Building Decision-Ready Requirements for Authorization Redesign

The Client: International Baccalaureate (IB)

IB (International Baccalaureate) is a global curriculum provider, authorizing schools in over 160 countries to deliver its four educational programmes, a core function supported by a 200-person Digital and Data Office spanning the UK, the Netherlands, the United States and Singapore.

At the time of engagement, IB was in a transitional period midway through a multi-year redesign of school authorization: one of IB's most consequential initiatives. The work built upon customer-focused discovery and research, but remained largely unstructured and had not yet been translated into actionable product requirements and a product roadmap.

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The Mission: Accelerating the Authorization Redesign Initiative

Background

Product People joined the Digital and Data Office from March to September 2026, pairing with an in-house Senior PM already embedded in the initiative. The engagement centred on the Authorisation Redesign: translating a year of prior discovery into a scoped minimum lovable product and epic-level requirements ready for engineering, ahead of the upcoming launch. Product People led definition and sequencing work end-to-end, from current-state mapping through to epic population in Productboard.

Why Product People Were Needed

The initiative spanned distributed stakeholders across the UK, the Netherlands, and the United States, alongside a business side building product fluency. IB needed:

• Clear prioritization tied to a minimum lovable product
• Alignment across product, business stakeholders, and engineering
• A shared, documented understanding of product requirements and processes
• Momentum on requirements without skipping stakeholder validation

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Our Main Quest: Building Decision-Ready Requirements for the Authorization Redesign

Scoping & Definition to Guide the Road Ahead

Problem: IB's authorization journey, spanning Consideration, Candidacy, and Authorization, takes schools up to 15 months in candidacy alone, yet had not yet been mapped end-to-end. Without a full picture of the process, it was difficult to pinpoint where the biggest bottlenecks sat or to define clearly what the redesigned process needed to look like. This was made more pressing by an upcoming redesign, which required understanding what had to be preserved for feature parity with legacy versions versus what could be deferred.

What We Did:

• Tested and mapped available surfaces, engaged in interviews and walkthroughs with involved stakeholders, and utilized existing documentation to understand the current state
• Mapped the current-state process across all three stages, including actors, terminology, and a RACI framework
• Ran Jobs-To-Be-Done workshops and epic-level working sessions to align product, design, and engineering on scope
• Defined the key criteria for evaluating and prioritizing epics into MLP and later phases
• Populated and sequenced epics for the upcoming redesign in Productboard based on suggested criteria
• Authored an Agile Best Practices Guide capturing epic and user story standards for the wider team to reuse

Outcome: The redesign moved from a scattered set of documents to a sequenced set of epics with a clear rationale, giving teams a shared view of the road ahead.

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Side Quests

• Scoped and defined requirements for a Regional Fee Initiative and groomed engineering tickets for delivery, estimated impact of $40M annually
• Defined requirements to resolve issues with publicly available contracts and auditability, moving the work through UAT with the business and development teams
• Took ownership of scoping Independent Affiliate processes to allow registration for professional learning workshops
• Completed a content mapping exercise across customer-facing platforms

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🏆 Mission Achievements: Delivered Outcomes

💡 Mapped the journey - Turned a complex Authorization journey into a mapped foundation for redesign, covering 5 stages and their Jobs-To-Be-Done, meant to enable schools to be authorized onto newer available Standards through a simpler, more guided experience

💡 Structured the redesign into epics in Productboard, sequenced based on aligned criteria

💡 Advanced the Milestone Planner to MLP - Took the central MLP feature from undefined to the design stage and drafted user stories.

💡 Closed a four-year contract gap - Closed a four-year gap in user-facing contract terms and enabled auditability.

💡 Unblocked a global access barrier - Identified the true scope of an Independent Affiliates issue as a missing Salesforce account type affecting non-IB customers worldwide, barring them from receiving workshops or training.

💡 Documented reusable standards - Authored an Agile Best Practices Guide to help standardise ways of working across the product team.

💡 Enabled a cost-saving pilot - Paved the road to $40M annual cost savings by enabling location-based compensation adjustment; the changes are now being piloted.