Case study · 02

Audited 8 workstreams against two goals. Cut roughly 50 projects. Helped deliver the tiger-team model that ran what was left.

Senior Business Program Manager at Turntide Technologies, remote. 2020 – 2023, the final two quarters of my tenure. The Chief of Staff handed me a high-consequence cross-functional program during a critical operating window. I turned the company’s project portfolio into a triaged backlog and a new operating model.

Role: Senior Business Program Manager
Company: Turntide Technologies
Tenure: 3 years across 4 roles
Window: The final two quarters of tenure
What I owned: Built the master project catalogue across all 8 workstreams from Jira, Zendesk, Monday.com, and stakeholder documents. Designed the audit framework and dashboard in Excel. Led the in-person audit conference line-by-line. Ran the post-audit status cadence. Presented findings up to SVP-and-Board level.
Who I partnered with: Chief of Staff (mentor, SME input); external product strategy consulting that shaped the post-audit tiger-team operating model; workstream leads across Operations, Logistics, Customer Success, Sales, Engineering (Hardware and Software), Technical Services, Product, and Marketing; SVP of Customer Success and a Board member in the audit-readout room; C-Suite as the upward escalation path.

0 Workstreams audited line-by-line

0 quarters Catalogue, audit, presentation, operating model

~ 0 OKRs / projects per tiger team, post-audit focus

01 Context

Turntide was in a high-intensity operating window. Eight workstreams were each running their own active project portfolios in parallel, in their own tools, against their own definitions of priority. The company’s stated focus was the 10,000-motor channel transition and a path to profitability. The portfolio in practice was wider than that.

The Chief of Staff needed someone to catalogue every workstream’s projects into one place, audit them line-by-line against the two company-level goals, and surface what to cut, pause, or keep. The program had cross-functional breadth, executive-room visibility, and no time to do it slowly.

He handed it to me. I led the dirty work and the status meetings; he gave SME input where it mattered.

02 Approach

Build the master catalogue

Pulled every active project across all 8 workstreams — Operations, Logistics, Customer Success, Sales, Engineering (Hardware and Software), Technical Services, Product, Marketing — from where the data actually lived: Jira, Zendesk, Monday.com, stakeholder documents, and a lot of conversations. Built the master file in Excel with a dashboard on top so the audit could be navigated in one place instead of eight.

Fig. 01 · Catalogue ingest. Eight workstream sources, one master file, one audit gate.

Audit against two goals

Held an in-person audit conference. Reviewed every project on the master file line by line against two and only two questions:

Does this advance the 10,000-motor channel transition?
Does this advance profitability?

Anything that couldn’t answer yes to at least one was a candidate to cut or pause. Owners were in the room. Decisions happened in the room.

Deliver the tiger-team operating model

The post-audit operating model was designed in collaboration with external product strategy consulting, whose frame of lean cross-functional tiger teams matched the company’s operating constraints. The workstream-siloed backlog was replaced with mixed cross-functional groups pulled from across the 8 workstreams, each focused on roughly five OKRs / projects at a time.

I helped deliver. Ran the status cadence on the new operating model; coordinated cross-workstream staffing; surfaced friction back to leadership; kept the master file alive as the system of record for what the tiger teams were actually shipping against.

Workstreams audited line-by-line against two company goals

03 Receipts

Catalogued every active project across all 8 workstreams into a single master file with an audit dashboard, pulling from Jira, Zendesk, Monday.com, and stakeholder documents.
Held an in-person line-by-line audit conference against the 10K-motor and profitability gates. Cross-functional owners in the room; decisions in the room.
Cut roughly 50 projects; paused many more. Recommendations adopted.
Helped deliver the tiger-team operating model — designed in collaboration with external product strategy consulting. Lean cross-functional groups pulled from across all 8 workstreams, each focused on ~5 OKRs / projects. Designed as a temporary structure for the operating window; survived past my departure.
Presented findings to the SVP of Customer Success and a Board member. Escalation path prepared for the C-Suite.
Externally validated. Ambrish Chitnis (senior leader at Turntide, outside my reporting line) wrote a LinkedIn recommendation naming this work specifically.

From chaos to a triaged backlog and a new operating model in two quarters.

04 In hindsight

The hardest tradeoff was honestly my health. In retrospect I gave it too much, and the mission too much. I took on something that was not meant for one person; it was meant for a team. The work landed — Ambrish’s recommendation reflects what landed — and I reflect now and wonder if a properly staffed program would have yielded even better results.

What I carried forward: scope-to-staffing is a conversation that belongs at the start of a program, not after. Lead with what we’re trying to solve, then make the resourcing match the ambition.

05 Stack

Excel: Master project file and audit dashboard.
Jira: Engineering and product project ingest.
Zendesk: Customer-Success and Technical-Services workstream ingest.
Monday.com: Operations and Marketing workstream ingest.
Stakeholder documents: Direct from workstream leads where no system of record existed.