I'm Tim, a mechanical engineer turned product manager at a small company that builds retractable structures. I've been there since the beginning of my career, and because it's a small team, I've worn just about every hat you can imagine.
I started as a project coordinator and designer, laying out massive structures and releasing them to manufacturing. That also meant working directly with clients, managing vendor relationships, coordinating with sales and shipping, and keeping everyone on the same page from kickoff through installation. I shifted to helping the senior product manager, who quickly took a liking to my work. We started exploring new ideas for BOM systems that would be more dynamically driven rather than array driven. Funnily enough, I had just watched a Veritasium video on computer science, specifically Conway's Game of Life, and it gave me an idea. Colour coded grid arrays that drive cell automation, where the BOM map essentially becomes an intelligent system that understands its own locations. I took a gamble on it, wrote over 1000 lines of VBA code over a weekend, and presented it that following Monday. Within a week, I was the new junior product manager.
That shifted my path toward product management, where I've spent the last two years doing R&D on a brand new product line. We just had a very successful international launch.
My day-to-day is a mix of organizing complex part information, researching new components, running cost analyses, updating BOMs, issuing revisions, coordinating with manufacturing, vendors, sales, and shipping, and presenting decisions to upper management. It's a lot of moving pieces every single day.
The Tools That Weren't Built for This
For years, I managed all of this in Excel and Microsoft Planner Premium and I fought with both of them constantly.
Excel is incredible for data, but it was never meant to be a project management UI. Trying to build a Gantt chart out of cells is painful. Templates are hard to standardize. Conditional formatting makes everything lag. You end up spending more time maintaining the spreadsheet than actually managing the project.
Microsoft Planner Premium was decent, but dependencies would break constantly and there were no standard project templates. The Gantt view wasn't particularly user-friendly either, and dragging tasks around felt clunky and unreliable. On top of that, if you wanted any kind of automation, you had to figure out how to access and manipulate the Dataverse directly, which isn't simple. It took a lot of knowledge and configuring that I just didn't have time for in my day to day, so creating any meaningful automation was basically off the table.
In my frustration with Excel Gantts and Microsoft Planner Premium, I decided to try and build a tool myself that actually fit my needs.
How It Started
I'm not a software developer by trade. My only real programming language is VBA. I've built automation tools in AutoCAD, created custom macros, written Python scripts for batch PDF generation, and built that entire BOM system from scratch. But web development? That was completely new territory.
I've been using AI tools since they launched about three years ago. They taught me VBA properly, helped me build internal tools, and gave me the confidence to try something bigger. When I decided to build Pivoteer, I had never written a line of JavaScript, never set up a database, and honestly didn't fully understand what "frontend" and "backend" even meant.
Building Pivoteer from scratch has taught me more than I ever expected:
- How frontend and backend actually communicate
- Database design and why well-organized data changes everything
- Row-level security and how to think about access control
- Git version control and why it matters
- How to build a website from the ground up
- How to think about user experience from a user's perspective
- The basics of web security and authentication
- How DNS, hosting, and deployment actually work
It's been one of the most rewarding learning experiences of my career. There's something satisfying about not only understanding how the internet works, but actually building something on it too. I've had a lot of fun learning, and I've come out of it with a much deeper appreciation for software development than I had going into this.
Where Pivoteer Is Going
Right now, Pivoteer handles the core workflow I always wished I had: systems and component tracking, project management with deliverables, interactive Gantt scheduling with real dependencies, and team collaboration with role-based access.
But this is just the start. I want to keep building features that solve real problems for people in similar roles. Standard templates that you can launch a project from in seconds. Better reporting. Smarter automation. There's a lot I want to add, and I'm working on it every week.
If you're in a similar boat to me, managing complex physical products with tools that weren't built for it, I'd genuinely like to hear about it. Reach out at support@pivoteer.ca so we can collaborate and I can help fix a problem for you!
Thanks for taking the time to read this. I'd love to hear what you think, and I look forward to your feedback.