadlines with Executives

In product management, deadlines are frequently established before technical estimates are conducted. Facing an impossible launch date, Głowacka experienced immense stress but chose to communicate the ground reality to Allegro's executive team. She prepared thoroughly by documenting the causes of the delay, outlining mitigation steps, and committing to weekly progress reports. While the stakeholders were initially unhappy, this transparent, data-driven approach built trust, and a realistic new launch date was successfully approved a month later.

Watch from 16:22

Balancing Stakeholder Priorities and Core Growth

Following the successful MVP launch, Głowacka faced intense pressure from various departments to add new features, while simultaneously needing to integrate a new carrier partner. She chose to prioritize adding partners to solidify the core service first, which initially caused frustration during team retrospectives. To resolve this, she brought all stakeholders together to co-create the future roadmap and offered compromise solutions that addressed at least half of their immediate needs, proving that honest prioritization keeps stakeholders aligned.

Watch from 19:50

Gamifying Logistics Testing with Clemens the Brick

Testing parcel locker deliveries with empty envelopes was unexciting and prone to errors, so the development team proposed a creative solution: shipping a physical brick named Clemens. Equipped with an AirTag, Clemens traveled to various cities across Poland, allowing the team to test real-world locker conditions, including a flooded bottom locker during a rainy season. This quirky testing method grew into a Slack channel with over 70 participants, successfully gamifying the QA process while generating excellent internal PR for the product.

Watch from 23:09
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