Process Design

Dockwa, part of The Wanderlust Group, is a marina management platform, focusing on finding efficiencies for marina operators and bettering boaters overall experience on the water.

Team

  • Product: Lead PD (Margo Sultenfuss)

  • External Agency: Klimt & Design, Upwork

  • Stakeholders: Head of Customer Success, GTM Leadership, VP of Product, VP of Engineering

Problem

Due to limited resources and a quick timeline for MVP release, the Marina Map feature had many manual processes in place behind the scenes. As the feature gained traction and more maps were requested, we needed to address the impending bottlenecks.

  • Due to a lack of directions and examples, customers were sending low quality content, making designers and CSMs spend hours hunting down information.

  • Product Design was spending ~35 hours a week creating maps in Figma

  • As CSMs received existing marina map content, there was not a scalable workflow for alerting the design team or an accurate way to set timeframe expectations with customers.

Goals

  • Reduce time spent on In Design phase collecting marina assets and creating maps

  • Reduce time spent internally communicating status updates and managing assets

  • Reduce onboarding time for customers and time to seeing value

Solution

Phase I - Adding automation and hiring external designers for asset creation

  • CSMs to submit Google Form after customer raised hand for new feature. Included detailed map questions and ability to attach marina photos.

  • On submission, Zapier triggers automation to 1) add content to shared Google folder 2) create a new Google Doc based off template.

  • Google Doc sent to Fiverr design contractors for Figma map creation.

  • Once map was sent back and moved to Done folder, Zapier automation sent Slack message tagging CSM notifying that map was complete and ready for upload.

Phase II - Streamlining project management tools into one platform, JIRA, and hiring embedded external agency

  • A Marina Map PDF was sent to every customer once they opted into the Marina Map feature, relaying the information needed to create maps, acceptable types of images etc

  • CSMs to submit JIRA form, creating JIRA issue with the relevant information and automatically assigns ownership to the agency designers. 

  • Company-wide expectations set that once submitted, map would be sent to the customer for approval in no more than 10 business days. 

  • Agency designers attached the finished maps directly to the JIRA issue and move to In Review status

  • CSMs automatically alerted, reviewed map, and moved to Done. 

Results

  • Reduced time spent in design: As seen on the image above, the total time spent In Design decreased dramatically once we outsourced asset creation to an agency, introduced JIRA automation and included Figma auto layouts. The Total Time in Design decreased from 22 days to 5 days.

  • Expectation setting: Relaying expectations to customers at the start of the process reduced time spent finding marina images and details. 

  • Time to value: Customer sentiment was greatly improved as they were receiving their new paid feature much faster and under a set time frame of on average 10 business days. 

The time spent in Annotation started to spike as the CSM team had increased workloads and started running into frustrating issues with our internally built annotation tool. Not represented in this data was the work the product design team was focusing on as I left Dockwa - we introduced the ability to bulk edit boat slips and also use Figma’s new variant tool to automatically annotate boats during import.