Turning a Declining Acquisition into a $275K Enterprise Growth Engine
How I led a post-acquisition turnaround—modernizing a 30-year-old legacy platform, redefining customer value, and closing the first enterprise contract in company history.
A Strategic Acquisition Facing Existential Challenges
EasyPost acquired MagicLogic to expand beyond shipping APIs into warehouse and fulfillment optimization. MagicLogic's load-planning technology—cartonization, pallet stacking, and container optimization—represented a strategic foothold in the logistics software market.
The problem? The business was built on a 30-year-old Delphi Pascal codebase. Within the first year of acquisition, ARR dropped by over 50%. Enterprise customers demanded API-first, cloud-native solutions—but MagicLogic could only offer a legacy desktop client and inflexible integrations.
A limited window existed to establish leadership in the load-planning space before well-funded, API-native competitors caught up. The new business unit needed to transform from a declining legacy tool into a growth engine integrated with EasyPost's ecosystem.
My Role: Fractional CPO
I owned enterprise-wide product strategy for MagicLogic following the acquisition. Acting as de facto GM, I designed and led cross-functional governance across internal and external teams—blending EOS L10 accountability with quarterly agile planning to align 40+ direct stakeholders and influence 350+ teammates company-wide.
Complex Customer Onboarding
What should have been a streamlined API integration was a months-long engineering project. Customers faced FTP uploads, TCP sockets, and fragile SOAP endpoints instead of modern RESTful APIs.
Impossible to Hire
Finding developers who could work on Delphi Pascal was nearly impossible. The learning curve was steep and the technology stack unattractive to modern developers—creating a single point of failure.
Too Many Humans in the Loop
The legacy system required manual intervention at multiple points, making true automation impossible. Enterprise customers building API-first platforms couldn't tolerate these delays.
Market Under-Monetized
MagicLogic was selling a deeply valuable optimization engine for less than $10K ARR per customer, while competitors charged 5–10× more. Enterprise-grade customers required seamless API integrations that didn't exist.
Understanding the Real Problem Through Continuous Discovery
I led a continuous discovery practice to surface real-world friction points, validate assumptions, and build an evidence-based understanding of customer needs. This wasn't theoretical—it was grounded in direct engagement with customers and delivery teams.
Weekly customer interviews revealed a consistent pattern: customers weren't willing to pay more and wait months when competitors deployed API-first solutions in days. Every week of delay eroded confidence that our algorithms justified the implementation burden.
Working sessions with customers and delivery engineers mapped workflows, identified bottlenecks, and aligned on solutions. The Delphi Pascal foundation was a ticking time bomb—difficult to maintain and impossible to hire for. Each custom integration added more technical debt to an already fragile architecture.
Customer Interviews
Weekly sessions to surface friction points and validate assumptions with real users.
Usability Reviews
Observed how customers interacted with the product in real workflows to reveal improvement opportunities.
Working Sessions
Collaborative sessions with customers and engineers to map workflows and align on solutions.
Competitive Analysis
Market research to understand positioning and identify the competitive window.
"Integration over optimization. Customers cared less about algorithmic perfection and more about how easily MagicLogic could plug into their existing ERP, WMS, OMS, and TMS ecosystems."
Creating Clarity and Alignment Across the Organization
The core objective was to make MagicLogic's load-planning optimization technology accessible to both internal and external teams through a modular back-end architecture. This would enable any EasyPost engineering team to leverage the optimization engine without Delphi expertise, while allowing customers to integrate MagicLogic into their workflows using any modern tech stack.
Engaging Stakeholders Early
Rather than unveiling a fully formed roadmap, I incorporated stakeholders into the decision-making process through informal discovery conversations, working sessions, and iterative reviews. This surfaced constraints, challenged assumptions, and strengthened the strategy before commitments were finalized.
The goal was not universal agreement—it was well-informed decisions with no blind spots, and stakeholders who felt ownership rather than surprise.
I led cross-functional alignment across Engineering, Design, Security, Legal, Sales, Customer Success, Professional Services, Marketing, and Finance—ensuring every function understood the "why" behind our work.
Balancing Speed with Inclusion
I operate with a philosophy of just enough discovery and just enough alignment to keep velocity high without sacrificing quality. To maintain momentum, I established:
Time-Boxed Feedback Windows
"We need your input by Friday" not "let us know when you have time"
Decision Documentation
Clear records of what was decided, why, and who was involved
Bias Toward Action
Perfect alignment is the enemy of progress
A Disciplined Operating Model Built for Speed
To execute at speed while maintaining cross-functional alignment, we ran a disciplined two-week sprint cadence supported by a streamlined meeting structure designed to protect focus time and ensure continuous forward momentum.
A Product–Engineering–Design triad served as the decision-making nucleus throughout execution. This structure was intentionally collaborative rather than hierarchical, with each function accountable for a distinct dimension of success.
By separating strategic alignment (Pre-Planning) from tactical execution (Planning), we created a predictable operating rhythm that preserved team focus. Engineers consistently had actionable, unblocked tickets ready at sprint start with stable scope.
The Triad Model
Triad Pre-Planning sessions allowed leadership to align rapidly, resolve conflicts, and eliminate ambiguity before work reached sprint planning.
A Deliberate Pivot That Transformed the Business
We made a decisive—and existential—call: declare functional bankruptcy on the legacy customer base. MagicLogic had ~450 legacy customers accumulated over three decades, yet only ~30 generated more than $10K ARR.
Our strategic choice: stop pursuing sub-$10K deals and reposition the company exclusively for enterprise customers in the $50K–$300K ARR range who required API-first architecture and were willing to invest accordingly.
Revenue Transformation
Moved from sub-$10K deals to consistent $50K–$300K enterprise contracts. Walking away from 420+ small customers to pursue 10–20 enterprise accounts was a deliberate, high-risk move. One enterprise contract now equaled 8–27 legacy customers in ARR value.
Operational Efficiency
Eliminated costly, one-off Delphi integrations tied to the legacy product. Standardized APIs dramatically improved onboarding and time-to-value. Engineering capacity was reallocated from maintenance to platform innovation.
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