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Impact
Launched two brand-new priorities with Stride teams that increased functionality for users and allowed updates to be made to billing systems without disrupting thousands of customers.
About Codecademy
Codecademy is an edtech company focused on redefining the education industry. Their catalog is built around coding and computer science. With 45 million users and climbing, they are a growing and thriving education company.
Codecademy had established teams working on company-wide initiatives. Stride was originally brought in to help with the “Growth team”.
Because of the pandemic and shifting priorities, Stride broke off into new teams to tackle new challenges.
Challenges
Cheatsheets
Codecademy received user feedback about a new feature during a hackathon which took off very quickly. They needed help building out this new functionality from the ground up, so they spun up a new team. The team's core objective was to deliver Cheatsheets. There was no styling, no navigation, no related courses, and no way to navigate back into the Codecademy ecosystem. Stride was given designs, APIs, data structures, and a timeline. From there, Stride worked to deliver a final product.
Codecademy’s team had experience holding retrospectives and assigning points to stories, but they had all come from different teams. This was their first time working together.
Automated Billing System
Codecademy had a manual billing system in place for enterprise buyers. They needed to build a system to support those transactions, invoices, and autopayments without disrupting billing services.
This team’s service work had launched only one year earlier, and all orders, invoices, and upgrades were done manually. Thousands of clients were expecting auto-renewals with different subscriptions and seats attached, for both individual and consolidated orders.
The biggest challenge was the recurring subscription. The team needed to make sure that no users would experience any interruptions with their renewal process.
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Solution
Cheatsheets
Codecademy had established a new product called Cheatsheets geared toward helping users learn JavaScript. As the product was taking off quickly, they needed help adding to the feature’s functionality from the ground up. At the onset, Stride was provided light designs and from there worked to deliver a final product in an expedited timeline that included full design, API’s, and data structures.
Automated Billing System
Codecademy’s billing system for enterprise buyers had only launched a year before and all orders were processed manually. Thousands of clients with different subscriptions all had to be processed by hand. To support ongoing billing during growth, Codecademy and Stride worked together to ship version zero of an automated system.
Results
- The first team hit the initial goal, releasing the new Cheatsheets product to the company.
- Successfully coordinated retrospectives for teams that had previously worked in silos; introduced the assignment of points to stories.
- Worked with the Codecademy team to evangelize for and write unit tests.
- Worked with the Codecademy team to build a dashboard that allows clients to assign seats, buy more seats, and bulk-invite users.
- Worked with the Codecademy team to automate recurring subscriptions for Business to Business (B2B) users without interrupting renewal processes and Business to Customer (B2C) subscription flow.
