For diligence-mode readers: the Manukora engagement, role by role. The case study is the summary; this is the receipts.

Manukora

Receipts

• Manukora · 11 months · Mar 2025 to Feb 2026
• Premium DTC · ~8 figure $/yr
• CEO's first sabbatical in a decade, with the systems holding
• 83 people onboarded, 8.96/10 onboarding experience, 9.15/10 "excited to use Notion"
• KR delivery 5 of 13 to 13 of 16 quarter-over-quarter
• Discontinued external agency retainer: $7,250/month
• 210-step NPD lifecycle, 9 departmental owners, still running six months post-handoff
• Stepped into acting Head of R&D mid-engagement to fill a structural hole
• Multiple supply chain crises absorbed and resolved without founder pulled in
• 50+ hours of pure synthesis on the Final Report alone, across 29 sessions, 99% focus time
• Every working hour logged in 15-min increments across all 11 months

A note before you read

This was a generalist-operator engagement with one mission: get Mike out. That meant doing whatever the company needed, in whatever order it needed it. Some of it was systems work, some of it crisis management, some of it filling roles that opened up when the operational backbone stabilized and exposed gaps underneath. Eleven months, sequenced by which bottleneck mattered most that week.

Manukora is where the Parallax Process was built. The blueprint, install and brain are the compressed version of what took eleven months here: find the missing loops, price what they cost, and hand the company back a system that survives without us.

Architect The Sabbatical-Ready Operating System

Chief Of Staff

Apr 2025 - Feb 2026

Mission: build the system that replaces founder-driven execution with repeatable coordination. Clear decision rights, adopted workflows, stable ownership at critical nodes. Success measured by quieter execution, and by whether the CEO can take a real sabbatical.

As of August 2026: the systems are still holding, six months after handoff.

Scope: 11 months end-to-end. ~50 hours of pure synthesis work on the Final Report alone, across 29 sessions, 99% focus time. Almost zero meetings. Almost all deep work.

Where the company was: fundamentally reactive. Force-of-will execution. Trade-offs implicit, unintentional, paid as the cost of moving fast.

Where it is now: behaviors practiced, systems utilized, decisions logged. A fragile but promising stage, and one that survived the handoff.

Customer Research Coach

Dec 2025 - Feb 2026

The customer research work that started as my entry point became a department capability. The last two months of the engagement were spent training the marketing team to run the research engine without me.

• Designed the research philosophy: hypothesis to test to evidence to refine. Built around scientific method, with the explicit anti-pattern of drinking our own bathwater (only listening to loyalists).
• Installed bet-sizing logic: qual before quant before ad-testing. Step-by-step down the staircase rather than tumbling down it.
• Trained two researchers from zero: funnel mapping, pool segmentation, qualitative interviewing (laddering, non-leading questions, traps to avoid), and the bridge from groomed insight to live testing.
• Customer journey as the north star: the exercise that always produces a new insight. Per-channel funnels mapped (DTC, Amazon, Retail), drop-off pools sized, value-weighted, and selected for interview targeting.

Result: customer research now runs as a discipline owned by marketing. The team can run iHUTs, qual, and quant independently.

Tools: Notion (research hub), FigJam (funnel maps), Loom (workshop deliveries)

Acting Head Of R&D

Oct 2025 - Feb 2026

When the innovation department needed to mature into a real R&D function, I stepped in.

• Transitioned innovation to R&D: formalized the function, defined the discipline, set the operating standards
• Built the 3-year product pipeline with Mike: long-horizon planning grounded in real customer research and validated reference-class data
• Roadmap survives the handoff: pipeline now lives as documented strategy, not founder intuition

Tools: Notion (roadmap database), FigJam (pipeline visualization)

Supplier Relations + Crisis Manager

Multiple incidents, 2025

R&D doesn't operate in a vacuum. When supply chain fires hit, I went into the foxhole.

Lid sealing incident: 35,000 units in port

The fire: 35,000 jars of finished product in port in New Zealand. Lids not sealing properly. Chinese supplier's CEO flying in. Mike abroad.

What I did:

• Got to New Zealand. Worked the floor with the team to map where the supply chain broke down.
• Built the cost-to-business model under different resolution scenarios.
• Mapped who was affected: customers, retailers, internal teams, the supplier relationship itself.
• Interviewed the supplier-side process end-to-end to find the exact failure point.
• Brought Mike and the Chinese supplier CEO into a problem-solve focused on the solution timeline, not just the problem.

Outcome: Root cause diagnosed, incident contained, supplier relationship restored.

Why this matters: Mike could be abroad focused elsewhere because someone else was in the foxhole. That's the install in miniature.

Build A Project Management Department

Operations & Quality Auditor

Oct 2025 - Dec 2025

With projects in flight and PMs in place, the next bottleneck was execution detail. SOPs lived in too many heads. Quality processes were inconsistent across product lines.

