Building UW Blueprint
My experience building a student-run organization that builds technology for social good — free of charge
I joined UW Blueprint in its first term at the University of Waterloo in September 2016 after the co-founders, Luisa and Katrina, asked me to join! When we first started, I was the VP Technology, then I became the VP Operations and finally the President in my last term at UW.
At the beginning
It began similar to being at a startup; it was scrappy, fast-paced and many people were doing everything. There were a ton of learnings and realizations we made, which I’ll go into details later.
When we started, we only had one project, which was great because as we were ramping up the club we could learn how to successfully manage one project and effectively had everybody in the club (15 people) contributing to it. My role was the VP Technology, which wasn’t well defined, but revolved around managing all the technical aspects of the club.
It translated into establishing our engineering practices, processes, getting our website setup, and overseeing the project from a technical perspective but also contributing code to the project. My biggest worry was that our team didn’t really have a common language or framework everybody knew, so we spent a lot of time ramping up on Ruby on Rails and React the first half, and got most of the development done after midterms. In the end, we pulled through with a solid MVP!
During that time, we were able to kickstart a few internal processes: recruiting, non-profit project outreach and external event planning with inspiration from the UC Berkeley Blueprint and our previous internship experiences.
We managed to define some future executive team (e-team) roles revolving around internal (culture, team events), external (student engagement and brand awareness), projects (finding and managing our projects) and operations (day-to-day operations). In the end, we had to create and refine our own processes which were unique to our non-profit pro-bono model and our co-op program.
Transitioning to presidency
Since I was VP Operations in my second term, I was already dabbling with all facets of the club so it was a natural progression for me to become president. I believed it was going to be our toughest term yet, as it was the last term all the Blueprint members of the founding team were around so I wanted to make sure Blueprint had a strong foundation, relationships and processes for future terms.
My singular goal during my presidency was ensuring Blueprint’s long term success after the founding team graduated in Winter 2018. We were all heavily involved in Blueprint up until that time and spent a lot of time actively thinking about and participating in Blueprint. We knew after this point we’d have to move on from our day-to-day duties and hand the reins over to our successors. We focused on building a social, transparent and flexible culture, revamping our processes, documenting everything and recruiting passionate students.
Some takeaways
There were many things I learned as being president that have translated to my career beyond school, mostly revolving around organizational and people learnings.
- Be open minded to other people’s perspectives so you can understand and empathize with them. This will help you remediate conflicts, work more effectively with others and create alignment among stakeholders.
- Be comfortable making quick decisions, and have good justification that backs up your decision making process that can be communicated in order to scale your decision-making process towards members. For decisions that don’t have time constraints, make sure you get a lot of feedback and communicate it broadly before implementing it.
- Assume good intent — I couldn’t understand why people weren’t meeting milestones or weren’t as passionate as me. It made me frustrated and I took it personally as a sign of disrespect and carelessness. In the end, I realized people and their lives are complicated, nuanced and full of higher priority objectives.
- Recruiting is essential in building a team. I spent a lot of time interviewing and selling people on Blueprint. I made sure they embody our values, have a passion for Blueprint’s vision and have a history of getting things done. People are what make an organization great — and people will make or break your organization. Great people have many opportunities and you have to persuade them on why yours is better than all their other options.
- Being flexible and open to new ideas. It’s important to have a diversity of perspectives and a culture open to experimentation so you can find what works best for you. Blueprint was similar yet so different from many clubs on campus. There is only so much you can learn from others, so you have to spend time thinking critically if other’s solutions work for you.
And now…
The hardest thing is figuring out what to focus on. There are so many things that can be improved in the club or fixed; or new cool and shiny things the club can pursue. In the end, it’s about thinking about how to balance short term and long term goals, people’s overall happiness, and the organization itself. It’s quite tough balancing all of this, but it’s about over communicating to all stakeholders, making sure you explain your thought process, and getting a lot of feedback.
Talking about and setting a vision is easy, executing it is much harder — a lot harder than one would imagine especially if you’re depending on others to do it for you. It’s good to have very few, say 3, goals that are measurable and doable by the end of the term with a couple of “stretch” goals. After that, setting milestones is very important. I spent a lot of time establishing goals with other members, holding them accountable and providing value in anyway possible to help them achieve their goals.
That’s it!
There were many ups and downs during my 2 year sprint at Blueprint. In the end, it was definitely worth it and one of the major highlights of my university career! I met so many amazing, passionate and talented people and they were what really made my time at Blueprint memorable. I’m so excited see what awesome things Blueprint does next!
