A sketch can keep a future open.

Airspace’s core business moves time-critical shipments with independent contractors we find and dispatch automatically. Usually customers hand over a package and the network and technology do the rest. So in 2021, when a wish kept surfacing in interviews with our sales and customer-success teams, it cut against the grain: customers wanted to work with their own preferred drivers and agencies. It was not yet a formed product request, and it did not belong to any one kind of customer. It was a capability we suspected could matter across the business.

To make the possibilities from those interviews easier to discuss and remember, I commissioned an illustrator to draw nine future-vision sketches of where the product could go. The one below imagines a customer adding their own preferred driver. It is deliberately sketchy: more concrete than a line in a roadmap, and less rigid than a specification. It is something we might aim for, even if we knew it would not be possible in the next quarter.

Keep the capability, even if it won’t arrive tomorrow.

Years later, we began Fleet Manager, a platform that lets customers run their own courier operations. Soon that sketch pasted on the wall had one more thing in it. We knew customers wanted to add their own drivers, but we also knew sometimes they would want to work with outside agencies. That meant we would need a system capable of handling both. An employee or contractor working with the company might allow for direct communication and routing. An agent working through an outside agency would likely not allow the same degree of control.

So when we came to implementation, we ensured it would work with agents from the start. Each driver joins through a specific relationship, and the relationship carries the rules: how they can be dispatched, how they can be paid, and what gets monitored. Time tracking, for example, turns on or off with the relationship instead of being forced into one default.

The sketch did not dictate that data model. What it did was keep the possibility open and top of mind: customer-managed drivers were a capability worth carrying forward, not an edge case to rediscover from scratch when a new product was already under pressure to ship.