Grant Workflow Modernization

The grant management platform processes hundreds of funding applications per year across multiple innovation programs. The intake and review workflow — the end-to-end path from application submission through reviewer assignment, evaluation, and decision — was built on a fragmented, largely manual process that created bottlenecks at every handoff.

Reviewers were managing applications through email threads and spreadsheets. Program managers had no real-time visibility into pipeline status. Applicants received inconsistent updates and experienced long waits with no transparency. The system could not scale to meet growing application volumes without proportional headcount growth.

As Technical Product Manager, I owned the modernization initiative end-to-end — leading discovery, solution design, stakeholder alignment, delivery management, and go-to-market. I worked across engineering, program operations, and the executive team to redesign the workflow and integrate the tooling required to automate it.

• Conducted continuous user research and funnel analysis using Mixpanel and Hotjar to map the current workflow, identify drop-off points, and surface the root causes of delay at each stage of the intake and review process
• Ran stakeholder interviews across reviewers, program managers, and the BD team to understand workflow pain points from every seat in the process — not just the applicant-facing surface
• Designed the modernized intake and review workflow — reducing manual handoffs, standardizing reviewer assignment logic, and introducing automated status notifications at key milestones
• Led integration of SugarCRM and SugarConnect across business development workflows, enabling 20+ leads to manage client pipelines, track engagement, and eliminate manual email-based handoffs
• Owned the rolling product roadmap across 3 concurrent workstreams, facilitating quarterly prioritization sessions with engineering, design, and executive stakeholders to sequence delivery against strategic goals
• Continuously used funnel and engagement data to challenge low-value feature requests — reducing work on initiatives that didn't move the key throughput or cycle time metrics by 20%
• Defined and executed go-to-market plans for 2 major platform releases, coordinating across engineering, marketing, and customer success to hit adoption targets within 30 days of each launch

• Automation at the handoff: the biggest throughput gains came not from speeding up individual tasks but from eliminating the wait time between them — automating handoffs and status notifications was the highest-leverage change
• User research across all seats: interviewing reviewers and program managers alongside applicants surfaced workflow problems that were invisible from the applicant side alone — the bottlenecks were almost entirely internal
• Data as a prioritization tool: using Mixpanel and Hotjar data to challenge feature requests — rather than just validate them — created a culture where every addition had to justify itself against the throughput metrics
• Roadmap across concurrent workstreams: maintaining a rolling roadmap with quarterly prioritization sessions kept three parallel tracks aligned and gave stakeholders a transparent view of sequencing trade-offs