I love order and structure, probably more than is strictly normal. So when I came on as president of the Product Management Association, my first instinct wasn't to plan a flashy event. It was to get our ducks in a row — to figure out how we actually wanted to run this thing before we ran it.
That meant starting with the unglamorous foundations. What's the mission of the club, really? What KPIs are we trying to move? Who's on the leadership team and who owns what? What's our "Why?" Those questions aren't exciting, but skipping them is how a club drifts.
From there I wanted a dead-simple, trackable way to actually execute. So I started isolating the work a club like ours has to do over and over: planning and hosting events, sourcing speakers, reserving rooms, handling budget, keeping a calendar that club members can trust. The centerpiece became what we call the Task Master board — a detailed project board that turns event planning into a repeatable workflow, so next year's team can run an event without quietly forgetting three steps that only lived in my head.
A couple of pieces I'd fight to keep. One is a partner and speaker CRM. We work with a lot of speakers, and I didn't want those relationships to evaporate after a single event — I wanted us to be able to draw on them again, for future talks, for input, for volunteer asks, and frankly just to send a proper thank-you. The other is a membership and attendance tracker, which is less romantic but matters a ton: it's tied directly to funding, and you can't make the case for resources you can't measure.
All of it lives on a single Notion page that our leadership team uses heavily, rolled up into a live KPI dashboard so we can see how we're actually doing at a glance.
But here's the real reason I built it, and it's the reason any of this matters. Student organizations are volatile by nature. There's constant churn — people graduate, roles turn over every year, and an enormous amount of hard-won knowledge just walks out the door. Institutional context, relationships, the little cultural know-how of how things actually get done. It falls through the cracks because nobody wrote it down anywhere durable. I didn't want PMA's momentum to reset to zero every spring.
So the features aren't the point. The point is that a new president can open this on day one and run the club without a single "wait, how did the last person do this?" conversation. Build for the next person, and it turns out the current person benefits too.