How Product People Turned Our Client's Mobility's TMS From a Manual MVP Into a Self-Serve Growth Engine
About how we secured leadership buy-in for a fact- and evidence-based growth roadmap targeting 400 Transport Management System customers in one year, up from 45.
Our Client
Our client is a European B2B provider of fuel cards and fleet payment solutions, founded in 1934 and serving around 400,000 commercial customers across more than 50 countries through its digital customer portal and mobile app.
At the start of the engagement, TMS had launched as a hand-picked minimum viable product (MVP), tested with a small group of about 45 paying customers rather than opened up to everyone, and a newly appointed Chief Digital Product Officer was driving the digital product organization toward data-driven, self-serve growth.
The Mission: Building a Path From MVP to Scaled TMS Adoption
Background
From February to August 2026, Product People served as interim Senior Product Manager for TMS growth. Product People led delivery across competitor research, roadmap strategy, product requirements documents, and cross-team coordination with engineering, marketing, and their online store team.
Why Product People Were Needed
The TMS sat inside our client's customer portal ecosystem, with dependencies across engineering, marketing, sales, and a separate online store team, and needed:
- A fact-based, prioritized roadmap
- A self-serve acquisition and activation funnel
- Cross-functional alignment to advance an in-progress trial redesign
- Competitive intelligence on direct and adjacent competitors
Our Main Quest: Turning a Sales-Gated MVP Into a Self-Serve Growth Engine
Removing the Barriers to Trial and Activation
Opportunity: our client recognized a chance to remove the friction keeping trial access sales-gated: existing customers were redirected from their logged-in customer portal account to a public website, asked to re-enter information the company already had, then waited about 1.5 months for a sales-led process to grant access. Fewer than 1% of website leads completed the contact form, and every demo was run manually by the team.
What We Did:
- Unlocked instant trial signup. How: prepared a self-serve free trial flow that pre-fills existing customer data from our client's online store instead of a manual contact form.
- Cleared the technical path for instant access. How: coordinated with multiple engineering teams to scope bypassing the standard backend account-setup process required for paid contracts using legacy systems such as SAP, so trial users could sign up instantly.
- Set the go-to-market model. How: ran a comprehensive free trial versus freemium research with competitive analysis, and recommended a free trial, which was unanimously adopted.
Outcome: A test order confirmed the online store integration worked end-to-end in August 2026, unlocking in the free trial redesign for implementation.
Replacing an Opinion-Based Roadmap With a Fact-Based One
Opportunity: we saw an opportunity to strengthen the TMS roadmap by grounding it in structured customer evidence and competitive data alongside the team's existing stakeholder input, making prioritization decisions easier to defend across the organization.
What We Did:
- Grounded the roadmap in evidence. How: built a competitor and feature gap analysis benchmarking TMS against two direct competitors and three adjacent-market startups.
- Surfaced the real adoption blockers. How: conducted customer interviews and synthesized sales feedback on lost deals.
- Sharpened prioritization. How: facilitated an impact-and-effort exercise with the engineering manager using an ICE (impact, confidence, effort) framework.
Outcome: Delivered a three-phase growth strategy targeting 400 customers by December 2026, up from about 45, and secured a dedicated engineering team for parallel feature work.
Side Quests
- Cut reliance on an at-capacity team for demos and prototypes by delivering a functional onboarding wizard prototype and PRD.
- Extended reach into new markets by delivering multi-language product page translations for the new trial and pricing pages.
- Shaped the final go-to-market recommendation with a comprehensive freemium-versus-free-trial benchmarking analysis.
- Gave our client's companion driver app team a clear path to sharper notifications by sharing hands-on push-notification lessons from scaling a comparable system at Alibaba (delivery prioritization, cohort targeting, fatigue caps) and handing over a three-phase roadmap to track, learn from, and optimize notification performance.
Mission Achievements: Delivered Outcomes
✅ Secured a fact-based growth roadmap – Leadership bought into a competitor-benchmarked gap analysis and a three-phase growth strategy targeting 400 customers by December 2026, up from 45, backed by a dedicated engineering team.
✅ Unlocked self-serve trial access – Replaced a 1.5-month sales-gated process with a 30-day self-serve trial on their online store, validated end-to-end in May 2026.
✅ Cut demo dependency – Built and validated a guided onboarding wizard prototype targeting trial activation rate gains from about 30% to 55%.
In the Client’s Own Words
Space Crew of this Mission
For Clients: When to Hire Us
You can hire us as an Interim/Freelance Product Manager or Product Owner
It takes, on average, three to nine months to find the right Product Manager to hire as a full-time employee. In the meantime, someone needs to fill in the void: drive cross-functional initiatives, decide what is worth building, and help the development team deliver the best outcomes.
If you're looking for a great Product Manager / Product Owner to join your team ASAP, Product People is a good plug-and-play solution to bridge the gap.
Interested in working with us?
Our Interim/Fractional Product Managers, Owners, and Leaders quickly fill gaps, scale your team, or lead key initiatives during transitions. We onboard swiftly, align teams, and deliver results.