← Work

Flagship case study

Groundwork

What it is

An AI‑assisted marketing and operations platform for a university career center.

Who it serves

A 20‑person center that runs more than 100 events a semester.

Status

In production. 32 reviewed releases. Executive sponsorship secured. Adoption pilot scoped, not yet run.

Role

Sole product owner. Conceived, designed, built and shipped.

The shape of itAn internal marketing operations platform with a governed AI generation layer, specified, built and run by a team of one inside a regulated institutional environment.

Maturity ledger

Groundwork's capabilities sit in three states: 10 built and running in production, 11 confirmed and locked in specification, 6 provisional at vision scope. Everything below this ledger shows production capability only.

10

Built in production

  • Marketing production system
  • Brand systems and templates
  • Events and campaigns
  • Briefs and channel copy
  • Editorial versioning and approval
  • Email sequences
  • Quick Create and Design Studio
  • Handshake CSV import foundation
  • Public event sharing
  • Soft delete and restore
11

Confirmed and locked

  • Home and personal workflow
  • Inbox and capture fan‑out
  • My work
  • Weekly update and team digest
  • Advisor design approval
  • Student email templates
  • Workshop Studio
  • Training and SCORM analysis
  • Committees
  • Reconciliation and coverage
  • Access console and audit log
6

Provisional at vision scope

  • Partner records
  • Funding cycle details
  • Deployment queue
  • Knowledge library
  • Workflow builder
  • Semester report assembly

The live product

The running build, embedded. Click into it.

Try: create an event Generate a brief, then the copy Change the room, watch assets go stale Switch role in the access console
Full screen ↗

Problem

A 20‑person center runs more than 100 events a semester. Each one needs a campaign brief, event copy, a promotional email sequence and finished designs. Before Groundwork, every asset was produced by hand. When an event detail changed, someone had to remember every asset that had already gone out carrying the old version.

What it does

One structured event entry produces the campaign brief, on‑brand copy, a timed three‑email sequence and finished designs. Change any detail on the event and every asset derived from it is marked out of date by name.

Groundwork, campaign brief view
Groundwork, timed email sequence
Groundwork, Design Studio

Production capabilities only.

Architecture

01 / Humans publish

Every external output ends in a copy action, a download or a share link. Workflows can draft and they can flag. They cannot send, post or publish.

02 / No student identity

Advisor captures are private to the advisor. Shared destinations are locked. Counts are aggregate. Funding records carry anonymized identifiers, and the identity key is held outside the system.

03 / Fixed rendering

The design engine holds 11 layout templates, rendered light and dark. The model selects among them; it cannot write arbitrary CSS. Preview and export walk the same render tree, so what a reviewer approves is what ships.

04 / Provenance is labeled

Verified, approved and synthesized content carries distinct labels. Missing data is shown as missing.

Groundwork access console, role permission matrix

Access control

Role permissions are enforced in the database, not in the interface, and verified by adversarial testing against each role.

Editorial layer. Generated content passes a human approval step before it becomes an asset. The generation‑governance layer itself sits in the locked specification above.

Build log

32 reviewed production releases.

What this does not show yet

An adoption pilot is scoped. Usage data will be added when the pilot produces it.