This started with a business development question: how do we make our supplier partnerships more valuable for both sides? Our supplier partners, the distributors and manufacturers who referred contractors to our platform, had zero visibility into how those referrals were actually performing. Their reps visited contractors armed with anecdotes and historical sales data from their own systems, which meant every conversation started with “How's business going?” instead of anything actionable.

We had the data to change that, and the project landed on my desk because it sat at the intersection of marketing, product, and engineering. At the time, nobody else was standing in that intersection. I scoped the requirements by talking to supplier reps about what would actually change their behavior in the field (product thinking). I designed the metric hierarchy and storytelling framework that made the data legible to a non-technical audience (marketing thinking). And I built the Tableau dashboards myself, writing the queries, structuring the data models, and standing up the views (engineering execution). Market-level performance, drill-downs to individual contractors, coaching-ready insights on financing adoption, ticket size, equipment mix.

The customer value for suppliers was immediate: reps walked into meetings already knowing where a contractor was strong and where they were leaving money on the table. For our business, it turned a referral relationship into a data-driven partnership. For me, it was the project that made the career shift obvious. I wasn't doing marketing that happened to involve data. I was identifying user needs, building a product to serve them, and measuring whether it changed behavior. That's product management, and it's what I've been doing since.