• Mapped existing SOPs across departments
• Codified the highest-leverage ones into Notion master files with version control
• Built quality system documentation that survived audit-level scrutiny

Tools: Notion, FigJam

Hiring Manager

Sep 2025 - Nov 2025

The systems needed people. I built the role spec, ran the hiring, onboarded the project managers into the new operating model.

• Wrote the role specs for the PM hires
• Ran the interview process end-to-end
• Onboarded incoming PMs directly into the Air Traffic Control rhythm
• Department now runs as a standing discipline with its own owners

Director Of Project Management

Aug 2025 - Oct 2025

Built the master file that surfaced every project in flight. Cross-functional visibility, owners explicit, deadlines logged, blockers surfaced before they escalated.

Modeled on actual air traffic control: every plane in the air visible, every controller knowing their patch, no plane lost to a handoff.

• Air Traffic Control ritual: weekly cadence, replaced the previous pattern of Slack-pings-as-project-management
• S&OP cadence installed to align sales forecasting with operational capacity
• Still running as of August 2026, six months post-handoff

Map The Full Company Lifecycle

Director Of New Product Development

Jul 2025 - Sep 2025

Built on the GTM systems work. Mapped the entire company process from idea inception to validation to approval, through every stage to shelf.

210 steps. 9 departmental owners. Relational database structure. Master files for each stage. Role-based punch lists. The thing that previously lived in Mike's head and a slide deck nobody opened became a living system the team could run.

• Stage 0 became non-negotiable: the decision whether to do the project at all got its own dedicated, ungated phase
• Marketing-Led Council installed: membership clear, authority explicit, decisions trusted. Replaced the pattern of marketing surfacing ideas that ops absorbed reactively at scale
• KR delivery improved: 5 of 13 to 13 of 16 quarter-over-quarter
• V2 frequency dropped: fewer products requiring a follow-up build to fix what Stage 0 should have caught

Tools: Notion (relational databases), FigJam, Loom

Migrate The Company Onto A Single Operating System

Training & Enablement

Dec 2025 - Feb 2026

Adoption is the real work. A migration doesn't stick unless habits change.

Six months after the initial migration, when Mike began signaling he was ready to step away, I ran a second wave of deeper Notion workshops to lock in the operating system before handoff.

• 83 people onboarded through a 15-video curriculum
• 8.96 / 10: onboarding experience score
• 9.15 / 10: "I feel excited to use Notion" (post-onboarding survey)
• Departmental workshops on advanced Notion: relational databases, automations, master files
• Factory floor adoption: cleanly inputting data at point-of-event rather than retroactively
• Replaced the stalled external Notion agency rollout and rebuilt the operating system with the team

Discontinued agency retainer: $7,250/month. This is the former monthly fee, rather than a calculation of the engagement's net savings.

Tools: Notion, Loom (15-video onboarding course)

Notion Wizard

Jun 2025 - Jul 2025

The bet: bring the entire company onto Notion in two weeks. Train every team. Get every department's filing system into one data lake.

Why it mattered: the single biggest leverage move I made at Manukora was getting every department's information into one place, because the day the company hires a Head of AI, they walk into a defined data architecture instead of a scavenger hunt.

• 2-week sprint: full migration, full training
• Every department onto Notion as primary filing system
• Hygiene standards installed from day one: naming conventions, database structures, master-file logic
• This made everything downstream possible

Tools: Notion, Loom (training videos), FigJam (information architecture maps)

Bring New Products To Market

Go-To-Market Lead

Apr 2025 - Jun 2025

The qual/quant work surfaced a deeper question: how does the company actually take a product from validated insight to shelf? The answer was: inconsistently. So I built the system.

• Mapped the full GTM cycle per channel (DTC, Amazon, Retail)
• Built content posting systems with single-source-of-truth master files
• Codified handoffs between marketing, product, and ops so the next launch didn't reinvent the workflow

This became the foundation for the lifecycle work that followed.

Tools: Notion (relational databases), Figma, Loom

Customer Insight Lead

Mar 2025 - Jun 2025

Mission: Design a research strategy for taking a new product line to market. Get the data clean enough to inform labeling, positioning, and channel strategy.

This was the entry point to the engagement. The qual/quant methodology became the seed of everything downstream: once you've designed a real testing protocol, every department starts asking what evidence do we have?

• Designed qualitative testing protocol: pool segmentation by drop-off behavior, non-leading interview structure, laddering technique
• Designed quantitative testing protocol: sample sizing, hypothesis structure, confidence thresholds
• Ran the testing waves before handing methodology off to the marketing team
• Data fed labeling decisions, positioning hierarchy, and channel prioritization

Tools: Notion (research hub), FigJam (funnel maps), Loom (workshop deliveries)