The companion to my Marina Map case study. Marina Map is the product; this is the delivery system that let it scale.

The Marina Map MVP shipped with heavy manual processes behind the scenes to hit the timeline. As the feature gained traction and map requests climbed, those manual steps became the bottleneck.

• No directions or examples for customers, so they sent low-quality content, and designers and CSMs burned hours hunting down the right information.
• Product Design was spending about 35 hours a week creating maps in Figma.
• No scalable workflow to hand off completed content to the design team, and no accurate way to set delivery-time expectations with customers.

Cut the manual work everywhere it showed up: in collecting assets, in managing status internally, and in customer time to value.

• Cut time spent collecting marina assets and creating maps.
• Cut internal time spent communicating status and managing assets.
• Cut customer onboarding time and time to value.

Two phases: first add automation around the existing manual process, then consolidate it into a single system with an embedded agency.

Phase I: Automate and outsource asset creation

• Intake. A CSM submits a Google Form when a customer opts into the feature, with detailed map questions plus photo uploads.
• Routing. On submit, Zapier adds the content to a shared Google folder and generates a Google Doc from a template.
• Creation. The doc goes to Fiverr design contractors for Figma map creation.
• Handoff. When the map lands in the Done folder, Zapier posts a Slack message tagging the CSM that it's ready for upload.

Phase II: Consolidate into JIRA, embed an agency

• Set expectations up front. A Marina Map PDF goes to every customer on opt-in, relaying required info and acceptable image types before they submit anything.
• Intake. A CSM submits a JIRA form, auto-creating an issue with the details and assigning it to the agency designers.
• SLA. Company-wide SLA set: map returned for customer approval within 10 business days of submission.
• Delivery. Agency designers attach finished maps to the JIRA issue and move it to In Review.
• Review. The CSM is auto-alerted, reviews, and moves it to Done.

The two-phase rollout cut internal production time and customer wait time at once.

• Faster delivery at scale. The "In Design" phase, the internal time to produce and publish a map, dropped from 22 days to 5, a 77% cut, through outsourced asset creation, JIRA automation, and Figma auto-layouts.
• Expectation-setting. Relaying requirements to customers up front cut time spent chasing marina images and details.
• Time to value. Customers received their paid feature far faster, under an average 10-business-day turnaround, and sentiment improved.

As request volume and marina size grew, time in the Annotation phase began to spike, strained by an internally built annotation tool. Not captured in this data: as I left Dockwa, the product design team was introducing bulk slip editing and using Figma's variant tool to auto-annotate boats on import.