Blacklane Cuts Planning from Weeks to Days with Real-Time Portfolio Visibility

How Blacklane Standardized Its Product Operating Model with Dragonboat as Its Single Source of Truth

This case study explores how Blacklane, a global premium chauffeur service, uses Dragonboat to transform their product portfolio management and replace fragmented spreadsheets with a single source of truth for decisions, actions, and outcomes. Dirk Daumann, Chief Technology Officer/Chief Product Officer, and Michael Haizmann, Product & Operations Lead, Consultant, and Coach, led the initiative to standardize their entire product operating model and establish a shared language for how work gets done, giving leadership the portfolio visibility they needed to make faster, more confident product investment decisions.

The Challenge: Portfolio Drift and a Missing Source of Truth

As Blacklane’s product portfolio scaled, intent began to decay between strategy and execution. Roadmaps were buried across a mix of Jira discovery projects and countless spreadsheets. Monthly leadership reviews required tedious, manual compilation in Google Docs. Dependencies were difficult to detect, trade-offs became invisible, and misalignment quietly compounded across teams.

This fragmentation left leadership without answers to fundamental questions: “Where is our engineering capacity invested?” and “How does this quarter’s plan align with our annual objectives?” Without a shared system to surface these signals in real time, the gap between strategy and execution was widening — creating rising product debt and slower time to market.

Product managers, meanwhile, felt like the tools they were asked to use were administrative overhead rather than something that served them. The result was a planning process that took weeks when it should have taken days, and a leadership team that was always looking backward instead of forward.

The Solution: One Source of Truth, Built for Adoption

Dirk Daumann and Michael Haizmann made a deliberate decision: implementing Dragonboat would not be treated as a tool rollout — it would be a standardization of the entire product operating model.

To make adoption stick, the team led with a “pull, not push” approach. Rather than mandating full-scale change immediately, they focused the initial rollout on quick wins that solved the highest-pain problems for delivery teams first:

• Establishing Dragonboat as the Product Portfolio OS and single, official system for all roadmaps. This was a cultural shift, not just a technical one — immediately bringing consistency and exposing hidden areas for improvement across the portfolio.
• Replacing manual reports with live, custom dashboards powered by Portfolio Intelligence, fusing real-time execution data from Jira with strategic context from Dragonboat, and giving leadership always-current shared context and memory for portfolio health.
• Driving outcome-driven visibility by linking daily work to OKRs. Every significant Initiative or Epic was tied to a measurable Key Result, shifting the conversation from reporting activity to validating business impact across the PDLC.
• Eliminating status meetings for large cross-team initiatives. For major cross-functional efforts like architectural refactors, dedicated dashboard views filtered by strategic theme provided a constant, clear progress signal (e.g., “33% done”) — making marathon alignment meetings unnecessary.
• Managing executive expectations through a phased adoption roadmap. Leadership received high-value wins early (Portfolio Visibility dashboards, Roadmap, and Capacity Planning), while more advanced capabilities like the Request/Intake Module were introduced once core adoption was stable.

“Dragonboat gave us what Jira and slides alone couldn’t: one place where OKRs, roadmaps, and capacity connect, so leadership, teams, and stakeholders see the same picture. We went from scattered plans and misaligned priorities to a single source of truth — and could finally have the real conversations about what to stop and what to bet on. That’s when strategy-to-execution actually started to work.”

 

– Michael Haizmann, Product & Operations Lead, Consultant, and Coach, Blacklane

The Results: From Cost Center to Strategic Advantage

Within weeks of implementing Dragonboat, Blacklane saw immediate and measurable impact:

• Planning time cut from weeks to days. The first monthly planning session after adopting Dragonboat achieved unprecedented clarity and alignment in a fraction of the time previously required.
• Faster, data-driven decisions. A capacity planning view immediately surfaced that a Key Result owner’s project lacked sufficient engineering support, leading to a fast organizational adjustment that would have otherwise taken weeks to surface and resolve.
• Elimination of manual reporting overhead. Static Google Docs and spreadsheet compilations were replaced by live, shared dashboards, freeing leadership to focus on future strategy rather than reconstructing the past.
• More predictable roadmap delivery, with faster time to market for new features, as cross-team dependencies became visible and manageable in real time.
• Product operations elevated from a cost center to a strategic advantage, giving leaders the shared context and memory to operate at speed and scale — keeping intent consistent as changes propagate across teams, tools, and the full PDLC.

Conclusion

For Blacklane, the journey to real-time portfolio visibility was not about deploying a new tool; it was about operationalizing clarity across the entire product organization. By adopting Dragonboat as their Product Portfolio OS, leading adoption through quick wins rather than mandates, and building a culture of data-informed decision-making, Blacklane closed the gap between strategy and execution that had been quietly growing as their portfolio scaled.

The result is a product organization that can move with the speed and confidence that AI-driven product development demands — one where leadership sees exactly where investment is going, teams understand how their work connects to business outcomes, and planning is measured in days, not weeks.

Explore how Blacklane built this foundation step by step in our blog series: Proving ROI with Outcome-Driven Visibility, The Pull Strategy for Product Adoption, Phased Roadmaps for Portfolio Maturity, and How Blacklane Improved Product Portfolio Visibility with Dragonboat.