Leadership, Management, and Business

At Ashoka, the belief that "everyone is a changemaker" fuels a dynamic approach to organizational strategy, one rooted in adaptability and lean innovation. This session challenges traditional beliefs like “more is always better” and questions the value of defaulting to expensive custom solutions. Instead, it emphasizes intentional minimalism: doing more with less by focusing on what truly drives impact.

As project managers and product owners serving non-profits, we know that tight budgets often force tough decisions. But constraints can spark creative solutions. We’ll explore actionable strategies for integrating digital tools efficiently, so non-profits can extend their reach without stretching their finances.

Key topics include:

More is not always better:
Streamlining tools and reducing choice overload, sometimes even in the case of resources, can boost clarity, creativity, and operational focus for nonprofit teams.

Reinventing the wheel is not always wrong:
Revisiting existing solutions or creating a simpler “wheel”, can spark innovation and result in tech that’s better aligned with a nonprofit’s unique mission and needs.

Customizations are not always expensive:
Thoughtfully scoped custom tech solutions can be cost-effective and significantly increase long-term efficiency and impact, especially when they set the stage for evolution.

Prevention is still always better than cure:
Investing in regular maintenance and proactive tech planning saves nonprofits from disruptive breakdowns and costly emergency fixes.

This talk is designed to empower non-profit leaders, project managers, and product owners with practical approaches to digital transformation, ensuring that every rupee invested returns maximum impact. The overarching theme is clear: smart, agile strategies, grounded in reflection and constant evolution, can empower nonprofits to thrive even on lean budgets.

You don’t need to write code to lead a successful Drupal project—but you do need to understand it well enough to translate between two very different worlds: developers and clients.

In this session, we’ll explore the art of tech communication for non-technical project managers, account leads, and client-facing roles. You’ll learn how to confidently lead conversations, ask the right questions, catch risks early, and be the bridge that keeps projects running smoothly.

Through real project examples, we’ll discuss:

• How to understand technical constraints without needing to code
• Talking to developers: terms, tools, and trust
• Talking to clients: simplifying without oversimplifying
• Red flags to watch for in both directions
• How to facilitate effective handoffs and cross-functional meetings
• Documenting technical decisions for non-technical stakeholders

Whether you’re managing a Drupal migration, a site build, or ongoing maintenance, this session will help you become a better translator, facilitator, and leader—without ever touching a line of code.

In this session, I'll guide you through the four key phases of our hand-off framework, from deal identification to project planning. I'll show you how we automated this process and what it took to get our teams to actually follow it.

- The "HubSpot to Jira" Handshake: See how we built a semi-automated process that flags high-probability deals and creates a living project epic in Jira, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks from the moment a deal looks promising.
 

-The Four-Phase Playbook: Intake, Initiation, Planning, and Execution: I'll break down the critical tasks and outputs for each phase (like the SOW, ProjectId, and Project Charter) and explain who owns what, from Operations to the Project Manager.

-The 30-Minute Handoff Meeting: We'll dive into the agenda for our mandatory 30-minute hand-off meeting. It's a quick, focused huddle between presales, operations, and the delivery team that prevents future misalignment. I’ll share the meeting hand-off template

-Real-World Automation & Tools: I'll show you the tools we use (HubSpot, Jira, Zapier) and explain how we wired them together to enforce our process, track progress, and create a single source of truth.

-Lessons Learned and FAQs: We'll discuss the common hurdles—like dealing with discrepancies between sales and delivery, and getting buy-in from your team—and I'll answer the tough questions from our own implementation journey.

Learning Objectives:

By the end of this session, attendees will walk away with:
- A practical, four-phase framework to standardize their project hand-off process.
- A template and a clear agenda for a critical 30-minute hand-off meeting that prevents misalignment.
- Ideas on how to leverage automation to enforce processes and reduce manual tracking.
- A deeper understanding of roles and responsibilities is necessary to establish a unified, accountable process that spans from sales to delivery.
- A clear plan of action to bring structure and predictability to their own agency's project kick-offs.