Method's first native inventory
So MWD businesses can sell what they can actually fulfill, without leaving the CRM.
End-to-end
0→1
B2B
2026
My tech stack
Claude code, Cursor, Figma, ChatGPT
Industry
Manufacturing, warehousing & distribution (MWD)
Company
Method CRM
Role
Lead Product Designer
~25%
Of Method's daily active users work in the inventory apps
→ 9
Average updates per order between creation and shipment
✓ 27–30%
DAU/MAU stickiness for the order apps — daily operational use
Challenge
A valuable segment was churning — and asking for inventory.
MWD is Method's fastest-growing, most durable segment: $9.7M across 1,204 accounts.
But it was churning, and inventory was one of its loudest unmet needs — a steady stream of requests for real-time stock, multi-location, and transfers.
Customers were asking Method to close the gap, or they'd leave for Katana or SOS.
Today
MWD teams flying blind.
No trustworthy stock view
Stock lived in spreadsheets, someone's head, or a disconnected system — no single reliable view of what's on hand, committed, or available to sell.
Selling blind
Reps committed to customers without knowing what was actually available — so promises turned into oversells and stalled orders.
No home for fulfillment
"We don't have anything today in Method that handles fulfillment." No way to see what a sales order needed, confirm what a PO received, or generate packing slips.
Finance reconciling in the dark
Transaction and tax mismatches with QuickBooks were a top churn thread — finance had no trustworthy inventory activity flowing back to the books.
Research
Five operators, one workflow
full order-to-cash team — Estimate → Order → Ship → Invoice — not a single user.
Primary Persona
Sales Manager Sam – Manages customer relationships, prepares quotes, converts approved quotes into sales orders, and creates purchase orders when inventory needs to be sourced.
Warehouse Manager Will – oversees receiving, inventory, picking, packing, and shipping to make sure orders are fulfilled accurately and on time.
Accounts Payable Alex – manages vendor bills, matches them against purchase orders and received goods, resolves discrepancies, invoices fulfilled sales orders, and manages outgoing payments.
Secondary Persona
Customer Chris – Places orders and expects accurate pricing, clear delivery timelines, and timely updates.
Vendor Victor – Supplies the products or materials needed to fulfil customer orders.
Constraints
Every decision had two layers — what's right and what's buildable.
Native inside the CRM
Inventory couldn't be a separate product or a second login — it had to live on the existing Sales Order and Purchase Order screens customers already worked in.
Every pattern I established would become the foundation MWD capabilities build on. I worked feasibility with PM and engineering before designs were finished — not after. Getting it right mattered beyond this release.
QuickBooks stays the source of truth
Method owns physical stock; QuickBooks owns the accounting. The two could never contradict each other — so the model had to keep Method's inventory activity aligned with the books at every step.
Eventual consistency
Available quantity updates asynchronously. I worked with engineering to signal stale data — so users never acted on a number that had already changed.
The solution
Adoptable, trustworthy, native.
Method is the only CRM built natively around QuickBooks — so inventory lives where selling already happens, not in a separate system.
- One connected flow: Quote → Order → Ship → Invoice.
- Item Availability: In Stock, Committed, Expected, Available — surfaces at the moment of commitment, so reps sell against what's really there.
- Fulfillment tracks partial shipments
- PO → Bill and SO → Invoice conversions close the loop to QuickBooks.
Inventory turns tracking on for new orders while existing transactions stay accounting-only — so it never risks a customer's books.
Inventory workflow
Enable inventory management
↓
Items app
QTY expected
Purchase order
Received items from vendor
Partial/full
Revert received
Bill
QTY in stock
QTY available
QTY committed
QTY expected
QTY in stock
QTY available
QTY comitted
Sales order
Fulfillment
Partial/full
Revert fulfillment
Invoice
Items app
Purchase order
Received items from vendor
Partial/full
Revert received
Bill
Building & Learning
The real test was trust.
