Luminosity Lab
Six engineers, three sprints, and a codebase that survived its own handoff.
The story
Luminosity Lab is Arizona State's interdisciplinary innovation lab. It's the place ASU sends ambitious engineering talent to build real products against real deadlines. I came in to direct a six-engineer squad against the hardest problem on my own roadmap: turning VerifyU from architecture diagrams and a patent into a working MVP that institutions could actually log into.
Most of the job was translation. I broke down product requirements into technical specs the team could estimate, defined sprint goals, ran standups, removed blockers, and held the line on code quality and architecture while business objectives were still being negotiated in parallel rooms. When something shifted upstream, my job was to absorb the volatility before it hit the engineers.
Three sprints in, we shipped core functionality on schedule and handed VerifyU's team a codebase they could keep building on without a rewrite. That's the rarer outcome for an MVP of this kind, and the reason the work compounded into everything that came after.