Problem
Program management ran entirely on Google Suite: program plans in Sheets, strategy in Docs, quarterly planning in more Sheets. Every artifact was maintained by hand, nothing fed anything else, and there was no source of truth. Leadership couldn't see across the portfolio without someone manually rebuilding the picture each time, which meant decisions consistently lagged the data.
Approach
I designed and built an executive portfolio platform covering 17 concurrent initiatives, each mapped to a swarm team of 3–5 engineers, roughly 50–85 engineers of delivery capacity in a single view.
I shipped it in two deliberate stages:
- Prototype: a Google Apps Script front end with Sheets as the data store, authenticated through Google Auth. Secure, no new infrastructure, and fast enough to prove value and earn approval.
- Production: re-platformed to Next.js and React, containerized in Docker with a real database, hosted on Earnest's existing AWS infrastructure.
The production step required standing up something the company didn't have: internal hosting for internally built applications. Earnest's only infrastructure was external and client-facing, which nobody wanted to touch. I established the internal path, which then became the pattern other teams used to deploy their own AI-built tools. I owned the architecture and hosting decisions end to end.
Impact
- Gave the senior leadership team a live, org-wide view of the portfolio for the first time, replacing manual roll-ups with a single source of truth.
- Surfaced engineer and engineering-manager over-allocation early, swarm teams carrying more than they could absorb, plus cross-program dependencies and risks, so leadership could rebalance capacity before delivery slipped rather than after.
- Established Earnest's first internal application hosting capability, unlocking a new class of internally built (including AI-built) tooling across the org.