I'm Sarah Renneker, and Groundwork is my one-person small business.

I started Groundwork after a decade working in the tech industry, most of it spent in complex, regulated industries: cybersecurity, insurance, higher education, edtech, HR tech. I've worked at five-person companies and thirty-thousand-person enterprises. I've been acquired twice and been part of acquiring others. I've seen how companies grow, how they struggle, and what separates the ones that figure it out from the ones that don't.

The answer is almost always the same: they understood their customer.

Not in a "we're customer-centric" poster-on-the-wall way. In the quiet, unglamorous way. Talking to customers constantly. Doing the research. Translating what you learn into a strategy the whole team can execute on. That work is easy to skip when things are busy, and it's the first thing to fall apart when companies scale. But it's the foundation everything else depends on.

That's what Groundwork is about. I help businesses do the research, define the strategy, and turn it into tools and messaging their teams can use.

What I've worked on:

My product management career has spanned bug fixes to platform strategy, customer portals to cross-product interoperability. I've led work on customer dashboards, internal dashboards, and navigated the complexity of integrating products after acquisitions. I've worked with onshore teams, offshore teams, and everything in between.

The throughline: whether the company was 5 people or 30,000, the same fundamentals mattered. Know your customer. Understand the problem. Align your team around a clear strategy.

Industries I've worked in:

• HR and Talent Management

• Higher Education

• EdTech

• Cybersecurity

• Insurance

• Local Trades

Mostly B2B. Mostly regulated or complex. I'm comfortable in industries where the buyer journey is long, the stakeholders are many, and "it's complicated" is the default.

How I work:

I'm a one-person practice, which means when you hire Groundwork, you're working directly with me. I only say yes to partnering with teams I know I can accelerate in a meaningful way.

AI Use Policy:

I am accountable for any and all work provided.

I use AI support tools as part of my workflow. I use AI for accelerating work that would otherwise take longer. I don't treat AI as a magic button. AI can hallucinate. It can't reason. It can't be held accountable. So I check every source, review every output, and take full responsibility for the work I deliver.

When handling sensitive or proprietary information, I will either use a company’s own private LLM/AI instance, or do things the the long way without AI. I never share proprietary information with a non-private AI entity. If you're curious about how I use AI to accelerate results, I'm happy to talk through it.

Outside of work:

I'm a remote worker based in Portland, Oregon. When I'm not doing research or running workshops, I'm probably cooking from scratch, experimenting in the garden, visiting nearby state parks, or studying Japanese language.