A two-year product vision that transformed Crew Scheduling from a mid-market planning tool into a scalable enterprise operations backbone — and generated 80% revenue growth.
Rentman identified two strategic priorities at once: expand deeper into the U.S. market and move upmarket into Enterprise accounts. Both required a fundamentally different product, not incremental improvement.
Crew Scheduling was strong but optimised for mid-market event companies. Enterprise and U.S. customers needed higher configurability, stronger process control, clearer workflow ownership, faster planning, and better communication and confirmation loops.
“This was not about shipping isolated features. It was about defining where the product needed to go strategically — and then making sure the whole organization believed it.”
So I led the creation and evangelisation of a two-year product vision. The vision wasn't a roadmap. It was a narrative — one that could align engineering, sales, customer success and leadership around a shared direction.
Before defining a future state we went deep into the current one, across four research tracks.
We scheduled real scenarios internally — multi-day projects, crew substitutions, last-minute time changes, cross-project conflicts — and felt the friction ourselves: too many manual steps, limited overview, draft indistinguishable from definitive.
We tested competitors across the U.S. and EU. Some were stronger on workflow structure, others on utilisation visibility. Few handled enterprise customisation cleanly, and most lacked integration between planning and communication.
Customer interviews, sales feedback, CS escalations, Productboard requests, usage analytics and enterprise deal losses. U.S. customers needed structured confirmation workflows; enterprise clients wanted process control and cross-department status visibility.
We reframed from “what features are missing?” to “what jobs are users trying to accomplish?” That analysis shaped the entire direction of the vision.
A vision only works if it is adopted internally. I structured evangelisation across four audiences, each needing a different framing.
Resisting the pull to publish a feature list. A roadmap gets nodded at; a narrative gets repeated back to you by someone in Sales six months later. That repetition is the actual deliverable.
Instead of jumping to features, we built a multi-layered vision artefact — narrative, mockups and strategic framing.
Select a function, instantly see best-fit crew, click to plan, auto-validate availability, send confirmation, track status live. Planning becomes proactive instead of reactive.
A press-style narrative positioning speed, control, enterprise visibility and reduced operational chaos — aligning messaging before a line of code was written.
Documented the market shift toward distributed event operations, U.S. requirements and enterprise standardisation. The product stopped being a scheduling tool and became an operations backbone.
The headline mechanism — 3× faster scheduling for project managers, with availability auto-validated at the point of assignment.
Availability hover previews, colour-coded scheduling states and collapsible project views, so conflicts surface before they become escalations.
Team-based crew lists with a clear draft versus definitive distinction — the change that most increased planner confidence.
Crew Scheduling evolved from a functional planning tool into a scalable enterprise crew operations platform. Enterprise conversations got stronger and the product narrative matured from feature-led to vision-led. The lesson: a clear vision, backed by deep research and systematically evangelised, is the highest-leverage tool a PM has — every incremental improvement tied back to a coherent one-to-two-year direction, giving engineers clarity, sales confidence and leadership belief.
Put the JTBD analysis in front of leadership earlier. The narrative landed, but the jobs are what made it defensible under challenge — and they arrived a month late.
Revisit the vision artefact quarterly. It was treated as finished once adopted, and by the second year parts of it described a market that had already moved.