Product-launch tracker
A relational launch tracker built with no engineering support, replacing a single Google Sheet that had been designed for ten people and was serving over a hundred. It gave a 125-person launch org its first daily-accurate view of what was actually shipping.
Write-up coming The system shipped and the numbers below are real. The full breakdown — steps, tools, where the human checks it — isn't written yet.
- System
- An Airtable relational database keyed on the shipment ID from the inventory system, reconciled daily against inventory data, flagging any launch whose arrival estimate moved by more than a week.
- Stack
- AirtableJavaPower BIInventory reconciliation
- Outcome
- Cut average time-to-launch by 30 days and grew first-90-day per-launch revenue by 27%, with adoption across all eight teams in the launch org.
Why this one is here
The oldest system on this site, and the one that taught me the pattern everything else follows: the bottleneck is rarely the work, it’s that nobody can see the work’s real state.
Nobody knew next week’s launches until the Friday before, because inventory estimates moved by up to six months and creative teams were scheduling off timelines that only a manual check could confirm. The fix was a shared source of truth that updated itself daily and said out loud when a date moved.
The adoption story is the part worth writing up properly. I met with all eight teams in the launch org, found each one a specific pain of its own, and made sure every team got a win on day one — which is the only reason a tool built by the marketing side got used by everyone else.