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Q&A With New Dispatch Product Leader, Joyce Schofield
Kelsie Hengel
Published on:
October 23, 2024
Updated on:
October 21, 2024
Published on:
October 23, 2024
Updated on:
October 21, 2024
In this Q&A, we dive into the career journey of Dispatch’s new VP of Product, Joyce Schofield. With a background in startups and enterprise-level product teams, she shares how a passion for solving complex problems led her to Dispatch and its exciting vision for transforming final-mile delivery. Let’s hear from Schofield as she discusses the product vision for Dispatch and how technology plays a major role in the future of last-mile delivery.
Q: Tell us about your journey to dispatch.
A: I had an opportunity to work with a startup years ago and then I made a shift to go to the Container Store to help build their first product team. It was probably the hardest job I’ve ever had in my product career, building a team from scratch. Unfortunately, because of the economy, there was a workforce reduction. I became available for a new career opportunity and I spent the first month thinking about where I wanted to go. I kept going back to start-ups and building core technology, which I really missed — solving problems in new ways that had never been thought about. So I started the journey just looking specifically at startups or any company that was building core technology with an entrepreneurial mindset. So long story short, I stumbled on the role at Dispatch and here I am!
Q: What’s your short and long-term product vision for Dispatch?
A: The last-mile delivery market is such an untapped space in terms of opportunities and problems to solve. That's really what excited me about this role. Short term, our goal is to solidify our market position and our target customers. We have quite a bit of capability on the on-demand delivery and fleet management side, and I think we have an opportunity to bring the products together. Long term, I would love for us to be the standard of last-mile delivery. Like when you hear food delivery, DoorDash comes to mind, right? That's what I want for Dispatch, to be the standard of last-mile delivery.
Q: How do you see the future direction of the Dispatch platform?
A: I love that last part of your question because that's key — a platform. I envision Dispatch shifting from a sales-led to a product-led company, where the product sits in the center and because of its capability, because of its features, it just sells itself. I want to see us make the shift to being a SaaS company that enables last-mile delivery, and different flavors of last-mile delivery. We have such a great opportunity to capture small businesses to enterprise customers in the platform, and my vision is that it's a customizable platform. So the platform has everything you would need to run last-mile delivery, but we would package it in a particular way for a small business versus the way we would package it for large enterprises.
Also, as a marketplace business, we enable the gig economy, where many people are finding ways to generate wealth and create financial freedom. Supporting our independent contractor drivers and courier partners through technology is a major part of the vision for the platform.
Q: What is your take on the tech space right now and where do you see the last-mile delivery market going?
A: When we talk to our customers, concerns about costs are top of mind. And not in the sense of how much things cost, but the cost of how many people are needed to manage delivery logistics, the cost of inefficiencies, the cost of missed SLAs, all of those different aspects. Then there is a high customer expectation with the new technology available, especially when you start talking about artificial intelligence and machine learning. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are playing a big role in optimization, whether it's route optimization, understanding your logistics costs, or figuring out how to implement automation.
The other interesting thing is last last-mile logistics is a system within a system of systems. So it's really important for data to be the center of the strategy, meaning companies need transparency in the logistics stream, but also need data to help them make the right business decisions. It becomes really important for the platform to be easy to integrate into and easy to share data. It also becomes important for us to collect data from customers so that we can analyze the data and figure out where we can offer improvements and pass those benefits back to customers.
Q: Anything else you’d like to share?
A: Yes! So we have been talking about the near future for the most part. We're talking about how artificial intelligence and machine learning will help deliveries. Those are very near and things that have already been done, but looking beyond the near future, we're talking about self-driving cars. We're talking about robots. We're talking about drones. How will that facilitate last-mile delivery? It’s interesting to think, how do we scale the platform? I have this mindset that we want to be a company that's here forever. That also means we're building for the long term. And if we are trying to build for the long-term, we also have to make bets on how much to build today that's going to be a good foundation to help scale in a cost-efficient and innovative way toward the future.
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