Project Manager — WiE Startup Externship

Crave Cam & Good Bacteria

Crave Cam & Good Bacteria

As a Project Manager for Duke WiE’s Startup Externship, I manage two student teams working directly with startup founders over a seven-week engagement. I translate founder goals into structured project plans, define weekly deliverables and review cycles, coordinate communication between founders and externs, and make sure each team finishes with work the startup can actually use.

For Crave Cam, a stealth consumer app, I manage projects focused on consumer growth and mobile product design. I help turn broad questions around user acquisition, engagement, and the product experience into concrete workstreams, set milestones for research and execution, review recommendations before they reach the founder, and keep the team aligned as priorities evolve. The work involves balancing growth thinking with the actual user experience rather than treating acquisition as a standalone marketing problem.

For Good Bacteria, I manage projects spanning women’s gut health market research, growth, and expansion strategy. I structure research around customer segments and market opportunities, help the team move from large amounts of information to evidence-backed recommendations, and define what a useful final deliverable should contain. I also manage the transition from research into execution, making sure recommendations are specific enough for the founder to act on rather than ending as a general market-research deck.

Across both startups, I build the operating structure around the work: shared project documents, phase-by-phase deliverables, founder meeting schedules, internal review deadlines, feedback windows, and weekly progress checks. I also coach externs on research quality, synthesis, pitching, professional communication, and using AI tools as support for their thinking rather than as a substitute for judgment.

What makes the role especially interesting to me is that the two projects require different kinds of product thinking. Crave Cam is about understanding how people discover and interact with a consumer product, while Good Bacteria is about understanding a complex customer and market space well enough to identify where the startup should focus. My job in both is to create enough structure that a student team can turn ambiguity into something useful.