Case Study
Scaling a Global Digital-First Ecosystem for a Leading Education Publisher
Key Result Highlights
- Expanded from 3 to 45+ platforms in 5 years.
- Stabilized high-complexity platforms within 6–9 months.
- Delivered predictable releases: 2- week sprints and monthly production updates.
- Increased content production velocity to 250 digital courses/books per quarter across geographies.
- Achieved significant performance gains and reduced technical debt.
- Built a unified model covering engineering, accessibility, UX, and product advisory.
The Client
A global leader in educational publishing, assessment, and digital learning operating across 70 countries. The organization delivers K12, Higher Ed, and Professional Learning content worldwide and is investing heavily in Digital-First product transformation.
The Challenge
The customer’s Digital First Strategy (DFS) spanned multiple geographies, verticals, and product teams. Despite working with multiple vendors, key DFS programs faced recurring escalations tied to platform instability, inconsistent user experience, rising technical debt, and unpredictable release cycles. Author adoption was slow, and internal teams struggled to consistently utilize new digital authoring tools.
Critical Success Parameters
- Stabilize complex digital platforms and improve overall performance.
- Reduce accumulated technical debt while ensuring high code quality.
- Drive predictable sprints and monthly release cycles.
- Accelerate author adoption of digital-first workflows across geographies.
- Improve user experience through design thinking-led enhancements.
- Implement in-sprint automation and performance improvements for
long-term reliability. - Scale platform count from a handful of tools to an enterprise-wide
ecosystem.
Our Approach
- Established a multi-year transformation program combining Platform Engineering, Quality Engineering, Product Management, and UX services.
- Implemented 90% in-sprint automation and increased code coverage to 90% across critical platforms.
- Improved performance metrics with response times under 2 seconds,
load times under 3 seconds, and 95 % performance retention at 2x load. - Standardized a 2-week sprint and monthly release cadence.
- Rolled out structured onboarding cycles to help authors and internal
teams adopt new tools. - Applied design thinking practices to streamline workflows and improve
ease of use. - Consolidated ownership of complex platforms, remediated tech debt,
stabilized them within 6–9 months, and then focused on optimization. - Allocated 10–15% of every sprint to tech debt cleanup and 5–15% to code optimization.
Need Similar Results?
Talk to our team to see how we can help.