Case Study · 2.5 min read

Stulie

Collaborative Project Management Board

Stulie is a project management system designed for small businesses, offering rich collaborative features like real time notifications and task management to keep teams on track.

stulie.com ↗

Project Overview:

Stulie is a comprehensive project management system designed primarily for small businesses but adaptable for various teams, including academic groups. It provides a centralized platform offering rich collaborative features focused on enhancing team productivity and project success. Key functionalities include agile sprint management, task assignment with real time notifications (text/email), user based filtering, team invitation/management, and a calendar view for tasks, all within a fully mobile responsive interface.

Goals & Objectives:

The primary objective was to address a specific client need for an intuitive project management board facilitating seamless task assignment and immediate team member notification, ultimately boosting productivity. Key technical goals included: implementing robust real time notifications, ensuring full mobile responsiveness, integrating a payment gateway, simplifying user onboarding, supporting agile methodologies (Sprints), providing flexible task visualization (calendar view, user filtering), and enabling efficient team management (invites, removals).

Approach & Process:

  1. Requirements & Design (Discovery & Research): Initiated with in depth market analysis and client consultations to identify core requirements and areas for improvement over existing solutions. Defined user needs (personas) and translated them into a concrete development plan, establishing a modern, intuitive design language focused on simplifying project management workflows.
  2. Development (Design/Development Phase): Built the application using agile development principles. Focused on implementing core features such as task creation/assignment, real time notification systems (text/email), calendar integration, user filtering, and team management functionalities. Ensured the architecture supported scalability and mobile responsiveness.
  3. Testing & Iteration (Iteration): Conducted user interviews and usability testing throughout the development cycle. Gathered qualitative feedback to iteratively refine the user interface, feature implementation (like task assignment and notifications), and overall workflow based on real world use cases.
  4. Launch & Maintenance (Launch & Delivery): Executed a seamless deployment to a live environment. Currently manage ongoing hosting and maintenance, monitoring performance and ensuring continued availability and support for its worldwide user base.

Outcome & Impact:

Stulie has been successfully adopted by over 50 distinct teams. User feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with teams consistently reporting significant improvements in collaboration, task tracking, and overall project management efficiency due to the platform's features and ease of use. The system effectively met its goal of providing a valuable, productivity enhancing tool tailored to the needs of collaborative teams.

FAQ

Questions I get a lot.

Why go back for a CS degree if you were already at $170k?

Because the work had already outrun the paperwork, and I was tired of that gap. I’d walked away from two schools already — Baruch didn’t even offer a CS degree, and by BMCC I was already writing production code, so sitting through intro classes for a piece of paper felt backwards. I enrolled at WGU in 2024, kept the full-time engineering job, and finished the B.S. in August 2026. Third school. First degree, eight years later than the “normal” path. I wanted the foundation, and I wanted to close a loop I’d left open twice.

How did you get hired without a degree?

I showed work. The first scripts were for my dad’s business in 2017, automating the data entry that was eating his week. Columbia’s coding bootcamp gave me three months of full-stack JavaScript and a cohort in 2019 — a program that doesn’t even exist anymore. PLNETWORKS hired me in 2020 on a portfolio, not a diploma. After that, each role was about what I’d already shipped: production bugs, HIPAA software, storefronts. The degree came eight years later. It didn’t open the first door.

What actually moved compensation from $75k to $170k?

Two years of shipping at PLNETWORKS, then a move to Cazton that roughly doubled it, then BrightInsight in 2022 — HIPAA-regulated software at $170k. Same skills, different rooms. The market paid for proof. I treated interviews like case studies of work I’d already done, not like a plea for a first chance.

Where are you from, and where are you now?

I was raised in Jamaica, Queens. First thirteen years in an attic. I live in Hell’s Kitchen now. The city didn’t get bigger. I just moved west of the same story.

How do you actually use Cursor and Claude?

As a tutor and a pair, not as a ghostwriter. I still read the diff. I still throw away the parts that look clever and aren’t. The tools make the boring parts faster so I can spend the hours on the decisions that have to be mine.

What would you tell someone learning to code right now?

Build something your family can use. Put it in public. Don’t wait for a school to bless the start. I dropped out twice, then finished. Both of those were the right call at the time.