Exercise: Turn Kickoff Notes into Structured Data

Good FDEs take structured notes, and great FDEs turn them into structured data. Once your notes are data you can generate the engagement brief, track action items, and spot gaps (like a missing sponsor) automatically.

The customer's project manager just emailed you their notes from the Brightline Health kickoff. They roughly follow a template, but people typed them quickly: headers have inconsistent capitals and spacing, bullets use - or *, and there are stray blank lines.

Customer: Brightline Health
Date: 2026-03-02

ATTENDEES:
- Dana Ruiz (VP Operations) [sponsor]
-   Sam Okafor (IT Director) [blocker]
* Priya Nair (Intake Lead) [Champion]
- Leo Park (Intake Specialist)

goals :
- Cut referral intake from 3 days to same-day
- Reduce manual data entry errors

Risks:
- EHR vendor API access needs ~6 weeks of approval

Action Items:
- [Sam] Share sandbox credentials by Friday
- [FDE]   Profile one month of fax referrals

Your task

1. parse_notes(text) returns a dictionary with exactly these keys:

{
    "customer": "Brightline Health",
    "date": "2026-03-02",
    "stakeholders": [
        {"name": "Dana Ruiz", "title": "VP Operations", "role": "sponsor"},
        {"name": "Sam Okafor", "title": "IT Director", "role": "blocker"},
        {"name": "Priya Nair", "title": "Intake Lead", "role": "champion"},
        {"name": "Leo Park", "title": "Intake Specialist", "role": None},
    ],
    "goals": ["Cut referral intake from 3 days to same-day", "Reduce manual data entry errors"],
    "risks": ["EHR vendor API access needs ~6 weeks of approval"],
    "actions": [
        {"owner": "Sam", "task": "Share sandbox credentials by Friday"},
        {"owner": "FDE", "task": "Profile one month of fax referrals"},
    ],
}

Rules:

• Section headers are Attendees, Goals, Risks, and Action Items, in any capitalization, with optional spaces before the colon. Sections can appear in any order and any section may be missing (use an empty list).
• Bullets start with - or *. Strip the bullet and surrounding whitespace.
• Customer: and Date: lines give single values (use None if missing). Their keys are also case-insensitive.
• A stakeholder's role is lowercased. If a stakeholder has no [role], use None.

2. missing_roles(parsed) returns the list of required roles, ["sponsor", "champion"], that no stakeholder has, in that order. With the notes above it returns []. If nobody is tagged sponsor it returns ["sponsor"].

Why this matters: In the last lesson you learned that an engagement with a champion but no sponsor usually stalls. A tiny check like missing_roles is the kind of tooling FDE teams build to catch that in week one, not month three.