The situation

Quayline sells dock scheduling software to 300 warehouses. At 35 people, the founder still wrote every spec, and the two PMs mostly translated his messages into tickets. Onboarding took 23 days and a third of trials never finished it.

What I did

We formed two product trios, each with a PM, a designer and a tech lead, and gave each one a metric instead of a feature list. The onboarding trio owned time to first value.

They rebuilt onboarding around the first booked dock slot rather than the full setup. Time to first value dropped from 23 days to 9, and weekly active accounts rose 38% over the quarter.

The founder moved to a weekly product review where he could challenge decisions without making them. It was harder for him than for anyone else, and he did it anyway.

What I would do differently

I would have hired the Group PM earlier. We started the search in week six and the overlap was only four days.