Muster
A software-as-a-service platform for an underserved market: volunteer-run troops managing rosters, events, and advancement on decades-old tools. Owned the full product cycle solo — market and competitive analysis, user research, feature definition and prioritization, design, and build. Currently in free pilot with troops in active use.
Every record in this product belongs to a minor, so protecting that data was an architectural constraint rather than a compliance step at the end. The data model was designed around it from the first table: what a parent can see, what a leader can see, and what nobody outside the troop can reach are decisions enforced at the data layer, not in the interface. Building it in from the start meant the answer to “who can see this?” was never retrofitted onto a schema that had already assumed otherwise.
Troops do not organize themselves the way an off-the-shelf roster tool assumes. Scouts belong to patrols, patrols shift, adults hold several roles at once, and advancement is a tree of requirements rather than a status field. The schema follows the real shape of the organization, which is why a parent, a scoutmaster, and a merit badge counselor can each open the same product and see the view their job actually needs.
Rather than guessing at a roadmap, I read through a real troop's email communications and let the recurring problems set the priority. What surfaced was not what a feature list would have predicted: the volume was dominated by the same logistics repeated week after week — who is coming, what to bring, which form is still missing. That reading is what put events, RSVPs, and documents ahead of everything else in the build order.