Two years turning undocumented factory workflows into a Microsoft-built traceability system — production cycle time down 30%.
We partnered with Microsoft to bring blockchain-powered traceability to the diamond supply chain. I led the product side of a 2-year implementation, bridging decades of informal business logic with enterprise engineering to digitize how diamonds move from mine to market.
Overview
My role was to sit between the business and engineering sides of this partnership. The hardest part wasn’t the technology itself. It was translating decades of informal, deeply embedded business logic into structured system requirements that a Microsoft engineering team, with zero context on how diamonds actually move through production, could build against. Every department had its own workflows, its own exceptions, its own way of doing things that had never been documented.
I ran weekly syncs with Microsoft, managed escalations when reality didn’t match the spec, and owned user testing to make sure what got built actually worked for the people on the floor. Over two years, this initiative became a core part of the company’s broader push to digitize diamond production, reducing production cycle time by 30% and creating a traceable, verifiable record for every stone that moved through the system.