Product People structured a National Learning Platform to enable coordinated platform delivery

The Client: Online Education Platform

Our client, a leader in the online education space, is delivering the DGE Learning Ecosystem for Portugal’s Directorate-General for Education (DGE) as part of the country’s Recovery and Resilience Plan (RRP), supporting the national Digital Transition in Education initiative.

The program aims to build a unified national platform for Digital Educational Resources (RED) that supports Portugal’s full school curriculum across roughly 330 subjects, while enabling equitable access to learning materials, personalized learning pathways, and modern teacher tooling for classroom management and student progress monitoring.

At the time Product People joined the mission, the initiative required translating complex public tender requirements, educational policy goals, and Open edX platform capabilities into a clear product structure that could guide design, engineering, and implementation across multiple delivery partners.

‍

The Mission: Interim Product Manager

Product People was engaged to support product leadership within the DGE Learning Ecosystem initiative, delivered by our client and its delivery partners for Portugal’s Directorate-General for Education (DGE).

The initiative involved multiple product teams including engineering, design, AI/data specialists, and delivery partners, working together to build the national platform for Digital Educational Resources. The project environment was complex, requiring alignment between public tender requirements, national education policy, and Open edX platform capabilities.

Product People stepped in to bring product clarity and structure to the initiative. The mission focused on translating the tender requirements into clear product definitions, scoped releases, and implementation-ready documentation that engineering teams could execute.

Program leadership expected a coherent, deliverable national learning platform—enabled by Product People applying strong product management discipline, stakeholder alignment, and structured prioritization to move the DGE Learning Ecosystem from tender specification to executable scope.

‍

Our Main Quest: Structuring the National Learning Platform for Delivery

Launch: Onboarded Very Fast

The DGE Learning Ecosystem involved multiple delivery partners, with engineering, design, and AI teams working across several product areas. However, the public tender defined hundreds of requirements without a clear product structure for teams to execute against.

Product People created fast clarity on what to build (and what already existed) by translating tender specifications into clear product jobs-to-be-done and mapping them against the client’s existing online learning platform. We documented which capabilities already existed, which required adaptation, and which needed to be built from scratch, creating the foundational layer for future PRDs.

Explore and Conquer: Structuring Delivery Across the Learning Ecosystem

Our engagement enabled the national learning platform to move from policy requirements to structured product delivery by translating complex tender requirements into clear product scope across multiple workstreams while coordinating engineering, design, and partner teams. We defined product operations ways of working, checklists for designers and engineers, created implementation-ready specifications, and aligned stakeholders.

‍

Initiatives

Initiative 1 — Translating Tender Requirements into Structured Product Workstreams

Problem

The DGE Learning Ecosystem was defined through a large public tender containing hundreds of functional and non-functional requirements. While these requirements described what the platform needed to achieve, they were not structured in a way that engineering teams could directly execute. Multiple delivery partners were involved, and delivery of the platform was split across 3 major milestones.

What Product People did

Product People clarified what could ship with existing capabilities vs. what required customization or net-new builds by translating tender requirements into clear product jobs-to-be-done and mapping them against the client’s existing online learning platform.

We enabled parallel delivery by organizing requirements into structured product workstreams. Identity and Access Management features such as user lifecycle, profile management, and account administration were consolidated into the IAM workstream, while course management, classes, and learning workflows were grouped into the Learning Journey workstream.

This decomposition enabled engineering, design, and partner teams to work independently while still contributing to the overall platform vision by giving each squad clear product scope, ownership boundaries, and implementation focus.

Initiative 2 — Delivering Identity & Access Management Foundations

Problem

Identity and Access Management is a critical foundation for the DGE Learning Ecosystem. The tender defined strict requirements for user registration, authentication, profile management, and account lifecycle across students, teachers, and administrators. However, these requirements were not yet translated into clear product artifacts that design and engineering teams could execute.

What Product People did

Product People enabled designers to develop compliant, intuitive interface solutions aligned with the platform architecture by producing detailed IAM PRDs (user lifecycle, account management, profile updates, and authentication patterns) from the tender specifications.

We enabled execution by working closely with the IAM engineering squad to convert requirements into implementation-ready backlog items, coordinating sprint planning, refinement sessions, and delivery alignment with designers and developers.

This approach ensured IAM capabilities were designed, prioritized, and delivered incrementally, establishing secure user onboarding and account management as foundational services for the national learning platform.

Initiative 3 — Establishing Product Delivery Governance Across Squads

Problem

The DGE Learning Ecosystem involved multiple squads and delivery partners working in parallel. Without clear product delivery standards, requirements could enter sprints without sufficient specification, design alignment, or localization readiness, increasing the risk of integration issues across teams.

What Product People did

Product People aligned product, design, and engineering teams across the program by establishing shared delivery processes and documentation standards. We introduced readiness checklists for product owners, defining the criteria a user story had to meet before entering a sprint, including finalized requirements, linked design assets, and implementation specifications.

In parallel, we worked with the design teams to introduce design delivery standards, ensuring that every feature included localization tags, complete user flows, and Zeplin links for developer handoff. We also coordinated regular refinement, planning, and status meetings across squads to track progress and ensure dependencies were addressed early.

This structure ensured features developed across multiple squads could be combined smoothly at milestone releases by enabling teams to work independently while maintaining integration readiness.

‍

Mini-Missions: Our Side Quests

As Interim Product Managers, Product People supported the DGE Learning Ecosystem programme with several side quests:

• Problem: The platform required a consistent localization process to ensure a high-quality Portuguese experience for students, teachers, and parents
  • Worked with translators to validate terminology and user-facing copy across the platform
  • Established a localisation workflow involving product, frontend developers, QA, and design teams to ensure translation tags, content structure, and release coordination were handled consistently
• Problem: The platform had to meet strict accessibility requirements defined in the public tender
  • Incorporated AA accessibility standards into the design system and feature specifications
  • Collaborated with accessibility testing teams to validate compliance and ensure the platform met government accessibility requirements across core user flows
• Problem: AI-powered learning recommendations required clear delivery stages and compliance safeguards
  • Coordinated with the AI and Data teams to define how recommendation features would be introduced across platform phases.
  • Defined controls allowing users to disable AI-driven features and ensured GDPR and EU AI compliance considerations were built into the product design.

‍

Mission Achievements: Delivered Outcomes

💡 Turned a complex government tender into build-ready product scope. The platform moved from policy requirements to structured product delivery by translating the DGE tender into 10 detailed PRDs and more than 300 user stories, giving engineering and partner teams clear specifications to execute.

💡 Enabled coordinated delivery across multiple partners and squads. The ecosystem delivered under tight program deadlines by aligning the client, delivery partners, designers, engineers, and AI teams around a shared roadmap and milestone plan through clear workstreams and delivery governance.

💡 Ensured compliance and readiness for a national-scale education platform. The platform met tender compliance requirements while remaining extensible for future capabilities such as AI-driven recommendations and analytics by embedding accessibility (AA standards), localization processes, and AI governance controls into product and delivery workflows.