Six months of flying blind.
When GenLogs launched in January 2025, the team had big plans for understanding how carriers and logistics managers were using their platform. What they didn't have was reliable data to work with.
Their first analytics tool produced numbers that made no sense — thousands of identical event counts across unrelated actions, events that weren't tracked at all. The data was so inconsistent that the team spent months trying to diagnose it before giving up.
“We lost a lot of trust with our analytics provider.”
Chris built custom Streamlit dashboards to fill the gap. They could tell when a user ran a search. They couldn't tell how long sessions lasted, what features were being used, or what was driving drop-off. The view of their own product was narrow.
Then they made a deliberate call to stop trying. With an aggressive roadmap to ship and a dev team already stretched thin, leadership decided to table the analytics problem and revisit it when they had time. That period lasted six months.
40 minutes from GitHub to fully set up.
GenLogs had a simple ask: connect their codebase, get data they could trust, and don't waste a week on implementation. They got all three before lunch.
Chris and his VP of Engineering met the Novus team at the New York office, logged into GitHub, and walked through the setup together.
“Within 40 minutes, we had everything connected. It identified all of our code. We've built a lot in a short amount of time, so it was extremely surprising to see how quickly it moved.”
Two issues surfaced during that session — places where data was being pulled incorrectly. By the time they walked out the door 20 minutes later, both were fixed. That first hour set the tone for what the design partner relationship would look like — fast, specific, and responsive to what the team actually needed.
The trauma check.
Fast setup is one thing. Trusting the data is another. After what happened with the previous tool, Chris wasn't willing to take the numbers at face value, and leadership wasn't going to accept it without verification.
So Chris did the manual work himself. Every night, he recorded a Loom video of himself clicking through the application, then went back and confirmed that Novus had tracked each event. He cross-referenced against Streamlit. He built the case step by step.
“It was a lot of work that we had to do internally to overcome that trauma. But what we found was that with very little implementation on the development side, we were tracking things properly.”
Within weeks, GenLogs stopped using Streamlit. Novus became the primary source of truth for product data. Leadership was convinced.
Two discoveries that changed the roadmap.
Once the team started trusting the data, it started telling them things they didn't expect.
The filter nobody was using.
GenLogs had a fleet-size filter built right into the top of their map view. It had been there since launch. In customer interviews, users would ask for exactly that feature, and the team would say “it's right there at the top.” Nobody seemed to find it.
Within the first few weeks of having Novus installed, a signal surfaced: no one had used the fleet size filter. Not once. It confirmed what the customer calls had been suggesting and gave the team the data to finally push leadership on a redesign.
The missing integration.
In the other direction, Novus flagged that the carrier card tabs — a key part of the product where users drill into detail about carriers — weren't instrumented at all. The team had shipped that feature without hooking it into Novus. No one had noticed.
It became an immediate dev ticket. Within days, the team had full visibility into which carrier card tabs users were actually clicking, and could start building the case for where to invest product effort.
“To not have that analytics and to fly blindly and get it from two or three customer interviews doesn't give us the use case. But now, having something say ‘by the way, we're not seeing usage when we expect usage’ has been really helpful.”
That signal did something the customer calls never could: it made the case in a language leadership understands. The redesign hasn't shipped yet — there are larger efforts ahead of it in the queue — but for the first time, Chris had data, not anecdotes, to bring to the table. The fleet size filter is now on the roadmap.
From dashboards to Slack.
The bigger change for GenLogs has been how the team gets product data. Chris used to log into dashboards, export metrics, fill in spreadsheets, and bring numbers to leadership meetings manually. That part hasn't changed yet — but the direction is clear.
More recently, GenLogs integrated Novus with Slack. Chris started getting analytics in the channels he was already in, without having to go looking for them. He's been to the dashboard less and less since.
The next phase they're building toward: each of Chris's PMs owns a specific application, and each application gets its own Slack integration pulling automated reports. When a new epic ships, the team will know within hours how it's performing, without running any queries.
Building together.
Beyond the data, Chris points to the design partner relationship itself as something that's changed how his team thinks about analytics. When Novus shipped something he and his team had flagged, he'd get a Slack message within days: “Hey, have you checked this out? This is exactly what we gave feedback about.”
For a startup that had spent six months without any analytics because the last tool broke their trust, that kind of responsiveness matters. GenLogs is now at the point where they're pushing Novus to the rest of their internal team.
They went from six months of no visibility into their product to real-time signals surfaced through Slack. The 40-minute setup was just the start.