About the Company
Max Shipping is a US-based shipping agency that manages vessel port calls and coordinates port-related operations on behalf of vessel owners and operators. The day-to-day reality of port call coordination is overwhelmingly email-driven - long threads with terminals, customs, pilots, agents, and clients running in parallel for every active port call.
Max Shipping engaged Tequity to build a vessel management platform that turns this email-driven chaos into a clean, centralized operating workspace - one that AI can read, classify, and act on alongside the human team.
The Challenge
Replacing email as the primary operational surface for a deeply established workflow is a non-trivial product problem:
- Email is the source of truth: Any new system has to live alongside email and ingest it, not replace it overnight.
- Vessel-centric mental model: Operators think in vessels and port calls, not in tickets or projects. The product had to mirror that mental model.
- AI classification of unstructured email content: To organize port call work, the platform has to read, classify, and extract structured information from messy real-world email threads.
- Production-grade from a clean sheet: This was a green-field build, with the team needing to deliver Phase 1 to live customers in months, not quarters.
Solution Implemented by Tequity
Tequity is running the engagement as a full design and engineering partnership, with a dedicated team led from project management through QA.
Phase 0 - Discovery and Foundations:
- Project kickoff with PRD authoring and prototypes.
- Vessel-centric information architecture defined with the customer team.
Phase 1 - V1 of the Platform:
- Built an in-app email client that replicates the Outlook experience, so operators can keep working in email while the platform reads everything around them.
- UI for vessel-centric pages - the operating surface for active port calls.
- Sprint 1 closed with email client sync, vessel-centric pages, and AI classification + extraction working together.
- Testing commenced and v1 was presented to the client and end users.
- UAT and Production environments set up and live.
Phase 2 - AI Layer:
- Started on the AI Draft feature, which composes and suggests outbound responses informed by the active port call context.
Cross-Cutting:
- Continuous QA, design, and engineering work to harden v1 ahead of broader rollout.
- Tequity owns delivery cadence and is structured to scale up as the next phase begins.
Process and Approach
The Max Shipping engagement showcases how Tequity takes a vertical SaaS product from a blank canvas to a v1 in market - bringing PRDs, design, AI engineering, and QA into a single team with a single delivery clock. The product is now in real customer testing with a clear next-phase roadmap including AI Draft and continued operational depth.
