Seaweed Digital Platform

Business Problem

Seaweed collection happens on beaches and rafts, not at desks. Across 30+ coastal sites, daily collection quantities, cultivator activity, species-wise progress against targets and field-team attendance were tracked through paper records and phone calls — with no consolidated view of what was actually collected, by whom, of which species, until well after the fact.

Business Context

The organization needed a purpose-built digital platform for seaweed field operations. The platform was developed by an external technology vendor; my role is functional and product ownership — defining what the platform needs to do, validating that it does it, and owning its adoption and evolution with the field organization. This case study describes that functional ownership, not the software engineering, which is the vendor's work.

Stakeholders

Field Officers (FOs) capturing collections and visits; Field Managers (FMs) overseeing FO teams through the platform's hierarchy view; cultivators and collectors whose output the system records; management consuming site-wise and species-wise progress; the development vendor; and myself as the functional owner coordinating between all of them — including the Sri Lanka team as the platform expands there.

Requirements

Requirements came from how collection actually works in the field: entry had to survive no connectivity (collections save locally and sync when a signal returns), reflect the real reporting structure (FM → FO → cultivator/collector), track a dozen-plus seaweed species in wet and dry form against targets, and stay simple enough for daily use on basic smartphones in coastal conditions.

Functional Design

The platform is organized around five field-facing modules: a Dashboard (daily summary, monthly trends, species-wise progress against targets, weather and attendance), Collection (species-wise entry with cultivator sourcing and full history), My Tree (the FM/FO/cultivator/collector hierarchy), Visits, and Finance — with offline-first behaviour throughout. I shaped this behaviour through requirements and iterative testing with the vendor; the views below are synthetic recreations of the shipped application, with all names, values and identifiers anonymized.

Key Responsibilities

• Owning the platform functionally — requirements, scope discussions and priorities with the vendor
• Translating field workflows into functional specifications, including the offline-first collection flow
• Functional testing and UAT across releases, including validating the remote-sync behaviour the vendor built
• Backend data validation so collection records could be trusted for reporting
• Rollout support and training with field teams, and the ongoing feedback loop that drives improvements
• Coordinating the platform's expansion to the Sri Lanka operation
• Performance reporting from platform data to management

Technologies I Personally Used

Cross-functional Collaboration

This project is coordination by nature: field teams describe what breaks on a beach, the vendor needs that translated into precise, buildable specifications, and management needs the resulting data in reviewable form. I sit in the middle of all three — plus, as the platform extends to Sri Lanka, the additional loop of adapting workflows for a second country's field organization.

Business Outcomes

Collection records that previously existed on paper now exist as structured, per-species, per-cultivator data the day they happen — visible to FMs and management without a phone call. Quantified impact is currently being validated and will be updated as metrics become available.

Lessons Learned

• Offline-first is not a feature in field software — it is the adoption decision; the first question every field officer asked was "what happens when there's no signal?"
• The hierarchy view succeeded because it mirrored the organization people already knew, rather than imposing a new one
• With a vendor building, specification precision is the product skill — vague requirements return as rework

Reflection

What I learned: functional ownership of a vendor-built platform is its own discipline — the leverage is in requirements, testing and adoption, and done well it's invisible.

What I would improve today: push for in-app analytics earlier, so field managers self-serve more questions instead of routing them through reporting.

Future enhancements: completing the Sri Lanka rollout, deeper species-level analytics on collection patterns, and tighter links between platform data and downstream processing and procurement planning.