In our mission to enable operations teams to build and scale, we're partnering with industry leaders to share their best practices, lessons, and advice. Today, we're speaking with 

Blank Street is a Series-A micro-retail coffee shop that leverages technology and automation to serve high-quality coffee, extremely quickly, at the lowest price.

Micro-retail consists of three store-types:

I'm responsible for the data side of the business. This spans across all things analytics, predictive modeling, creating and maintenance of our data stack, data pipelines, strategic review, and more. Data is a core part of our entire operations so I get to work with each team to ensure they have the right information, at the right times, to make the best decisions.

What does your Data Stack look like today?

With Food and Beverage businesses, there is no all-in-one software solution that can be used across the entire business. This means we have separate providers for each component, e.g. inventory management, shift scheduling, payroll, point-of-sale, IoT devices, and more. We pipe all this data using Fivetran to our Data Warehouse (Amazon Redshift) where we aggregate every data point across the entire company (including all of customer support, sales, timesheets, real-estate payments, etc.). Our inventory management and shift scheduling software didn’t have Fivetran connectors so we built some things, bespoke.

From there, we are able to use Redshift to then answer any quantitative and qualitative question people have. We use Avenue to automate monitoring for 

 something is important and needs action and 

 that information should be routed in the company.

Invest the time early to set up the right data stack to support your teams' operations. This will most likely look like aggregating all data into a central Data Warehouse, so that you then have one source-of-record to ask and answer all operational questions. From there, I recommend tooling like Avenue to activate the data so that it's useful to your team. Often dashboards go overlooked, and what's most important to a company's operations is that people are acting at the right time.

Any recommendations for prospective Avenue customers?

I'm most excited about enabling all teams across the company to make data-driven decisions, easily.

Avenue CEO Justin Bleuel sits down with Blank Street's Head of Data, Ali Salihoglu, to discuss all things data especially as it comes to enabling an operations-driven company.

Q&A with Blank Street's Head of Data, Ali Salihoglu

Today, Avenue launches Control Center, a birds-eye view of all of your issues at an organization, a team, and also a team-player level. The Control Center provides key insight on the volume and status of your issues, as well as easy access to manage these issues effectively.

Operations teams are responsible for ensuring their business is, well, operating. They are are accustomed to constant fire-fighting, ensuring all plates are still spinning, rather than business-building—often catching problems comes down to constantly refreshing dashboards and solving them is a flurry of emailing and Slack DMs, attempting to follow and out-of-date internal playbooks (i.e. Notion and Google Docs).

With the release of Avenue's Control Center, Ops teams now have a centralized system of record for understanding and answering:

Previously, Avenue users could explore signals that they built and see previous alerts and runs by clicking into each alert, separately, which meant there was no easy way to understand 

 signals were contributing to the number of issues and 

 was accountable to each alert. This made it more difficult to gauge the status of an issue, who was working on an it, and the urgency it needed to be actioned on, if it wasn't already resolved.

With Command Center, at a quick glance, Operations teams can now get a breakdown of your issues by signal name, status, and assignee. You can also double-click from the signals to the actual issues and direct your attention to where it is needed most, whether you're a team manager or a team player.

You can immediately take advantage of this new feature — no additional action is required!

A new Dashboard for issues across all signals and team members.

This feature can be used from organization and team managers to team players. Furthermore, you can easily tailor the Dashboard table to your needs with filters and grouping.

How do I get access to start using Avenue at my company?

Avenue Launches Control Center for Ops

Amol Patel

Today, Avenue is launching an in-app SQL client that allows you to write and format queries directly from the Signal Builder in Avenue. Users can now test-run their queries, see results, and any error output all within the Signal page.

Previously, when creating or editing a Signal, you had to copy and paste a query from your own SQL editor. This created a lot of friction and room for error when creating new Signals for your team.

With the in-app SQL client, you can now quickly develop and test queries when creating or editing Signals. You will also be able to format larger queries that can be hard to read. You no longer need to use your own SQL editor and manually copy and paste these queries into Avenue.

You can immediately take advantage of this new feature. It's live in-product, today!

An interactive SQL editor to develop and test your queries.

Ops members and Data engineers who write SQL queries when creating Signals.

