Genie completes 1 in 4 feature tickets with Tusk's AI coding agent

Introduction

Genie is a SaaS company that allows e-commerce brands to effortlessly manage inventory tracking, planning, and ordering on one platform that takes only minutes to set up. Over 150 modern, fast-growing Shopify brands are scaling their operations while using Genie to make inventory management much less painful.

Challenges Faced

Building software for e-commerce brands usually requires serving more than just a single need. Sebastiaan Debrouwere, Founder & CEO of Genie, explained that winning in the e-commerce space means becoming a platform company that serves interlinked needs.

Because of this, Genie faced challenges typically seen in mature companies early on. For starters, their engineering team had to build many features from the outset. The compound nature of their product meant that they received constant customer feedback, creating a large backlog of small to mid-sized feature requests.

Sebastiaan wanted a way to ship these customer-requested features quickly to make customers happy. However, Genie had limited engineering bandwidth for completing these minor tasks since bigger features were on the roadmap. And without a quick way to assess technical feasibility for customer-requested features, these tickets sat in their backlog without a clear path to production.

Enter Tusk

What made Tusk really stand out were two things. One, the Tusk team has been making rapid progress towards improving the agent’s reliability when generating code. And two, the agent fits seamlessly into our existing product development workflow.

    – Sebastiaan Debrouwere, Founder & CEO of Genie

In Q2 this year, Sebastiaan reached out to the Tusk team because he was looking to use an AI coding agent to mow down their backlog of customer-requested features.

Having onboarded Tusk on the Team Plan, he was particularly pleased that Tusk was able to seamlessly embed into their existing product development workflow. Tusk’s integration with Notion and GitHub and ability to understand context from Figma, screenshots, and videos meant that the Genie team didn’t have to change their habits for managing tickets and reviewing PRs.

With Tusk, Sebastiaan could complete small UI/UX changes without burdening his senior software engineers. It also helped their product and engineering team in two other key ways:

1. Generating branches for more complicated tasks as a jumping-off point
2. Conducting code investigations that help both the engineering and product team understand the scope and complexity of potential features

Smoother Feature Scoping

Tusk Investigator provides me detailed coding instructions, like specifically what the agent would tell a junior engineer. It's made me a lot more attuned to how much effort might have to go into a customer-requested feature.

It’s definitely made it easier for me to level with my engineers. And it's also helped my engineers to have somebody in Product who understands the implementation at a deeper level.

As a semi-technical founder, Sebastiaan found that scoping small features would still require a senior engineer to spend time doing a technical spike.

With Tusk, however, Sebastiaan could now scope out customer-requested features without using up precious engineering bandwidth. He would assign the “Tusk Investigator” label to tickets he needed to triage. Tusk would then traverse Genie’s codebase, gather context, and provide engineering advice on the relevant files and implementation approach.

If the feature seemed like a low-lift one that could fit into a sprint, he would then either assign it to Tusk or an available engineer to complete. By speeding up Genie’s ticket triaging workflow, Tusk allowed for more work to be done in a sprint.

Sebastiaan has also made it a habit to read Tusk's investigation notes religiously. As such, he’s developed a deeper understanding of all the in’s and out’s of the Genie codebase (despite being a CEO who wears many hats day to day). This has improved his ability to communicate with engineers and make more informed product decisions.

Results

Recently we wanted to implement a new template for our Templates feature, so we assigned the issue to Tusk. It went from an issue to a merged PR in under 2 hours with minimal human supervision. This was not a simple task. We’ve had dozens of wow moments like this with customers where they ask for something on Intercom and we get it shipped really quick with Tusk’s help.

Tusk provided Genie a way to tighten the feedback loop with their customers when building their compound product. They were able to do this without burdening the engineering team with excessive context-switching and scope creep.

From a product perspective, having Tusk pick up and resolve small pieces of ad-hoc feedback that customers reported went a long way for Genie. Every customer for whom Genie has done this has converted to a paying customer.

If you’re a PM or Product Designer who cares about craftsmanship but worry about distracting your engineers, book a demo with the Tusk founders.

If you run an e-commerce business and need help tracking, planning, and ordering inventory in one single source of truth, schedule a demo with Genie.