We delivered an AI Product Manager for the only product manager at a Clements Ferry Road marine electronics company — one that runs as Claude Cowork on her laptop and carried a new battery monitor from 214 support tickets through the spec, the roadmap, the dealer launch, and the first ninety days in the field.

She was hired in 2022 as the first and only product manager at a 44-person company off Clements Ferry Road that builds saltwater-rated electronics for boats. Battery monitors, bilge alarms, shore-power sensors. The founders are engineers who started in a garage on James Island in 2009, and for thirteen years the product roadmap lived in the head of one of them. She was brought in to write it down and to ship the next thing.

The next thing was a battery monitor that could tell a boat owner, on their phone, whether the house bank would make it through the night at anchor. Everyone agreed it was needed. Nobody agreed on what it was. Sales wanted Bluetooth.

Engineering wanted a shunt they already had tooling for. The founders wanted it in dealers by the Charleston Boat Show. She had 214 support tickets, 38 recorded customer calls, three competitors' manuals, and a spreadsheet of feature requests that went back to 2019. She was one person, and the launch was fourteen months of work if she did it the old way.

The AI Product Manager runs as Claude Cowork on her laptop, with access to the same folders she works in and nothing else. It does not replace her. It does the parts of the job that are reading, sorting, drafting, and remembering, so that she can do the part that is deciding. Discovery came first.

It read all 214 tickets and all 38 call transcripts in an afternoon and came back with eleven problems, ranked by how often they appeared and how angry the customer was when they appeared. The top one was not Bluetooth. It was that owners did not trust the state-of-charge number, because every monitor on the market drifted after a few weeks and nobody knew which reading to believe. That became the product.

The monitor would re-calibrate itself every time the bank hit full charge, and the app would show its own confidence. From there it wrote the requirements document, 19 pages, from her notes and the discovery findings, and kept it current. When engineering changed the shunt rating from 300 to 500 amps in week six, it found the four other places in the spec that assumed 300 and flagged them. When the founders asked for a version without the app, it wrote the trade-off memo, two pages, with the cost of a second SKU against the dealers it would win, and she took that to the meeting instead of a gut feeling.

It kept the roadmap in a sheet with 61 line items across firmware, hardware, app, packaging, certification and dealer training, and every Monday it read the engineering tickets and the Slack export and told her which items had moved, which had quietly stalled, and which dependency was now the one that decided the ship date. Twice that was the FCC filing, which nobody was watching. For the launch it wrote the dealer sell sheet, the installation guide, the 140-question support knowledge base, the press note for the boating trade, and the training deck the sales team ran at a marina in Mount Pleasant for 22 dealers from Georgetown to Beaufort.

It drafted the pricing analysis that landed the unit at $289, which was $40 above the founders' instinct and $60 below the nearest competitor with self-calibration. The monitor shipped in ten months, not fourteen. The Charleston Boat Show was in January and it was on the table. The lifecycle did not end there.

Since launch it reads every return, every review and every support ticket on the new unit each morning and keeps a running list of what is wrong in the field. The first ninety days produced 1,140 units sold, 14 returns, and one firmware bug in the calibration routine that it caught in ticket number three, when the pattern was still two owners and a hunch. The fix went out in the app in nine days. The roadmap for version two is already 23 line items, and every one of them traces back to a customer who said it.

She is still the only product manager. She says the difference is that she now spends her week talking to dealers, boat owners and engineers, and almost none of it reading. "I used to be the person who knew where everything was. Now I'm the person who decides what we build.

That's what I was hired for."