Case Study - Standing up a CRM-based proposal workflow across a multi-office construction firm

The business problem

Construction proposals are time-sensitive, content-heavy, and stakeholder-dense — a single submission touches estimating, project management, business development, and regional leadership, often under a hard external deadline. Big-D was running that workflow on Excel: each proposal lived as a static spreadsheet, inputs were re-keyed between teams, and there was no shared source of truth for the reusable content (firm credentials, past projects, team bios) that every proposal needs.

The pattern was a familiar one — the spreadsheets weren't failing in any one place, they were failing in aggregate as proposal volume grew across regional and statewide offices. The mandate wasn't "buy a CRM"; it was "make proposals scale without scaling chaos."

My role

I was the explicit Product Manager on this engagement. The work split cleanly into discovery, design, rollout, and validation:

• Gap analysis on the legacy process — mapped how proposals actually moved through Excel across offices, where inputs originated, where they were re-keyed, and which steps were genuinely manual vs. which were habit. The output was a requirements document that drove tooling selection and acceptance criteria, not the other way around.
• Workflow redesign — pivoted the proposal flow from static Excel inputs to a dynamic, multi-input CRM workflow with shared content and clear hand-offs between estimating, business development, and project management.
• CRM rollout — spearheaded implementation across regional and statewide offices, including integration with the company's other essential internal software so the CRM became the system of record rather than a parallel one.
• Training and change management — led organization-wide training, working through the predictable resistance that comes with replacing a workflow people already knew how to operate.
• Cross-department tooling — developed cross-department workflows and a ticketing system that centralized project execution and reduced inter-departmental handoff friction.

Validating under real proposal volume

The risk in any rollout of this kind is that the new system looks great in pilot and breaks under real load. I ran multiple simultaneous proposal projects through the new workflow during implementation — not as test data, but as real submissions on real deadlines — to validate the system against live work before declaring it production-ready. That same parallel-validation approach surfaced the rough edges that desk testing would have missed (input ordering issues, missing fields for specific proposal types, training gaps in specific offices) and gave me a credible answer when leadership asked whether the new process could be trusted at scale.

What I took from this

Big-D was the first role where I held the Product Manager title, and the work was almost entirely the parts of PM that survive any industry: scope the real problem before picking the tool, design the workflow before designing the rollout, and validate against live work before claiming completion. The construction context made the stakeholder map specific — estimating, business development, project management, regional leadership — but the shape of the work (gap analysis, cross-functional alignment, change management, validation under load) is the same shape I run at Tesla today on the AI & Knowledge Systems team. Different industry, different tooling, same job.