01 — Why it mattered
Booking agents were jumping between tools to handle a single quote — and the CRM was the slowest stop on the loop.
A keyboard-first CRM for an airline booking team — built around the workflow, not the database schema.
02 — Problem
The legacy CRM was mouse-first and form-heavy. Agents moved between dialer, calendar, and notes to finish one quote. The data was right; the interface was in the way.
03 — Approach
Rebuilt the workspace around a command palette and keyboard-first navigation. Pipeline, follow-ups, and notes live one shortcut away. Routes stream where it makes sense; the heavy data tables are virtualised.
04 — Build
Component library first, screens second. Tailwind tokens lifted from the brand work, typed end-to-end with TypeScript. Shipped in a tight loop with the booking team dogfooding nightly builds.
05 — Outcome
A client-rendered workspace that paints in under a second and holds still while it does — 784ms LCP, 227ms TTFB, and a cumulative layout shift of 0.004 against a 0.1 threshold. The keyboard layer replaced the spreadsheet habit it was built to compete with.
06 — Reflection
The leverage was not in adding features. It was in removing clicks. Every shortcut we shipped paid back the same week.