A robotics season is a 6-month project with a hard deadline. Teams that manage it with clear goals, milestones, and ownership out-execute teams that improvise. No MBA required.
Season goal — what you want to achieve by State or your last competition. Be specific: “qualify for Regionals and earn Design Award consideration.”
Competition goal — what winning looks like at the next event: “finish in the top 8 alliance seed and pass robot inspection on first attempt.”
Session goal — what you need to finish today: “intake jam rate below 5% across 20 trials.”
Notebook documentation, outreach, award applications, and team logistics do not belong exclusively to one role. Assign these explicitly — name a person and a deadline. If you do not assign them, they will not happen.
| Week | Milestone | Done When… |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | First drive | Robot crosses the field, driver control functional |
| 5 | Mechanism works | Primary mechanism scores game elements with <10% fail rate over 20 trials |
| 8 | Autonomous v1 | At least one auton routine runs >50% consistently |
| 11 | Autonomous reliable | 8/10 runs within target on competition-surface tiles |
| 13 | Driver ready | 3 cycles/min, <3 errors per match period, 10+ logged sessions |
| 15 | Competition ready | Passes inspection dry-run, notebook audit complete, interview practiced |
| 16 | Event 1 | Debrief written same night, rebuild list ready for next sprint |
Some tasks cannot start until other tasks are done. These form your critical path:
When planning a sprint, identify if any of your goals are blocked by an unfinished dependency. Finish the dependency first.
The simplest sprint board is a piece of paper or whiteboard divided into 3 columns:
Tasks assigned for this sprint with an owner and a done condition.
Being worked on this session. Move here when you start it.
Completed and tested. Move here only when it actually meets the done condition.
Online tools (Trello, Notion, Google Sheets) work too — but a physical board visible to the whole team during practice is faster. Use what you will actually check.
The backlog is everything the team wants to build, test, or fix that is not in the current sprint. It is not a failure pile — it is a prioritized list of future work.
Clear by: finishing the CAD model, generating the BOM, and submitting the order this session — not next session.
Clear by: identifying the exact error, not guessing. Use the PID Diagnostics guide if it’s a control problem. Check git history if a recent change broke it.
Clear by: making sure no single task is owned by only one person who has not shared context. Document decisions so work can continue without them.
Clear by: running the test that would settle it. If you cannot run the test yet, use a decision matrix with weighted criteria. See Engineering Notebook for decision matrix format.
One week before each competition, run through this:
Write this the night of the competition — while you remember what actually happened:
Your season goal statement and first competition goal belong in entry 1 of the notebook. This is the problem definition — the most important EDP step.
When you hit a milestone, write an entry. When you miss one, write an entry explaining why and what changed. Both are engineering evidence.
Every team decision — design direction, autonomous selection, mechanism choice — logged with who was present, what was decided, and why. This is your decision matrix evidence.
The end-of-week review — what worked, what did not, what changes next — is an iteration entry. This is the loop judges want to see repeated 5–10 times across the season.
Written the night of the competition. This entry demonstrates that your team evaluates its own performance honestly — a strong indicator for the Judges Award and Excellence Award.
A notebook that reflects good project management shows:
None of these require extra work. They require that the work you already did gets documented in real time.