EdTech: 18 months of agility

This wasn't a project I can frame as a tidy growth story. Everything that could go wrong, did — not because the work was complex, but because the ground kept moving. This case is less about the launch than about how to keep building anyway.

The project: an education platform for a B2B company with 15,000 business clients. The company was moving from fully offline client acquisition and a web portal listing educational materials to a complete, fully digital product. Apart from design challenges (described in a different case), project scope included CRM and ERP integrations, a client database migration, onboarding and motivating client teams to join the platform — a separate, high-priority task in itself — and specific fixes like switching the database key from company email to personal phone number. On paper the project seemed to have a considerable scope, but it looked manageable and predictable. In practice, the project never had a clean phase: 18 months of continuous disruption from kickoff to final release. That was the flow that taught me to respect certain project milestones and frameworks.

Stakeholder turnover

The education director changed 3 times, and each change effectively restarted the project: each leader had their own idea of how the company should move forward — context broke, priorities reset. It was the CEO's call each time, so I couldn't prevent it; I could only protect the team's motivation and the product's spine. I widened the stakeholder circle so no single opinion could reset the project alone, used JTBD-based user stories with the reasoning behind every decision, and architected the product modularly so a priority shift never meant a full rebuild.

Contractor crisis

10 days before launch, the external dev team's delays surfaced. Part of the team had been covering for their own inability to deliver — the backend was nearly at a starting point. We split the release into stages based on the time needed to rebuild it. It became a real team effort: building UX around new technical constraints and rapidly recombining functionality to fit the shortened timeline.

Takeaways

The takeaways are pretty textbook truths. 1) Align with the main decision-maker, but create shared context and documentation. 2) Read a company's digital maturity. 3) Designing and launching in small iterations reduces risk. 4) During the hardest moments, focus on what's solvable.

Results

After 18 months we shipped a mixed education platform across three staged releases. The product hit its business goals and earned real user love: 9/10 NPS in 3 months after the first launch.