Session Notes: Opportunity Map Alignment (Day 4)

2026-06-09 · Briana Riordan and Cindi, with Nate St. Pierre · ~1 hour 40 minutes, on-site

Overview

This was the Week-2 alignment session. Nate walked Briana and Cindi through the opportunity map assembled from the four weeks of discovery — the product of roughly sixteen conversations across the team, processed down from an initial thirty-plus observations to about a dozen grouped opportunities. The purpose wasn't to decide everything on the spot; it was to react to each opportunity together, see which ones resonate, and converge on the handful of quick wins worth building in Week 3. Briana and Cindi took the working document to review and confirm their priorities within a day.

The lens throughout: which of these solve a real, current problem that isn't already being handled well — and which are interesting but not worth acting on right now.

How the Map Is Read

Each opportunity is sized two ways: how it would get built (a quick win included in this engagement, or a larger build scoped separately) and how much it matters. Quick wins are things that can be done inside an AI tool through language and instructions alone — reading something, reasoning over it, and producing a cleaner output. The moment an idea needs to pull data out of one system or push it into another, it stops being a quick win and becomes a larger build, because the connection work — permissions, edge cases, reliability — is where the real time goes.

The Opportunities Discussed

Customer service & email replies. The team manages a large library of templated responses for recurring customer questions. The idea explored: an assistant that takes an incoming email, identifies the right response, and produces a draft for a person to review and send. The cleanest starting point is the accounting inbox, where the questions are more standardized (resale certificates, W-9s, and the like) — a strong proof of concept that could later extend across the other inboxes.

Vendor price-change monitoring. When a vendor issues a price update, there's currently no fast way to see which products are affected and by how much. The quick-win version: drop a new vendor price sheet in and compare it against current pricing, flagging the changes worth paying attention to at whatever threshold matters. The value is concentrated in a small number of major vendors.

Order intake. Orders arrive by email as purchase orders and art files and are entered into Antera largely by hand. The group saw real value in moving toward a review-edit-approve flow — the bulk of an order assembled automatically, a person confirming and finishing it — rather than full manual entry. A higher-value opportunity, but a larger build, since it touches the order system directly.

Product entry & sync. Getting new products entered correctly and listed consistently across Antera, Sage, and ASI is a meaningful, growth-relevant area. It's also more involved — pricing logic, copywriting, and data that has to be established along the way — so it reads as a larger build worth scoping rather than a quick fix.

Production labor data. The team already captures production data across a set of daily sheets. The quick-win idea: a cleaner way to view and summarize what's already being collected — a simple dashboard view ("here's what happened yesterday: these jobs, these hours, these units per hour") drawn from the existing sheets, without changing how the data gets entered.

Product imagery. Turning a plain product photo plus a logo into a polished, in-context marketing image — the product decorated and shown in a realistic setting — came up as a way to upgrade product photography and sales mock-ups. This graduated into a potential small build and a live demonstration for the team.

Knowledge capture & continuity. Several processes live largely in one person's experience and aren't documented in a way others can follow. Capturing how key processes are actually done — so the know-how is shared rather than concentrated — was discussed as an important, if larger, undertaking.

Longer-horizon ideas. A machine-maintenance log and assistant, repeatable specs for recurring orders, and a live "state of the floor" production view were all discussed as interesting future directions rather than near-term builds.

Advanced AI session. Beyond the group productivity training for the whole team, Briana and Cindi will do a deeper working session to learn to build their own AI tools and projects directly.

About-Us context file (bonus). A useful byproduct of all the discovery: a ~20-page narrative of the business — who you are, what you do, how the work flows — that you could hand a new hire, vendor, or consultant to get up to speed asynchronously. Offered as a low-cost bonus.

What We're Moving On First

By the end, three things were converged on for Week 3:

1. An email draft assistant, starting with the accounting templates as the cleanest first case.
2. A vendor price-change monitor — drop in a sheet, get the changes that matter flagged.
3. The advanced power-user session for Briana and Cindi.

Several larger opportunities — order intake, product entry and sync, and a fuller labor-data system — were flagged as the most promising candidates for a future scoped build, to revisit after the quick wins.

Next Steps

• Briana and Cindi: review the opportunity map and confirm priorities, with any additional thoughts or questions, within a day.
• Nate: build the agreed quick wins, run the group AI productivity session and the advanced session, and follow up with direction on the larger builds worth scoping.