Sep 2024 – May 2025
code
design
In summer 2023 MassInsight’s AP Operations and Research & Impact teams were juggling spreadsheets, Box folders, Zoom links, and half‑a‑dozen SaaS dashboards just to run a single professional‑development workshop.
As the project‑manager for our Impact engineering team I was tasked with turning that patchwork into one cohesive tool.
Atrium is an end‑to‑end event‑management platform that merges file storage, registration, email outreach, live attendance tracking, and analytics into one opinionated—but flexible—workflow.
The problem we inherited
- Fragmented data Attendance lived in Zoom exports, registrations in Google Forms, and rosters in bulky Excel sheets.
- Slow manual processes Staff spent hours reconciling names, sending reminders, and producing after‑action reports.
- Security headaches Student data moved between unsecured personal drives and email threads.
Our brief: build an MVP in one semester that eliminated those pain points without forcing MassInsight to upend its existing processes.
First milestone — stitching the basics together
We named the project Atrium (the central chamber that connects every room).
- Storage layer – Spun up a Supabase Postgres instance with row‑level security and role‑based policies.
- File ingestion – Wrote a CSV/Excel parser that maps columns from any district export to Atrium’s canonical schema.
- Event wizard – A Next.js form that lets staff create an event, upload a roster, and schedule Zoom links in <3 min.
- Transactional email – Integrated Resend so invitations, reminders, and follow‑ups send from @massinsight.org without exposing SMTP credentials.
By week 6 we had a working skeleton: staff could create an event, invite participants, and see RSVP counts update in real time.
Edge‑cases & lessons learned
Some things break only when real teachers start clicking…
- Name mismatches – “José L. Ramírez” vs “Jose Ramirez” killed our lookup logic. We added fuzzy string matching and an interactive “possible duplicates” sidebar.
- District firewalls – Invitation links were stripped from plain‑text emails. Switching to a branded HTML template with
https://events.massinsight.org links fixed deliverability.
- Attendance fidelity – Zoom’s raw log marked drop‑ins as separate sessions. We merged sessions <5 min apart to avoid under‑counting engagement.
Optimising the workflow
Function over form first, polish later.
- Redux Toolkit keeps the UI snappy while large rosters (10 000 + rows) stream in chunks.
- Serverless functions in Supabase handle heavy XLSX parsing so the browser never freezes.
- One‑click exports deliver filtered attendance, no‑shows, and PDP‑hour certificates as ready‑to‑send PDFs.
- Role‑based dashboards ensure teachers only see their own events, while admins access cross‑event analytics.
Average end‑to‑end time to set up and run an event dropped from ≈ 3 hours to < 25 minutes.
Outcome & impact
- Deployed on a StratusPointIT‑managed sub‑domain with SSO.
- 2300 + invitations sent and 98 % delivered during the pilot semester.
- Generated real‑time analytics that fed MassInsight’s annual program‑evaluation report—previously a manual two‑week scramble.
- Hand‑off included a living Notion runbook and CI/CD GitHub actions so MassInsight’s tech team can extend Atrium independently.
What I did as PM
- Scoped the MVP, broke work into fortnightly deliverables, and maintained the living spec you see above.
- Coordinated between MassInsight stakeholders, our two SWE interns, and external IT (StratusPointIT).
- Prioritised security reviews, GDPR alignment, and formal OKRs over “nice‑to‑have” UI sparkle.
- Kept momentum—bi‑weekly demos, retros, and a Kanban board that never grew stale.
Building Atrium taught me that the fastest way to delight users is to simplify what they already do—not to force a brand‑new workflow.
I still get Slack pings when staff uncover a quirky roster format, and fixing those edge cases remains my favourite kind of puzzle.
Tech stack