The bar wasn't "does it work" — it was trust. I ran onboarding sessions with an experienced inventory operator. The enable-inventory model landed cleanly, and she validated the availability model unprompted. The sharpest insight: the Method-vs-QuickBooks boundary was both the right call and the #1 adoption risk — the thing we'd need to educate accounting-minded users on.
BUT qualitative feedback told a different story
"I need to see the whole circle — that it's going back to QuickBooks on the bill and the invoice side."
"If it doesn't go back to QBO, how can you say I have inventory that's not reflected in my financials?"
Receive inventory partially (PO)
0%
0%
Satisfaction completion Rate
Shipping items partially (SO)
0%
0%
Satisfaction completion rate
"Getting my head around the 'Method only' part — for the accounting people, that's going to be your biggest challenge: explaining what you're trying to accomplish, and that you're not stepping on toes with QuickBooks."
What Changed
What the feedback changed.
1. Made the loop provable — PO → Bill.
The operator wouldn't recommend inventory until she could see received stock flow all the way to accounting. "I need to see the whole circle." So PO → Bill became a first-class, visible step — turning what the warehouse received into what finance owes.
Before: Convert bill — no convert to bill option
After: Convert bill — Visibility of items received, convert to bill
2. Closed the sale — Sales Order → Invoice.
Shipped items had to become billable without re-entry. SO → Invoice moved from roadmap to non-negotiable, so fulfillment and finance stay in lockstep and nothing slips between shipping and billing.
Before: Convert invoice — Old QB Desktop patterns, no inventory visibility
After: Convert invoice — Visibility of items shipped prior to invoice conversion
3. Made QuickBooks sync trustworthy.
The sharpest friction was trust in the numbers — an accounting-minded operator was confused that physical stock lives in Method while accounting stock lives in QuickBooks. "If it doesn't go back to QBO, how can you say I have inventory that's not reflected in my financials?" The fix was making the source-of-truth split explicit: Method owns physical stock, QuickBooks owns the books, and the conversions are the bridge.
Before: Enable inventory management — disclaimer Alpha testing
After: Enable inventory (QB sync) — seeding inventory stock instead of manual
Outcomes
A trusted foundation — not a one-off feature.
Inventory DAU ramping toward ~25% with stickiness climbing to ~29%, benchmarked against Method's existing order apps.
"You got the scope of it, you defined it all — this can absolutely work. It does work."
"This can keep somebody from having to go to a third-party like Katana or SOS."
What's Next
From foundation to depth.
The MVP set up the roadmap: price rules and price levels, packing slips, multi-location transfers, reorder points, and backorder handling.
Next, I'd validate the async edge cases with users earlier, and put the QuickBooks conversions in front of customers as their own flow from day one — alpha showed they carried the most trust weight.
Method's first native inventory
So MWD businesses can sell what they can actually fulfill, without leaving the CRM.
End-to-end
0→1
B2B
2026
My tech stack
Claude code, Cursor, Figma, ChatGPT
Industry
Manufacturing, warehousing & distribution (MWD)
Company
Method CRM
Role
Lead Product Designer
~25%
Of Method's daily active users work in the inventory apps
→ 9
Average updates per order between creation and shipment
✓ 27–30%
DAU/MAU stickiness for the order apps — daily operational use
Challenge
A valuable segment was churning — and asking for inventory.
MWD is Method's fastest-growing, most durable segment: $9.7M across 1,204 accounts.
But it was churning, and inventory was one of its loudest unmet needs — a steady stream of requests for real-time stock, multi-location, and transfers.
Customers were asking Method to close the gap, or they'd leave for Katana or SOS.
Today
MWD teams flying blind.
No trustworthy stock view
Stock lived in spreadsheets, someone's head, or a disconnected system — no single reliable view of what's on hand, committed, or available to sell.
Selling blind
Reps committed to customers without knowing what was actually available — so promises turned into oversells and stalled orders.
No home for fulfillment
"We don't have anything today in Method that handles fulfillment." No way to see what a sales order needed, confirm what a PO received, or generate packing slips.
