Standing up national-priority projects in the middle of COVID

I ran R&D at a project-based delivery company, which means there were no standing product teams, every new engagement needed a team formed around it, sized right and staffed with the right mix of web, mobile, QA and DevOps. Then COVID arrived and turned that into a stress test, requirements changed weekly, everyone went remote overnight, and the projects coming in were suddenly matters of national importance with deadlines nobody would move.

The defining one was a COVID testing system for the country’s main airport. I mobilized a team in four days, delivered the architecture in one week, and integrated the system with laboratory and government databases so results flowed where they had to. It launched on time, into an airport that could not reopen without it.

Another was a smartphone-based reader for rapid tests, built on computer vision. The model reached about 97 percent accuracy and let people report results remotely, which gave public-health teams data they simply did not have before.

Across two years I ran 30 plus engineers through programs like these, and the lasting lesson was that forming a capable team fast around a hard problem is a skill of its own, separate from running a team that already exists. How those teams were put together, and what I would do differently now with AI agents in the mix, I walk through on a call.