One Team Managing Email at Scale
Avi Goldman, founder of Parcel, on the email developer experience
The important point is that email had become a real software operations problem, not a simple design task. One small team at a company like Uber was effectively running a shared system for dozens of brands, countries, and product lines, which meant keeping templates on brand, swapping languages, and updating many emails fast when a logo, color, or layout changed. That is the exact kind of work that pushes teams toward components, versioning, approvals, and internal tooling.
-
The old workflow was mostly copy, paste, and file passing. Teams often worked in Dreamweaver, local code editors, or homegrown Git setups, then manually moved HTML into sending platforms. That worked when email was occasional, but it broke down once a few people had to support many recurring campaigns and brands.
-
Parcel was built around the idea that email needs the same building blocks as web software. A developer creates reusable components like buttons, rows, and headers once, then marketers and designers reuse them. Change the component once, and every email using it updates, which is the practical answer to one team managing many brands.
-
The market split was clear. Litmus was strongest as a testing and preview product, while Parcel focused on the day to day act of writing and maintaining email code. Figma used Parcel for marketing email creation and Litmus for separate transactional testing, which shows how creation and testing often lived in different tools before tighter platform integration.
This is heading toward email creation becoming part of the core messaging stack, not a side workflow. As tools like Parcel get pulled into platforms like Customer.io, the winning product will be the one that lets a lean team manage many templates, channels, and stakeholders from one system, while keeping every message current without manual rework.