Finance reconciling in the dark
Transaction and tax mismatches with QuickBooks were a top churn thread — finance had no trustworthy inventory activity flowing back to the books.
Research
Five operators, one workflow
full order-to-cash team — Estimate → Order → Ship → Invoice — not a single user.
Primary Persona
Sales Manager Sam – Manages customer relationships, prepares quotes, converts approved quotes into sales orders, and creates purchase orders when inventory needs to be sourced.
Warehouse Manager Will – oversees receiving, inventory, picking, packing, and shipping to make sure orders are fulfilled accurately and on time.
Accounts Payable Alex – manages vendor bills, matches them against purchase orders and received goods, resolves discrepancies, invoices fulfilled sales orders, and manages outgoing payments.
Secondary Persona
Customer Chris – Places orders and expects accurate pricing, clear delivery timelines, and timely updates.
Vendor Victor – Supplies the products or materials needed to fulfil customer orders.
Constraints
Every decision had two layers — what's right and what's buildable.
Native inside the CRM
Inventory couldn't be a separate product or a second login — it had to live on the existing Sales Order and Purchase Order screens customers already worked in.
Every pattern I established would become the foundation MWD capabilities build on. I worked feasibility with PM and engineering before designs were finished — not after. Getting it right mattered beyond this release.
QuickBooks stays the source of truth
Method owns physical stock; QuickBooks owns the accounting. The two could never contradict each other — so the model had to keep Method's inventory activity aligned with the books at every step.
Eventual consistency
Available quantity updates asynchronously. I worked with engineering to signal stale data — so users never acted on a number that had already changed.
The solution
Adoptable, trustworthy, native.
Method is the only CRM built natively around QuickBooks — so inventory lives where selling already happens, not in a separate system.
- One connected flow: Quote → Order → Ship → Invoice.
- Item Availability: In Stock, Committed, Expected, Available — surfaces at the moment of commitment, so reps sell against what's really there.
- Fulfillment tracks partial shipments
- PO → Bill and SO → Invoice conversions close the loop to QuickBooks.
Inventory turns tracking on for new orders while existing transactions stay accounting-only — so it never risks a customer's books.
Inventory workflow
Enable inventory management
↓
Items app
QTY expected
Purchase order
Received items from vendor
Partial/full
Revert received
Bill
QTY in stock
QTY available
QTY committed
QTY expected
QTY in stock
QTY available
QTY comitted
Sales order
Fulfillment
Partial/full
Revert fulfillment
Invoice
Items app
Purchase order
Received items from vendor
Partial/full
Revert received
Bill
Building & Learning
The real test was trust.
The bar wasn't "does it work" — it was trust. I ran onboarding sessions with an experienced inventory operator. The enable-inventory model landed cleanly, and she validated the availability model unprompted. The sharpest insight: the Method-vs-QuickBooks boundary was both the right call and the #1 adoption risk — the thing we'd need to educate accounting-minded users on.
BUT qualitative feedback told a different story
"I need to see the whole circle — that it's going back to QuickBooks on the bill and the invoice side."
"If it doesn't go back to QBO, how can you say I have inventory that's not reflected in my financials?"
Receive inventory partially (PO)
0%
0%
Satisfaction completion Rate
Shipping items partially (SO)
0%
0%
Satisfaction completion rate
"Getting my head around the 'Method only' part — for the accounting people, that's going to be your biggest challenge: explaining what you're trying to accomplish, and that you're not stepping on toes with QuickBooks."
What Changed
What the feedback changed.
1. Made the loop provable — PO → Bill.
The operator wouldn't recommend inventory until she could see received stock flow all the way to accounting. "I need to see the whole circle." So PO → Bill became a first-class, visible step — turning what the warehouse received into what finance owes.
Before: Convert bill — no convert to bill option
After: Convert bill — Visibility of items received, convert to bill
2. Closed the sale — Sales Order → Invoice.
Shipped items had to become billable without re-entry. SO → Invoice moved from roadmap to non-negotiable, so fulfillment and finance stay in lockstep and nothing slips between shipping and billing.
