Modernising an established SaaS platform

The shared challenge

An established education SaaS platform needed to evolve. Product and engineering teams had to balance new capabilities with the realities of a legacy core, tenant isolation, identity and cross-product integrations.

The work called for a practical route through those constraints, with architectural decisions that developers could implement and teams could support in production.

Where I fitted in

I was responsible for the modernisation plan and technical direction, working with Product, Engineering and senior stakeholders on the roadmap. Alongside the developers, I helped work through options, review designs and connect the architectural decisions to implementation.

Delivery was a collective effort across teams. My role was to provide a coherent direction and help the people building the services make informed decisions within it.

What we changed together

The programme adopted a hybrid architecture. I defined core MIS modules as API-first, multi-tenant .NET components working with a single-tenant backbone and database, alongside microservices and event-driven integration on Azure.

Cross-product APIs, data isolation and shared-service operations were part of the design. The teams delivered Central Reporting, the Integrations Platform and a modern authentication server supporting OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect and SAML 2.0. Those live services were used by 2 million+ users per month.

What carried forward

The work included architectural standards and the development lifecycle for peer review and programme delivery. Those shared practices gave teams a basis for making and reviewing subsequent changes, with the context held across the organisation.

For me, seeing the work through means leaving teams with a system they can own and evolve, and decisions they can understand without needing the original architect in every conversation.