The University of Colorado Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering has over a decade of success in designing, building, and operating student led CubeSat missions. The experience and lessons learned from building and operating the CSSWE, MinXSS-1, MinXSS-2, and QB50-Challenger missions have helped grow a knowledge base on the most effective and efficient ways to manage some of the “tall poles” when it comes to student run CubeSat missions. Among these “tall poles” we have seen student turnover, software, and documentation become some of the hardest to knock-down and we present our strategies for doing so. We use the MAXWELL mission (expected to launch in 2021) as a road-map to detail the methodology we have built over the last decade to ensure the greatest chance of mission success