Project 2: Cohort Showcase (Individual Contribution Log)

Contribution & Team: Web/Development team, self-selected — no one directed me to this role, but my background as both a developer and a project lead made it the clearest fit.

Strengths demonstrated: I moved early to unblock the team, building an intake form for team member content before we had a formal process, and proactively flagged the dependency risk of Creative and Content moving slowly against a fixed build timeline. When our chosen platform turned out to be a poor fit mid-build, I made the call to pivot rather than lose more time to trial and error — a call I'm confident in, even though it wasn't mine alone to make. I built the page templates so they could be duplicated cleanly instead of rebuilt eighteen times, which is the same instinct I bring to production work: build the reusable piece once, correctly, before scaling it.

Weaknesses & lessons learned: My biggest lesson was about assumption-setting, not tooling. I assumed a shared understanding of a process (how uploaded content should get organized and handed off) that turned out not to be shared at all, and I lost real time to that gap. The fix isn't "communicate more" in the abstract — it's specifying handoff steps explicitly, even when they feel obvious to me. I also noticed I was absorbing coordination work that wasn't formally mine, largely because a fully-loaded structure was more useful to the team than an empty one while we waited on decisions elsewhere. That's a real tension I want to get better at managing: stepping in to unblock a team versus quietly taking on a leadership role I didn't sign up for. Next time, I'd raise that tension explicitly and early, rather than resolve it by just doing the work.

**Tools: **Google Sites, Google Sheets, Claude Design, Figma, Imgur, Visual Studio Code