Rebuilding a Platform for Scalability
Role: Product Manager
Team: Remote Development Team, CTO, Product Designer
Duration: 4 months (Aug–Nov 2017)
Challenge
Firehose Project is an online learning platform for people seeking to learn a new skill or professional trade. The most popular course offering is the Full-Stack Web Development program, an intensive program designed to train students to become employable web developers. As the flagship program, it informed how the platform was structured and built—a technical detail that later became a limiting factor as we looked for ways to support our students through an evolving industry.
The two pain points we heard from students:
Their learning needs varied, but our program had a rigid structure and price tag
They lacked experience with the programming languages and buzzword topics currently relevant to the industry
We wanted to be able to offer both flexibility and new courses on our platform. To do that, we could either continue building on top of our existing, unsuitable system, or we could invest the time into restructuring our platform. After evaluating the potential gains and risks, it was clear that structural changes were only becoming increasingly necessary and it would be irresponsible to our students and ourselves to risk causing a forced restructuring project of unknown scope or duration. We decided to take the opportunity to build a strong foundation for the levels of revenue and growth we wanted to pursue.
Process
Given the technical nature of this project, I worked closely with the CTO and development team to identify the structure and components of our ideal platform, then narrow the scope to the most fundamental pieces for an MVP. Because we continued operating while working on this project, we also had an active user base to consider. We needed to incorporate the existing system into the new one we were building, and maintain a hybrid system without confusing our students, new or old. This meant we also needed to be methodical about how and when to roll each change out to avoid interrupting the student experience.
As PM, my primary responsibility throughout this process was to lead and support the team from the project’s concept and development to post-launch, and ensure clear communication and information flow to the rest of the company.
Solution
To make sense of all the different considerations and pieces of the puzzle, we mapped out the relationships between the main components comprising this hybrid system, and printed each page of the UI designs.
Once the pieces became clear, we broke the progression of changes down into six key stages that would gradually build into the hybrid system we called, the “universal user experience.” The piecemeal nature of this roadmap would allow us to restructure the platform and make changes to the user interface all without disrupting the experience and flow for any student.
Traction
In the case of this particular project, no news was good news. All levels of user activity were sustained across the platform at each rollout stage, and no user confusion was reported. In addition, the success of this rollout allowed us to take our first step into product expansion by introducing our first new product offering.