The last mile is the part of a delivery where margins are thinnest and the customer notices the smallest slip. The technology behind it — route optimisation, parcel tracking, driver apps and the link into the retailer’s checkout — has to be quick to build on and stable enough to trust when the volumes arrive.
Our experience in the industry comes from Urb-it, where the engagement grew from a developer seat into turning the business towards an API-driven delivery platform: e-checkout widgets, open APIs for partners and microservices in Kubernetes on AWS integrating with an existing Azure platform. The point was to keep the value of earlier investments and still get the scalability that externally exposed APIs demand.
What we took from it applies to most delivery companies: small self-organising teams ship faster than large projects, and the platform underneath decides how fast. That is what Platform engineering and Product development are about.
