Context & stakes
Defined Learning is a US K-12 EdTech company serving 2M+ active users, 108,000 teachers and 5,000+ schools across 1,000+ districts, with statewide partnerships in Tennessee, Connecticut and Oklahoma. The platform carries 600+ project-based lessons, 400+ careers and 79 career pathways in 16 clusters. A fragmented multi-role experience (Student, Teacher, Admin) was slowing releases and raising delivery costs.
The problem
Three roles, three inconsistent experiences. The assessment flow, key to school sales, didn’t differentiate. Marketing depended on paid third-party tools for presentations.
My role & decisions
- Sole product designer across the ecosystem: prioritization, stakeholder alignment and design ops were on me.
- Key decision: standardize all three role experiences into one design system before building new features. That system made Defined Careers shippable within about six months.
- Built one design system serving several Defined brands: typography, color, a reusable component library and documentation that keep Learning and Careers consistent as the ecosystem grows.
- Led Defined Careers from zero to shipped, then kept leading it live: release-by-release design, roadmap input and post-launch iteration on real classroom usage.
- Spotted a cost leak outside my brief: designed an internal presentation builder that replaced a paid third-party tool for the marketing team.
Process
I started by mapping the three role experiences side by side: what a student, a teacher and an admin actually do in a week. The overlap became the shared system, the differences became role-specific surfaces. From there the design system came first, screens second, so when Defined Careers kicked off, most of its UI already existed as components. Every release cycle since has followed the same rhythm: real classroom feedback in, prioritized design out.
