Rebuilt a rigid career-readiness assessment platform into a self-serve product
Career Launch partners with 150+ college institutions in preparing students for the workforce through its career readiness assessment platform, that aims to help students identify their strengths and areas of improvements across eight competencies using the Career Readiness Competency framework from NACE (the National Association of Colleges and Employers) — spanning communication, critical thinking, technology, and more. I owned the rebuild of the assessment platform behind all of it end to end: the customer research that defined it, the architecture and full-stack build, and the migration of every existing account. The rebuild I led offered comparative data analytics and a streamlined user experience to support far wider institutional adoption.
Institutions weren't renewing, and the platform itself was a large part of why.
- Renewals were soft, and the same complaint kept resurfacing: the tool was painful to use.
- Getting a survey link meant filling out a request form and waiting days for our team to build it by hand.
- At the start of the school year that backlog stretched into multiple business days — for admins and for our own team.
- Every academic term needed a brand-new link, so admins accumulated a pile of them and routinely sent students last term's.
- Admins couldn't compare results by program, by term, or across the whole institution — so the questions leadership asked were exactly the ones the platform couldn't answer.
- Rather than guess at the cause, I went and asked the people who use it every day.