Avenue Launches In-App SQL Editor: Run and test queries directly in the Signal Builder

Avenue Launches In-App SQL Editor

Today Avenue announces the launch of Advanced Issue Details: a new look into the activity (past or current) of a Signal. Advanced Issue Details gives customers the ability to see the signal information, assignment, active status, and related conversation (and emoji-replies) of an alert, pulled from Slack. From the Issue Details page, customers can:

Solving an incident is rarely straightforward. A single issue can get sent around to multiple stakeholders, go through many stages until it's fully resolved, and need lots of additional pieces of information. As a member of a larger team, it can be hard to keep track of all of this, especially if you're dealing with multiple issues at once.

Now, this history is compiled in a single page on the Avenue app. This allows users to easily familiarize themselves with the state of the incident without having to dig around on Slack/Email/etc. Once users are caught up, they can action upon the item from this page directly without having to go back to the secondary app where they initially received a notification.

Advanced Issue Details is now available to all Avenue users. To access it:

A new page that compiles information about an issue in a single place and allows users to action upon that issue directly from Avenue.

Avenue users that work within the context of larger teams and may be dealing with incidents that get passed around to multiple stakeholders.

What kinds of comments are included in the comment section of the page?

Right now, only replies and reactions to an alert/report sent via Slack are added to the comments section. However, Email and WhatsApp replies may be added at a later date.

existing signal runs get an Advanced Issue Details view?

Yes, but they may not have a full history of all of the comments that have been sent.

Do I need to do anything special to start recording comments?

Yes! For comments to record correctly, please re-install the Slack app in the Profile > Settings section of Avenue.

Avenue Launches Advanced Issue Details: All Context and Action in One Place

Justin Bleuel

Operations teams are the business builders behind the largest and most complex companies in the world. They are a critical function that brings success, efficiency, and reliability to the organization. For example, at Uber our Operations teams were responsible for marketplace health, supply imbalance, surge multiples, sign-up funnels, vehicle inspections, restaurant uptime, NPS, churn and anything and everything else in between. 

Ops are savvy generalists and natural problem solvers. A large part of the role involves identifying and solving for when things go wrong (as they inevitably do). Yet up until now, their jobs have largely been manual and reactive. Even the best Operations teams will describe their role as “firefighting,” where they’re always reacting to something new and focusing on just the biggest fire in front of them, without the ability to prioritize or think ahead.

While other functions like IT and engineering each have robust tools for monitoring and incident response, the same has not existed for operations. Most teams rely on hacked together solutions, like constantly refreshing dashboards or noisy Slack bots combined with an emoji-response system, which has much room for error and no clear way to ensure accountability, traceability or reliability.

This is where we come in. Avenue is the world's first operations observability platform. Avenue aims to bring the same monitoring and incident response engineers have become so accustomed to, to operations teams everywhere. The platform empowers operations teams to achieve more, by giving them back time, removing bottlenecks, and allowing for a renewed focus on solving rather than searching. With Avenue, teams will be empowered to:

$4M in seed funding to bring observability tools to operations teams

Avenue first came out of the Y Combinator W21 cohort. As we continue to reach new businesses and expand our product offering, we’ve raised $4M in seed funding led by Accel along with Elad Gil, Lachy Groom, AirAngels, Flexport Inc., and a group of world-class operators from Uber, Coinbase, Thumbtack, Binance, Flexport, Airbnb, and more. While we’re currently working with 50+ organizations as a part of our beta, with the new funding we’re excited to announce general availability of our product that has already powered 200,000 notifications to teams.

, and I have been building businesses together for more than a decade. We've known each other since middle school, and have always been on the lookout for opportunities to build and innovate. Together we even created one of the first iPad apps and received hundreds of thousands of downloads from the App Store. Jeff later went on to work on the technology behind Amazon Alexa’s entity resolution (as part of their artificial intelligence team), while I joined Uber as a Product Manager and saw firsthand the issues that our operations teams dealt with on a daily basis. We had built some internal tools that provided, but it became clear that Operations was a growing business-builder that requires the same sophisticated tooling tech teams have used to scale.

Operations will sit at the center of the next generation of startups that address many of the world’s biggest problems. At Avenue we’re building the platform that will power their success, and are just at the beginning of this ambitious journey.

Latest posts

Q&A with Blank Street's Head of Data, Ali Salihoglu

Avenue Launches Control Center for Ops

Avenue Launches In-App SQL Editor

Avenue Launches Advanced Issue Details: All Context and Action in One Place

Introducing Avenue: The First Operations Observability Platform