Mentor Page

LA County Internal Services needed a platform to connect county employees with internal mentors. The existing process was entirely manual — spreadsheets, email threads, no way to track match status or application progress. The ask was a digital platform to replace that workflow.

I came in as a software engineering intern and ended up owning the project end-to-end: PM, lead developer, and the person who stood in front of county stakeholders and explained what we were building and why.

The first thing I did was cut scope. The original ask included advanced matching algorithms, reporting dashboards, and an admin portal. None of it was needed to solve the core problem — employees couldn’t find or apply to mentors, and coordinators had no way to manage the pipeline. Everything else was nice-to-have.

I defined the MVP as three flows: a mentor profile directory, an application form, and a coordinator review queue. That’s what got built in week one as a skeleton, and what got shipped at the end of week five as a complete product.

The 3-month estimate came from the county’s procurement and vendor process. We moved faster because we owned the build in-house and cut every feature that wasn’t load-bearing for the core workflow.

I ran daily standups and weekly demos in a SCRUM cadence, wrote the tickets, reviewed the PRs, and managed stakeholder communication. The team was four people including me — three engineers and a designer — none of whom had worked together before.

The hardest part wasn’t the engineering. It was translating between what the county stakeholders asked for and what the team actually needed to build. County stakeholders speak in workflows and policies; engineers need to know what renders, what validates, and what goes in the database. My job was to be the interface between those two modes.

I also wrote a meaningful amount of the production code — C# backend with .NET, Azure for hosting and auth, and a Razor-based frontend. Not as an escape from PM work, but because being in the codebase meant I understood where we were on every ticket in real time. I could scope accurately because I knew what was hard.

We shipped in 5 weeks. The county saved roughly $50K compared to the vendor quote for the same scope. The platform went live across LA County Internal Services with 1,000+ active users and processed 100+ mentorship applications in its first cycle.

I presented the final product and the build approach to county leadership at the closing demo. The feedback was that the team had shipped more scope, faster, than any comparable internal project in recent memory.