Before: Convert invoice — Old QB Desktop patterns, no inventory visibility
After: Convert invoice — Visibility of items shipped prior to invoice conversion
3. Made QuickBooks sync trustworthy.
The sharpest friction was trust in the numbers — an accounting-minded operator was confused that physical stock lives in Method while accounting stock lives in QuickBooks. "If it doesn't go back to QBO, how can you say I have inventory that's not reflected in my financials?" The fix was making the source-of-truth split explicit: Method owns physical stock, QuickBooks owns the books, and the conversions are the bridge.
Before: Enable inventory management — disclaimer Alpha testing
After: Enable inventory (QB sync) — seeding inventory stock instead of manual
Outcomes
A trusted foundation — not a one-off feature.
Inventory DAU ramping toward ~25% with stickiness climbing to ~29%, benchmarked against Method's existing order apps.
"You got the scope of it, you defined it all — this can absolutely work. It does work."
"This can keep somebody from having to go to a third-party like Katana or SOS."
What's Next
From foundation to depth.
The MVP set up the roadmap: price rules and price levels, packing slips, multi-location transfers, reorder points, and backorder handling.
Next, I'd validate the async edge cases with users earlier, and put the QuickBooks conversions in front of customers as their own flow from day one — alpha showed they carried the most trust weight.
Method's first native inventory
So MWD businesses can sell what they can actually fulfill, without leaving the CRM.
End-to-end
0→1
B2B
2026
My tech stack
Claude code, Cursor, Figma, ChatGPT
Industry
Manufacturing, warehousing & distribution (MWD)
Company
Method CRM
Role
Lead Product Designer
~25%
Of Method's daily active users work in the inventory apps
→ 9
Average updates per order between creation and shipment
✓ 27–30%
DAU/MAU stickiness for the order apps — daily operational use
Challenge
A valuable segment was churning — and asking for inventory.
MWD is Method's fastest-growing, most durable segment: $9.7M across 1,204 accounts.
But it was churning, and inventory was one of its loudest unmet needs — a steady stream of requests for real-time stock, multi-location, and transfers.
Customers were asking Method to close the gap, or they'd leave for Katana or SOS.
Today
MWD teams flying blind.
No trustworthy stock view
Stock lived in spreadsheets, someone's head, or a disconnected system — no single reliable view of what's on hand, committed, or available to sell.
Selling blind
Reps committed to customers without knowing what was actually available — so promises turned into oversells and stalled orders.
No home for fulfillment
"We don't have anything today in Method that handles fulfillment." No way to see what a sales order needed, confirm what a PO received, or generate packing slips.
Finance reconciling in the dark
Transaction and tax mismatches with QuickBooks were a top churn thread — finance had no trustworthy inventory activity flowing back to the books.
Research
Five operators, one workflow
full order-to-cash team — Estimate → Order → Ship → Invoice — not a single user.
Primary Persona
Sales Manager Sam – Manages customer relationships, prepares quotes, converts approved quotes into sales orders, and creates purchase orders when inventory needs to be sourced.
Warehouse Manager Will – oversees receiving, inventory, picking, packing, and shipping to make sure orders are fulfilled accurately and on time.
Accounts Payable Alex – manages vendor bills, matches them against purchase orders and received goods, resolves discrepancies, invoices fulfilled sales orders, and manages outgoing payments.
Secondary Persona
Customer Chris – Places orders and expects accurate pricing, clear delivery timelines, and timely updates.
Vendor Victor – Supplies the products or materials needed to fulfil customer orders.
Constraints
Every decision had two layers — what's right and what's buildable.
Native inside the CRM
Inventory couldn't be a separate product or a second login — it had to live on the existing Sales Order and Purchase Order screens customers already worked in.
Every pattern I established would become the foundation MWD capabilities build on. I worked feasibility with PM and engineering before designs were finished — not after. Getting it right mattered beyond this release.
