The challenge
A delivery startup needed to launch an on-demand delivery service connecting customers, drivers, and partner merchants — three different apps' worth of functionality — without three separate teams building disconnected products. Customers needed to place an order and track it in real time, drivers needed a way to receive and accept delivery requests efficiently, and merchants needed visibility into incoming orders without learning a complex system.
Coordinating all three sides in real time — matching a new order to a nearby available driver, keeping the customer's tracking view in sync with the driver's actual location, and notifying the merchant the moment an order comes in — was the core technical challenge, on top of building three genuinely different user experiences from one connected backend.
Our approach
We built three linked mobile experiences — customer, driver, and merchant — on a shared real-time backend, so an order placed by a customer, an incoming request seen by a driver, and a new order notification seen by a merchant are all views onto the same live event, not three separate systems kept in sync after the fact. Order matching and driver assignment run centrally, live location tracking streams from the driver app to the customer's tracking screen, and merchants get a simple order queue instead of a general-purpose dashboard they'd need training to use.
Each app was scoped to exactly what its user needs — drivers see delivery requests and navigation, merchants see their order queue and status controls, customers see tracking and order history — keeping every experience simple despite the shared backend coordinating all three in real time.
Outcome
The result is one connected system instead of three disconnected apps: a customer placing an order, a driver accepting it, and a merchant preparing it are all working from the same live order state. Order matching and status updates happen automatically across all three apps instead of requiring manual coordination between them.