Staff Manager

Problem

A community of more than 500 collaborators does not run itself on spreadsheets, but that is roughly where things were. Compensation, reimbursements, document signing, who could see and do what, the courses and content people needed: each lived in its own place, half-manual and easy to get wrong at scale. I was asked to make it one system, and to own both what it should do and the building of it.

Approach

I built it on Next.js and Supabase, with AI-assisted development doing a lot of the heavy lifting so a small team could move like a larger one. I owned the product decisions and wrote the code, which kept the loop between what users needed and what shipped very short.

The scope was wide, so I sequenced it. Access control first, because everything else depends on who is allowed to do what. Then compensation and reimbursements, then document signing, then courses and content. Each piece shipped on its own and earned its place before the next one started.

Outcome

The 500-plus collaborators moved onto a single platform for the things that used to be scattered and manual. Role-based access meant the right people saw the right things without someone in the middle approving every step, which made the whole operation consistent and auditable. Document signing and reimbursements stopped being email threads, and a lot of recurring admin overhead came off the team.

It is the clearest example I have of the way I like to work now: a product owner who also builds, using AI to close the gap between deciding and shipping. It is why “a PM who can build” is not a slogan for me. It is just how this got made.