Customer-Created Products
Context & Challenges
LearnPlatform is a system used by Local and State Education Agencies to manage their edtech ecosystems. It allows organizations to build libraries of digital tools and run structured workflows—discovery, vetting, and publishing—across departments for privacy, compliance, interoperability, efficacy, and accessibility.
The bottleneck emerged at the very first step: discovery. If a product wasn’t already in the library, educators had to submit a request for it to be added. As LearnPlatform adoption grew, so did these requests—often because end users could not find, or believed they could not find, their product. This resulted in a surge of submissions that had to be manually processed before any vetting could begin.
By 2022, this workflow had become unsustainable. Hundreds of requests were submitted each quarter, averaging 5–20 minutes to process, with nearly 25% of them duplicating products already in the system. Administrators had no visibility into educator requests until staff processed them, and educators frequently mistook “added” for “approved,” compounding confusion. The outcome was a system plagued by delays, duplication, and rising contractor costs—straining scalability just as demand from districts for custom and homegrown tools accelerated.
Problem & Solution
Problem
Solution
Discovery & Process
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User interviews and workflow mapping – Conducted interviews with educators, admins, contractors, and CSMs. Mapped the full workflow from user search → request → contractor review → product creation → administrator vetting → publishing to identify drop-offs, friction points, and error-prone steps.
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Data analysis – Reviewed 2.5 years of request data, surfacing hard metrics on processing times, duplication rates (~25%), and contractor hours. These findings framed the PRD problem statements with clear cost, time, and volume evidence.
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Duplicate pattern review – Audited thousands of requests to identify causes of duplication (e.g., typos, domain changes, company name variations). Findings directly informed requirements for richer customer-provided fields and smarter system matching.
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Language and UX testing – Ran user testing with educators and admins to refine copy and reduce confusion between “added” vs “approved.” Validated clearer status messaging before build.
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Internal prototyping – Built a lightweight prototype for contractors and CSMs. This revealed opportunities to split delivery into two phases, enabling an earlier release to work out bugs and refine matching logic while still moving toward full rollout.
Ideation & Development
Scoping and Prioritization
Applied must-have and critical path techniques to define essentials: instant time to value, duplicate reduction, and in-platform transparency.
Phased Rollout
Launched in stages to manage risk and enable immediate value.
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Phase 1: Custom Product Creation Wizard for local product creation.
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Phase 2: Backend matching wizard, replacing the legacy request system entirely. Ability for users to merge with provider-managed (global) products.
Execution
Delivered via a Kanban + Agile hybrid—Agile for sprint planning and reviews, Kanban for story flow through design, development, QA, and deployment. Overcame technical hurdles in field-matching, new product-type tables, and feature tracking, with CSM input ensuring workflows resonated with power users.
Measurement
Tracked duplicates avoided, velocity of customer-created products, synced product adoption, contractor hours saved, time-to-value gains, and reduction in support tickets to demonstrate ROI.
Impact
The Customer-Created Product initiative transformed how districts engaged with the platform, shifting from slow, contractor-driven processes to a self-service model that delivered immediate value. By reducing friction, increasing transparency, and enabling deeper engagement from administrators, the feature not only streamlined operations but also strengthened long-term product adoption and satisfaction.
~660 annual contractor hours eliminated
Eliminated duplicate products issue
Time-to-Value reduced from ~14 days → Immediate-Time-to-Value (ITV)
-95% drop in support cases tied to product requests
+130% increase in administrator session duration
Higher adoption velocity and synced product usage confirmed feature stickiness