QuickBooks stays the source of truth
Method owns physical stock; QuickBooks owns the accounting. The two could never contradict each other — so the model had to keep Method's inventory activity aligned with the books at every step.
Eventual consistency
Available quantity updates asynchronously. I worked with engineering to signal stale data — so users never acted on a number that had already changed.
The solution
Adoptable, trustworthy, native.
Method is the only CRM built natively around QuickBooks — so inventory lives where selling already happens, not in a separate system.
- One connected flow: Quote → Order → Ship → Invoice.
- Item Availability: In Stock, Committed, Expected, Available — surfaces at the moment of commitment, so reps sell against what's really there.
- Fulfillment tracks partial shipments
- PO → Bill and SO → Invoice conversions close the loop to QuickBooks.
Inventory turns tracking on for new orders while existing transactions stay accounting-only — so it never risks a customer's books.
Inventory workflow
Enable inventory management
↓
Items app
QTY expected
Purchase order
Received items from vendor
Partial/full
Revert received
Bill
QTY in stock
QTY available
QTY committed
QTY expected
QTY in stock
QTY available
QTY comitted
Sales order
Fulfillment
Partial/full
Revert fulfillment
Invoice
Items app
Purchase order
Received items from vendor
Partial/full
Revert received
Bill
Building & Learning
The real test was trust.
The bar wasn't "does it work" — it was trust. I ran onboarding sessions with an experienced inventory operator. The enable-inventory model landed cleanly, and she validated the availability model unprompted. The sharpest insight: the Method-vs-QuickBooks boundary was both the right call and the #1 adoption risk — the thing we'd need to educate accounting-minded users on.
BUT qualitative feedback told a different story
"I need to see the whole circle — that it's going back to QuickBooks on the bill and the invoice side."
"If it doesn't go back to QBO, how can you say I have inventory that's not reflected in my financials?"
Receive inventory partially (PO)
0%
0%
Satisfaction completion Rate
Shipping items partially (SO)
0%
0%
Satisfaction completion rate
"Getting my head around the 'Method only' part — for the accounting people, that's going to be your biggest challenge: explaining what you're trying to accomplish, and that you're not stepping on toes with QuickBooks."
What Changed
What the feedback changed.
1. Made the loop provable — PO → Bill.
The operator wouldn't recommend inventory until she could see received stock flow all the way to accounting. "I need to see the whole circle." So PO → Bill became a first-class, visible step — turning what the warehouse received into what finance owes.
Before: Convert bill — no convert to bill option
After: Convert bill — Visibility of items received, convert to bill
2. Closed the sale — Sales Order → Invoice.
Shipped items had to become billable without re-entry. SO → Invoice moved from roadmap to non-negotiable, so fulfillment and finance stay in lockstep and nothing slips between shipping and billing.
Before: Convert invoice — Old QB Desktop patterns, no inventory visibility
After: Convert invoice — Visibility of items shipped prior to invoice conversion
3. Made QuickBooks sync trustworthy.
The sharpest friction was trust in the numbers — an accounting-minded operator was confused that physical stock lives in Method while accounting stock lives in QuickBooks. "If it doesn't go back to QBO, how can you say I have inventory that's not reflected in my financials?" The fix was making the source-of-truth split explicit: Method owns physical stock, QuickBooks owns the books, and the conversions are the bridge.
Before: Enable inventory management — disclaimer Alpha testing
After: Enable inventory (QB sync) — seeding inventory stock instead of manual
Outcomes
A trusted foundation — not a one-off feature.
Inventory DAU ramping toward ~25% with stickiness climbing to ~29%, benchmarked against Method's existing order apps.
"You got the scope of it, you defined it all — this can absolutely work. It does work."
"This can keep somebody from having to go to a third-party like Katana or SOS."
What's Next
From foundation to depth.
The MVP set up the roadmap: price rules and price levels, packing slips, multi-location transfers, reorder points, and backorder handling.
Next, I'd validate the async edge cases with users earlier, and put the QuickBooks conversions in front of customers as their own flow from day one — alpha showed they carried the most trust weight.