Customer story · Consumer products
From swirl to signal.
How SharkNinja's Commercial team scaled to 51 global product launches and 250+ launch-market combinations, out of eight disconnected systems and into one source of truth. Without growing headcount.
- 51
- Launches
- 250+
- Markets
- 0
- Headcount added
- 8 → 1
- Systems unified
- 30+
- Categories
- Faster
- Team velocity
Where they started
The starting line
Launching a product at SharkNinja means coordinating across 30+ categories and dozens of global markets. There was no single place to manage it. Launch information lived in Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, email, Wrike, Snowflake, Salsify, and PowerBI. Every launch meant piecing hundreds of spreadsheets together by hand.
The cost showed up in four places. Leadership couldn't see a launch slipping until it was already a problem. Teams spent their days hunting status across systems instead of doing the work. Groups like Supply Planning couldn't keep up with manual entry on top of their real jobs. And every launch ran a little differently, so there was no repeatable playbook. The 95-item launch checklist summed it up: important, fragile, and stuck in a single Excel file.
At this volume, across this many markets, things were going to slip. A dropped ball on a launch is a missed retailer deadline, delayed revenue, and rework.
“Swirl. Hundreds of spreadsheets pieced together by hand for every launch.”
— Neil Shah · SharkNinja
What we built together
The solution
Simple Stack built Commercial Readiness in Airtable as the execution layer on top of the systems SharkNinja already runs. Not another reporting surface — the place the work happens.
Launch information now lives in one system instead of being rebuilt from scattered files each time. Weekly readiness meetings run directly off Airtable. The tool tracks how tasks depend on each other, so a launch at risk gets flagged before it becomes a crisis. Ready-made templates for lead-market and localisation tasks give every launch the same structure, so the process is repeatable instead of reinvented.
The pilot proved it scales. It started with one product — HD1000 Nano — and grew to Coanda and Juniper/Redwood. Adoption is expanding across categories now, driven by the people who actually run launches.
The platform
Four capabilities. One system.
One launch record
Every category, market, and milestone in one system instead of eight.
Dependency-driven risk
Tasks know what they block. At-risk launches surface early, not late.
Launch templates
Lead-market and localisation task sets applied to every launch the same way.
Weekly readiness
The readiness meeting runs off the tool. No pre-meeting deck assembly required.
The view
What the team sees
Retail excellence
41%
Supply
49%
Trade
58%
Field sales
65%
Upcoming · 7 days
23
Delayed
0
Overdue
7
Upcoming top 2 tops
36
Line reviews
2
Commitment deadlines
1
Approaching set dates
5
Outcomes
Results that matter
That last number is the one that compounds. More launches, more markets, the same team. A central source of truth took the manual admin off already-busy people, which is what let the Commercial team say yes to more volume without asking for more headcount. At consumer-products scale, launch volume is revenue, and this is how it scales.
“Understanding who is actually doing everything, in a consistent and automated way, saved so much time on admin work and allowed us to move faster.”
— Tricia Ryan · Sr Director, Commercial · SharkNinja
The path
The path we're on
This did not land as one big launch. It was built in stages, each one earning the next. The team is three phases in, and the fourth is already starting inside Tricia's group.
Phase 01 · Done
Foundation
One source of truth. Launch information out of eight systems and into Airtable.
Phase 02 · Done
Workflow automation
Templates, dependencies, and early risk flags. Every launch runs the same repeatable way.
Phase 03 · Now
Integration
Airtable as the system of record across teams, scaled to 51 launches and 250+ launch-markets.
Phase 04 · Next
Claude & AI
Airtable in the background of Claude. Ask for status, health, and updates in plain language.
“Some teams, like mine, are using Airtable in the background of Claude. It makes Airtable the system of record and lets us share information across teams seamlessly.”
— Tricia Ryan · Sr Director, Commercial · SharkNinja
Phase 04
What Phase 04 unlocks
With Airtable as the trusted system of record, Claude connects directly to it through MCP. Getting an answer or making an update takes a sentence instead of a search.
Reporting on request
Ask for the status of a launch, a category, or a market. Get the answer without building a view or a deck.
Launch and retailer health
A read on where a launch stands and which retailer commitments are at risk, summarised in plain language.
Key date updates
Move a milestone by asking. Dependent tasks and downstream dates shift with it automatically.
Change management
Airtable as the system of record makes sharing information across teams seamless.
Commercial Readiness is one of nine workstreams now building on the same foundation. The pattern repeats: start with the team doing the work, ship something they run their week from, then expand. The next launches will not need a new spreadsheet.
Let's talk
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