I was one year into working at CBS. Drupal 7 was sunsetting; my supervisor had just quit. Then the Dean’s office changed directions: Instead of migrating the next planned batch of websites in the queue onto Drupal 8, we had to migrate the final 35 websites on the list – the ones scheduled a year out – ASAP.

Given the deadline and the sudden lack of teammate, I knew that my role on this project wasn’t going to be limited to Content Strategy; I was also going to support it as a Technical Project Manager. I concepted and led the development of an MVP content type to get those sites onto Drupal 8 as fast as possible.

I worked with the Business School’s head of Marketing & Communications, as well as a Columbia University IT (CUIT) programmer and project manager. I also worked with designated points of contact at each of those 35 websites.

The head of Marketing & Communications did a lot of discovery to bucket out the types of pages these websites were creating. The programmer built the MVP; the project manager kept the programmer’s time allocated. The points of contact were in charge of most of the actual content migration, though I ended up doing a fair amount of it in order to make the deadline as well.

• Concepted all-in-one content type of Frankensteined Drupal 8 modules
• Gathered and communicated product requirements to CUIT team
• Named product fields in accordance with module functions
• Tested product (Agile iteration process)
• Conducted active, engaged stakeholder management
• Taught product trainings
• Developed product documentation
• Supervised site migrations
• Conducted some site migrations as well

We made that MVP and got all those sites migrated.

My first takeaway was that this experience made a great argument for the importance of user-first design. Interestingly enough, despite all my testing and iterating, people weren’t necessarily using the product as designed. Some used it for their own needs, which revealed a few new use cases that our team hadn’t considered. And helpfully, the users also had a long wish list for the product. This was extremely useful when we graduated from MVP to modules with more robust content design features. When we started to upgrade to the modules, the users had already provided us with a whole spreadsheet of product improvements to reference, ready to go.

My second takeaway was regarding stakeholder management. This was my first time conducting at scale, and the complexities made me realize how much more I had to learn. The process motivated me to earn a Masters in Negotiation & Conflict Resolution, focusing on organizational management (Columbia ‘23, GPA 4.03).