Eight weeks with Oda: Summer Internship 2022
We’re the ten tech students who got the awesome opportunity to join Oda this summer where we worked on some really cool projects. We got to see what it’s like to work in an innovative, fast-moving tech company. And just like last year, we formed two teams, one working in the Shop area and one in Logistics. We worked in cross-functional teams each consisting of a designer, a data scientist, and three software engineers, all coming from different schools: NTNU, UiO, UiB, and Hyper Island.
The first week was a super interesting onboarding full of presentations and workshops that helped us get to know Oda and the people behind all the internal processes. We got to learn all about the company’s history as well as its plans for the future. These sessions gave us an idea of the potential value the projects we were going to work on, and what part they could play in the bigger strategy. We also got to spend a day on delivery routes with the drivers, and a day in the warehouse picking orders. That helped us understand more about operations, which was valuable later in the summer when we had to make decisions. Lastly, we attended technical onboarding sessions where we got the coding environments set up on the Macs Oda supplied for us. This was easily the most frustrating part of the week, but luckily knowledgeable people were assigned to help us get set up without too much pain.
Throughout our time at Oda, we had regular contact with mentors whom we could ask subject-related questions as well as talk about anything else on our minds. People were generally very engaged in our summer projects and were very helpful if we had questions. We also got access to various Slack channels, where we met other helpful people.
Logistics project 🚚
Case: Assign routes to drivers
The logistics team consisted of Andreas, Ingrid, Tiril, Ole August, and Ronja.
We were given the following problem statement:
What is the most optimal way to assign routes to drivers, and how should this process be experienced by our drivers and traffic coordinators?
With limited time, we began the process by scoping the project and gathering insights. We talked to drivers, observed and interviewed traffic coordinators, held workshops, and got to know the code base. We found that our main problems were the time spent and the lack of fairness in manual assignments. That made our goal clear: to create a fair and user-friendly system that included a transparent, comprehensible auto-assignment process. This system should support manual and automated assignment of routes, drivers, roles, partners, and vehicles.
After gaining a general understanding, we started looking at how to build and implement a solution. To create fair auto-assignment, we first had to find out what defines a difficult route. Based on input from the drivers and traffic coordinators, and what data was available, the difficulty metric ended up taking in each order’s weight, what floor it was to be delivered to, and whether or not there were any elevators present. The top priority of the matching system was to make sure that drivers are not assigned to routes starting before their shift, and the second was to take a look at the difficulty of a driver’s last driven routes to make sure each driver gets a fair overall average difficulty level as possible.
To make sure the system was user-friendly, we focused on the user journey, guiding users through the process, and providing them with necessary feedback at the right time. We also wanted to provide helpful information for the manual assignment and explanations behind the auto assignment so that the traffic coordinators could easily decide between the two. We did this by modernizing the technology and the UI, and making the loading time shorter.
Working on a project in logistics often means that you work on a small part of the logistic process, meaning that other teams are working on the parts happening right before and after yours. With this in mind, we had to look at our project as part of a complex system, balancing details with the bigger picture. This was engaging and sometimes challenging, but luckily for us, we always had our mentors and colleagues to ask when we needed advice.
Throughout the project, we attended stand-ups, check-ins, syncs, retrospectives, and Friday-wins, whether this was our team alone, or with the Shop team, mentors, and the rest of our support system at Oda. This helped us plan and track our process and prioritize tasks towards our common goal. We worked out a flexible work schedule that coordinated work hours within the teams, which was nice because it gave us the opportunity to work from home/the cabin/the beach when we wanted. And if we needed to come in late or leave early, we’d just let our team know and it was fine. And while our internship lasted for eight weeks, we each had the opportunity to take a week’s vacation whenever we wanted.
To summarize, it’s been a summer filled with fun challenges and great people.
Shop Project
Case: Oda Autopilot™
The shop team consisted of Peter, Gabriela, Julie, Ludvig, and Agathe. Our goal was to make a very exciting new feature for the Oda app called Autopilot, using an AI-first approach. The use of AI technology has increased greatly in recent years, and making processes easier for people is a keyword in today’s society. The process of shopping is necessary, but for many people it’s a boring process that just has to be done. It’s easy to forget things you need when shopping, and especially those you don’t buy very often. Using AI, Autopilot aims to suggest items customers might want on their Autopilot and automate this process by adding them to the cart at a time the customer is likely to need it.
Our first weeks consisted of research and gathering key insights using design-thinking to make sure we were doing the right thing. Once we had some key insights, we had HMW sessions — ideation sessions in order to scope down the problem — and this led us to a common understanding of what we wanted to develop together. Then, we divided the tasks in the three different disciplines, and had daily stand-ups to update each other along the way. Midway through the internship, we held our first Autopilot demonstration. It was nerve-wracking but fun, and we got a lot of great feedback to further develop our product!
We continued to build different features for Autopilot in the following weeks. Our UX-designer, Gabriela, focused on creating questions for the feedback model to gather useful data and conduct user tests so we could iterate and improve the design and find possible pain points. She also made sure we communicated the product in a way Oda customers would understand. Gabriela and the developers worked closely together every step of the process, especially towards the end when it came to engineering the design and iterating on possible technical difficulties together. The developers, Peter, Julie, and Ludvig, continued to work on implementing the functionality behind handling the Autopilot. Later on, we worked closely with Gabriela to create the visual part of the application, as well as mapping this together with the functionality. Agathe, our data scientist, started training and testing her ML-model while making sure the output predictions were readily available for the developers. The final weeks of the internship were hectic, and as our second and final demo-day inched closer, it was truly crunch time! Fortunately, it all came together just in time for our presentation and we managed to create a working prototype that we are super proud of! We worked hard to make something that could really be of value to Oda. We were so happy to see that everyone at our final presentation seemed impressed with what we created together. 🙏
On top of all the knowledge we gathered this summer about AI-first, automation, and working in a cross-functional team, we had a lot of fun together and with everyone at the Oslo office.
There was a strong focus on socials, which was a lot of fun. The internship was kickstarted the first Friday with the summer party for the entire Oda gang. Furthermore, there were after-works, dinners, GoKart, and last but not least, tournaments and breaks with ping pong among interns and others at Oda.
All in all, it’s been a summer filled with fun challenges and great people ❤️. We have learned and laughed — it has been a blast spending a summer in Oda!
