The Home Depot
Motif
Motif is a platform built to run the full lifecycle of an HBCU band program, not just one piece of it. It connects recruiting, auditions, camp, ensembles, travel, music library, and alumni into one system, instead of asking directors to run each of those out of a different spreadsheet, group text, or standalone tool.
The distinction that matters is that a student moving through Motif doesn’t reset into a disconnected record every time their relationship to the program changes. The same person moves from prospect, through the recruiting pipeline, through an audition, onto a roster, into a season, and eventually into the alumni base, and the system carries that context forward instead of losing it at each handoff.
Year
Services
Services
My role + scope
Founder, product designer, and product director. This is a 0→1 build I conceived and have taken into production. I have zero code experience, so my scope covers everything up to and including the point where a decision becomes code: product vision, information architecture, user flows, the design system, terminology, specs, and prioritization.
I don’t write code myself. I direct two separate AI tools to do it: one for specs, architecture, and prompt writing, one for implementation only. Every feature goes through that pipeline. I make every product and design call along the way.
Context + problem
Band directors are educators, but running a modern HBCU band program also means recruiting, auditions, camp logistics, travel and housing, equipment, communications, and alumni relationships. Most of that work still happens across spreadsheets, group texts, and paper forms, because the software built for it doesn’t reflect how these programs actually operate.
That gap isn’t cosmetic. HBCU programs use different vocabulary than the software assumes. “Flags,” not “Color Guard.” Percussion is named differently depending on whether it’s a marching band, jazz ensemble, or concert band. Directors think in two layers at once: a holistic family layer (Brass, Woodwinds, Percussion, Visual, Leadership, Staff) and an operational section layer underneath it, and generic tools only support one of those.
Travel and housing carry the same weight. Student and staff rooming has to be hard blocked, co-ed rooming can never be overridden, and bus and room assignment models vary program to program. None of that is edge case handling. It’s the baseline a director expects a tool to already understand.
The deeper problem is that a recruit isn’t an isolated CRM record. That same person may become an applicant, an auditionee, a member, a section leader, and eventually an alumnus. Most tools treat each of those as a different system with no memory of what came before. I designed Motif around that relationship instead of around separate modules.
