Brent Hagan is the Chief Supply Chain Officer at Lob, the direct mail automation platform whose tech-enabled network delivers hundreds of millions of personalized mailpieces every year at 99% on-time reliability. In this episode, Brent joins Federico Ramallo to explain how he built that logistics engine from the ground up using entirely third-party manufacturing and fulfillment, with no fixed manufacturing cost, and how AI now sits in the middle helping orchestrate critical decisions.

Brent traces his path from manufacturing and operations engineering to the C-suite, and what hands-on time on the factory floor taught him about respecting constraints, building credibility, and why the best-laid plans on paper rarely survive contact with reality. He shares the story of figuring out an entire materials-planning role in two hours a day as a young plant manager, how he gives frontline leaders autonomy under a simple 'what went right, what went wrong, what did we learn' cadence, and why a single mistake in a physical operation can multiply catastrophically fast.

The conversation digs into the unglamorous economics of operations: the real cost of lean rituals and gemba walks versus the improvements they unlock, why no-meeting days for engineers follow the same logic, and how he thinks about protecting a team's focus. Brent also breaks down what actually makes acquisitions work, the integrate-or-operate-independently decision that can't have a middle ground, and how he uses AI as a context-rich thinking partner without letting it become a crutch. He closes on the hardest problems he has solved at Deliverr and Amazon scale, and why 'lab logistics' is Lob's next frontier in end-to-end supply chain orchestration.

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction to Brent Hagan and Lob
03:03 When a Single Mistake Multiplies: Lessons from the Factory Floor
06:08 From Operations Engineering to the C-Suite
09:02 Building Credibility and Trust with a Team
12:04 Learning a Whole Role in Two Hours a Day
15:15 Autonomy, Ownership, and What Went Right / What Went Wrong
18:12 The Real Cost of Lean, Gemba, and Protecting Focus
21:08 What Actually Makes Acquisitions Work
27:10 Reviewing Work and Asking Why
30:01 The Original API in Direct Mail
33:10 Orchestrating a Third-Party Manufacturing and Logistics Network
39:09 Where AI Fits: Poking Holes and Increasing Throughput
42:01 AI as a Context-Rich Thinking Partner
45:13 The Hardest Problems at Deliverr and Amazon Scale, and Lab Logistics