Parcelly is all about teamwork. Our team members are essential pillars within our company and we want to shine a spotlight on their hard work and dedication.
In our first Team Spotlight of 2024, we sat down with Cameron to discuss all things Parcelly. From beginning his journey as a Business Development Associate to now being a Junior Product Specialist, Cam had an abundance of experience and moments to reflect on from the past 18 months.
Tell me about yourself and why you decided to join the Parcelly Team.
“I was fresh out of university in the Summer of 2022 and was looking for my first grad role. I did a bachelor's for three years and then was weighing up doing a master’s or to start working and I decided to get into the world of work. I started applying for roles and found the Parcelly role through my university’s career website. I remember I had three rounds of interviews, and I remember hitting it off with Umair in my final interview, which was nice as he would become my manager.
I had worked in my gap year between school and university, and I wanted something a bit different to that, as that was a huge company which felt a bit like I was a tiny cog in a huge machine where I couldn’t really make a difference. Therefore, I wanted a start-up or smaller company trying to do something and I found that at Parcelly. Every day is very different and exciting, the time does really fly by! It was perfect for what I was looking for. Starting in a sales role really helped me develop myself and my professional persona. Sales is also a really useful skill to have learnt.”
What would you say has been your biggest learning experience while working at Parcelly?
“There are two things mainly. The first is time and workload management as there are always lots of things to be doing. You have to learn how to manage your day, how to prioritise and work out a relationship with your manager to make sure that all tasks are covered. Learning how to do that is something I didn’t have experience with, especially on this scale. Learning how to manage my calendar and my work has been a big learning experience, firstly with Umair in the network team and then with Michael in the tech team as they are both very busy teams.
The other one has been learning to identify things like bugs in our system, app or the admin interface. Being able to identify what I need to flag to the tech team as a bug in the code as opposed to what is an operational problem or an issue with how the team are using it. I’ve learnt a lot about how to identify that and I’ve kind of learnt through doing which is the quickest way to learn I think.”
What have you achieved in your time with us that you are particularly proud of?
“I started my role in Bristol as a Business Development Associate, and the main goal the team wanted to achieve was that by the end of 2022, we would have a network of 1500 DHL locations. When I joined the team in August, it was at 700. Our network team back then was four people and with that team, we managed to more than double the network. It was a busy few months, but something we were driving to achieve, and we did it. It was very cool to be able to deliver on that. In four months, the team did 800 trainings, it was crazy!
A personal achievement for me was moving city. I moved from Bristol to London which seemed like a big scary thing, but having Parcelly as my constant was really nice to have. Moving cities and working in a new office was a cool experience. A third would be our integration of new partners UPS and APC Overnight. There are a lot of details that go into getting two new partners integrated into the network, so that has been a real achievement.
Finally, in my current role as Junior Product Specialist, we have made about 100 product feature requests. 60 of them have been moved into development and 40 of them have gone live, so that has been really exciting. I’ve helped define what we want to be changed on the platform, come up with ideas myself and taken requests from the team. Being able to be involved with that and get a lot of it done was a real achievement.”
How has your skill set developed while working at Parcelly?
“Starting in the sales role, I took to it quite quickly being able to sell our product to merchants, growing the network and learning from Umair how to approach sales. My introduction over the past few months to product management has really developed my skill set. For example, working on the product lifecycle and learning how a feature idea moves to a discussion of the effects, then into development, then into testing, then giving feedback and monitoring it when it goes live. Learning all those stages and how to test software has been really valuable for me.
Reporting tech incidents has been another skill that’s developed. So, if something goes wrong in the system and it’s affecting the whole network, I’d have to quickly communicate with the tech team what exactly has gone wrong. Learning about APIs and how we communicate with other companies via our back-end has been very valuable and something I had no idea of before. Also just becoming an expert of the Parcelly platform and learning how it all works to recognise bugs and operational issues.
I started off teaching merchants how to use the app and now I assist the company on how to use the platform. If there’s anything the team want to change or fix, they will come to me. So that has been really cool and I couldn’t have imagined myself in this position a year and a half ago when I joined.”
THANK YOU Cameron for being such a great colleague and contributing towards Parcelly’s vision and growth!
If you fancy a new challenge and are interested in joining us, why don’t you check out our vacancies?
