Portfolio

As the Producer of Crowd Comic, I:

• Led an 18-person multidisciplinary team consisting of programmers, designers, artists, and writers.
• Facilitated sprint planning, backlog refinement, stand-ups, and retrospectives to maintain development momentum and team alignment.
• Conducted daily check-ins with the programming, design, and art leads to identify inter-team dependencies early and prevent blockers from impacting development progress.
• Managed production tracking through GitHub Issues, helping organize milestones, dependencies, and feature priorities across multiple subteams.
• Coordinated communication between discipline leads to improved cross-team collaboration and streamlined issue resolution.
• Maintained production documentation, meeting notes, and delivered weekly stakeholder progress reports throughout development.

Crowd Comic was developed over four months by an 18-member multidisciplinary team consisting of programmers, designers, artists, and writers. As Producer, I coordinated communication and production workflows across departments while helping maintain alignment between the project’s evolving creative goals and technical implementation.

Managing dependencies between frontend systems, backend functionality, UI/UX design, and content workflows became a major focus throughout development.

To maintain production stability and communication across a large team, we utilized:

• Github Issues: for task management, sprint tracking, and documentation.
• Discord: for daily communication and cross-disciplinary coordination.
• Swagger & Sequelize: for backend documentation and database management.

Maintaining Production Direction Without an Active Product Owner

Early in development, the professor serving as the project’s Product Owner unexpectedly became unavailable, leaving the project without consistent creative direction or clearly established production expectations. With three separate subteams working simultaneously across frontend, backend, and UX/design, the lack of centralized leadership created uncertainty surrounding priorities, workflow structure, and long-term project goals.

To maintain momentum, I stepped into a larger leadership role to help define production structure, establish clearer workflows between teams, and make key prioritization decisions when necessary. I created production roadmaps, milestone goals, and meeting structures that gave the team a more stable framework to work within despite the absence of consistent product ownership.

This allowed development to continue progressing steadily while maintaining alignment across multiple disciplines throughout the semester.

Coordinating Dependencies Across Frontend, Backend, and UX Teams

One of the largest production challenges involved managing dependencies between the frontend, backend, and UX/design teams. Frontend implementation was frequently dependent on backend systems and API functionality being completed first, which created potential blockers that could easily stall progress across multiple areas of development.

To reduce these bottlenecks, I conducted daily check-ins with each subteam lead to identify dependency risks as early as possible and adjust priorities before blockers escalated. I also maintained visibility into what each team was actively working on so I could quickly connect teams when information, assets, or technical clarification were needed.

This communication structure improved coordination between disciplines and helped keep development moving even when certain systems were still in progress.

Preventing Team Stagnation and Burnout

Maintaining long-term engagement and momentum for Crowd Comic became an ongoing challenge. Some team members began feeling stagnant after remaining focused on the same area of development for extended periods of time, which risked slowing progress.

To improve morale and maintain flexibility, I implemented a workflow inspired by Valve’s “Desk on Wheels” philosophy, allowing team members to temporarily contribute to other areas of development when they were interested in exploring different work or needed a break from their current responsibilities.

This approach helped maintain team engagement, encouraged cross-disciplinary collaboration, and allowed contributors to stay motivated without disrupting overall production stability.

Creating Structure

Challenges surrounding communication, meeting efficiency, and visibility into project progress became apparent early in the project. Since we had no standardized workflows, important information became lost between meetings and teams.

To improve organization, I created documentation templates, standardized meeting structures, and maintained detailed meeting summaries for both team members and project advisors. I also established milestone roadmaps covering major development goals.

These systems improved production visibility, streamlined communication, and helped keep development aligned with milestone expectations throughout the project lifecycle.