With just six years of existence, Olist, an ecosystem of e-commerce solutions for retailers and digital brands, has already accumulated titles achieved by very few companies. In 2021, the company became one of the newest unicorns and topped the Endeavor ranking of the fastest-growing companies in the period. In 2022, it was one of the five Brazilian companies to join the Growjo list of the fastest-growing startups in the world.

These significant milestones were achieved in the last two years, during which Olist had the strategic partnership of Meta. According to Olist’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Bruno Martins, “Meta was one of the key partners on this journey that led Olist to grow over 200%, triple in size, and improve integration efforts with a new marketplace on the platform by about 95%.”

The partnership began with architecture planning for the sales channels, but it didn’t stop there. Meta entered Olist with the mission to turn technology into a growth catalyst. “As digital transformation experts, we know that change is not just about exchanging or implementing new technology but involves people and culture. And that’s what we brought to Olist,” says Jhonatan Ventorini, an Account Executive at Meta.

From there, Meta started acting as a strategic business partner. “Starting from software engineering, where we reviewed the entire current company architecture, we conducted an analysis of value generation not only in terms of technology but also in relation to the business and its current needs,” recalls Ventorini.

Channel integration is a crucial part of Olist’s core business, and working on the architecture of these channels to expedite the process was essential for the company’s expansion. “The embryo was technology, but the partnership with Meta grew and also helps us in other areas, from product design to human resources and the development of other technology capabilities such as information security, SRE, among others,” adds Martins.

ACCELERATION JOURNEY

Olist’s success story also involves overcoming significant challenges. The company, whose mission is to empower commerce by connecting sellers to marketplaces, found itself in a growing market due to the accelerated digitization of businesses driven by the pandemic. However, the company needed to accelerate its own processes to handle the increasing number of merchants needing to showcase their products in a world where physical stores had to close their doors.

In addition to this, the company received a significant financial investment and, therefore, needed to ensure accelerated growth supported by agile, robust, and transparent governance, procurement, budgeting, information security, among other processes. Meta’s partnership with Olist began at this crucial moment in the business, where it was necessary to combine acceleration with the ability to achieve exponential growth.

The first visible need was to speed up the process of launching a sales channel, which took six to nine months for technical integration, plus the time for the channel to mature on the platform. The process lacked the agility demanded by the market and required a high level of dedication from a large team of developers. “It was a very long time, especially given our growth targets. So, I hired Meta to work with us on architecture,” recalls Martins. Meta was responsible for designing a more robust architecture that interacted with other ongoing systems but allowed scalability of processes and business.

Together with Meta’s expertise and involvement, Olist managed to reduce the effort for launching a sales channel on the platform by about 95%, now accomplished in 4 weeks with a smaller team of just four developers. Meta understood early on that developing an architecture that enabled scalability in the creation of new channels would have a direct impact on the business, including financially.

“This architecture case turned out to be a turning point for me because I proved the value of having a specialized area and what it can leverage in terms of business. And today, we have our architecture department with super-talented architects working, always staying ahead of the business,” declares Martins.

Strategic partnership beyond technology

The ability to develop at the speed the customer needed was what ensured the success of Meta’s work. But there was also a very important differentiator that elevated it to a strategic technology partner: the ability to understand Olist’s business as a whole and its needs. “I need to understand the client’s needs and objectives, and then technology will adapt to these needs,” explains Ventorini.

Olist’s CTO, Bruno Martins, highlights that Meta differs from other consultancies in flexibility and openness to designing a solution that is suitable for each client. “I’ve always seen a lot of openness from Meta in this regard. I’ve worked with Meta since before coming to Olist, from other companies, and I know how much Meta embraces the client’s cause and designs a solution that is suitable for that client,” he says.

Meta collaborated with the project in a cross-cutting manner, with a holistic view of the client, bringing in professionals and helping to review human resources hiring processes. “Meta helped us and made us reflect on the entire Human Resources part, making us faster in our hiring processes so that we pursue talents more effectively and quickly,” adds Martins.

“Meta was the great partner we had to reach where we are.”

Bruno Martins
CTO at Olist