208 marinas, 260+ maps published, 18% upgrades against a 10% goal, map delivery cut from 22 days to 5.

Team: I led design as Product Design Manager, working with a second product designer, a PM, four engineers and a tech lead, and an external agency. Stakeholders ran up to the CEO, GTM leadership, and the VPs of Product and Engineering.

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Marinas were running daily operations off a paper binder, by hand, with no history and no way to maximize occupancy.

Dockwa is a marina management platform, finding efficiencies for marina operators and improving the experience for boaters on the water. Marina Map layered Dockwa's existing reservation data onto a live, interactive picture of the marina, so dockmasters could stop running operations off a hand-edited binder.

Marinas use a marina map to see which slips are open and manage the day to day. The industry standard is physical: a large in-office whiteboard, or more often a binder with the map printed for each day of the year, filled in and edited by hand every morning. It's slow, it's error-prone, and it makes true occupancy maximization impossible.

Marina Map was also Dockwa's next paid add-on. Beyond fixing a daily operational headache for marinas, it was a lever to upgrade the existing paying customer base, so the feature carried a dual mandate: useful enough for dockmasters to adopt daily, and valuable enough to move operators up a tier.

Move marinas off paper, and prove the feature was worth paying for.

Three things we wanted to move: increase nights booked in Dockwa, the company's North Star (customers were managing some reservations by hand instead of importing them). Drive upgrades and purchases, since this was a paid add-on. And cut the time dockmasters spent maintaining the map, which averaged around two hours a day.

Ten marinas, chosen for complexity, told us what the map actually had to do.

We deliberately screened for range and difficulty: small to large (from under 50 slips to over 200), across New England, Florida, and California, marinas holding both long-term contracts and transient reservations, and multiple storage types (slips, dry stack, moorings). Ten interviews later, the pattern was clear:

Every marina had its own dense system of detail and color coding: boat type, daily arrivals and departures, unpaid balances. Boat length and depth, slip size, and power pedestal locations were universal. Dockmasters were spending an hour before and after every shift correcting the map and copying reservations over from the digital system by hand. Because edits erased the old state, there was no history of changes or cancellations. And the person holding the binder kept becoming the bottleneck for the whole operation. What marinas wanted from the map, in order: maximize dock usage first, improve operations and service second.

An interactive picture of the marina, with Dockwa's live reservation data layered on top.

Before Marina Map, no map existed inside Dockwa and no marina's slips were digitized anywhere in the product. Standing the feature up meant designing two things at once: the customer-facing view, and the internal pipeline that produces and publishes each marina's map. Three areas emerged:

Map creation (internal). In-house designers built standardized marina maps in Figma from the customer's existing map and Google satellite imagery, using a component library of stylized dock elements and auto-layout, then exported them as SVGs.

Map annotation (internal, required before any map works). A CSM imported the SVG into a new Settings page and dragged the marina's defined slips onto the image in the right spots.

Customer-facing map view. Once the CSM published, the customer got a new interactive map inside their Assignments tool.

This create-annotate-deliver pipeline is what my Scaling Systems, Marina Map case study scales.

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Real usage broke the annotation step, so I automated it.

For the MVP we stripped it back, cutting self-service to ship. Two things surfaced fast. Marinas wouldn't adopt the map without their own color coding, so we added up to eight custom codes that applied automatically to each slip. And annotation time climbed from four days to sixteen as requests and marina sizes grew: the more slips, the longer it took.

That's the piece I'm proudest of. Instead of having CSMs create and place every slip by hand, I used Figma auto-layout to drop a bright yellow box everywhere a slip should go during map creation. On upload, the tool recognized each yellow box and swapped it for a real boat slip, so the CSM only had to match each slip to its name, not build and position it. Annotation time dropped sharply.

Beyond docks, marinas kept asking for other layouts (dry stack, parking-lot storage, mooring fields), which we kept iterating on.

As of November 2023, Marina Map was the most successful feature at Dockwa.

We rolled it out to 208 marinas with over 260 maps published, and it beat every target we set.

Upgrades and purchases came in over 18% against a 10% goal: paying customers who upgraded their tier or bought Dockwa because of Marina Map. On time savings, more than 55 marinas dropped their physical maps entirely, saving those users over ten hours a week. Nights booked rose too; we couldn't tie the increase directly to the map, but Dockwa saw a marked lift as marinas moved onto the feature.

Faster delivery at scale: The 'In Design' phase, the internal time to produce and publish one marina's map from asset collection to a live view, dropped from 22 days to 5, a 77% cut, through process automation, tighter data collection, and reusable Figma components. Getting the tool into customers' hands faster is what let the feature scale to 208 marinas. The delivery system behind this 22 to 5 day cut is documented in Scaling Systems, Marina Map.

Self-service map creation is the next step, putting map building fully in the customer's hands, editable end to end, with Dockwa's other tools integrated into the map view. It's designed; it's waiting on resourcing.

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