01
Time was the real constraint
Planning and administration already competed with teaching. A new product had to save time before it could ask teachers to participate in a community.
All projects
Product case study
2024–2025
Research · Product design · Full-stack prototype
Oss Lärare Emellan
A Swedish EdTech platform shaped with teachers, not just for them. OLE moved from a broad professional network to a clearer resource-first product through surveys, interviews, two rounds of testing, and the willingness to remove major features.
Product and development case study by Elmer Almer Ershagen.
Archived prototype · not an active service
ReactTypeScriptSupabaseLovable
Built around
teachers’ real work
95
voices before the final direction
Early research
95
teacher survey responses
First test
10+
teachers with the broad prototype
Follow-up
5+
teachers with the focused iteration
Timeline
2024–25
from first sketch to archived beta
The starting question
Could teachers reuse more—and rebuild less?
Teachers repeatedly create material, solve planning problems, and search for advice in disconnected places. OLE explored whether one trusted space could make useful work easier to find, adapt, and share across schools.
02
Useful material was hard to retrieve
Resources lived across drives, chats, groups, and personal archives. Relevance, subject filters, school level, and clear structure mattered more than sheer volume.
03
An empty network has no value
Teachers were skeptical of yet another platform if it felt inactive or complicated. The first visit needed to offer something concrete without depending on network effects.
Evidence before polish
The idea was tested at three different levels
The research mixed broad signals with close observation. Each layer answered a different question: is the problem real, where does it hurt, and does the product make sense in use?
01
Breadth
95 survey responses
An early teacher survey highlighted time pressure, resource discovery, planning support, and professional development as recurring needs.
02
Depth
Interviews and school conversations
Teacher conversations exposed the context behind the answers and helped reduce roughly 28 initial ideas to a smaller set worth prototyping.
03
Behaviour
Two rounds of product testing
More than ten teachers tried the broad direction. A later, smaller round tested the focused iteration and helped check whether the product was becoming clearer.
“A platform for teachers cannot merely look useful. It has to prove its relevance before the user spends time feeding the community.”
From idea to evidence
The product changed as the questions became sharper
OLE did not move in a straight line. The strongest progress came from narrowing the promise, building enough to test it, and treating finished features as hypotheses rather than commitments.
October – November 2024
The first sketch
Start with the teachers’ working reality
The first concept was a professional network for teachers to connect and exchange material. Rapid Figma, Claude, Replit, and Lovable prototypes made the idea tangible within days, while early teacher conversations kept the problem grounded.
- A teacher was consulted from the first prototype
- The team selected OLE as its Techship direction
- The Swedish name and first product language took shape
November – December 2024
Research and reduction
Turn a broad need into a product hypothesis
A 95-response survey, a school presentation, teacher interviews, competitor references, and a Crazy 8 exercise mapped the opportunity. The idea was still broad, but the repeated signal was practical: save time and make good material easier to find.
- Roughly 28 feature ideas reduced to eight priorities
- Three early teacher interviews challenged the initial scope
- The pitch was rebuilt after critical mentor feedback
December 2024 – February 2025
From pitch to working beta
Build the broad version to discover its limits
After winning a development-package award at Techship Demo Day, the concept became a working React and Supabase product. Profiles, resources, filtering, a forum, messaging, groups, saved material, onboarding, and responsive layouts made the whole proposition testable.
- A maintainable GitHub, Lovable, and Vercel workflow
- Working accounts, uploads, filters, posts, and mobile layouts
- Seed content and a beta-signup path for invited teachers
March 2025
The difficult simplification
Stop building an all-in-one platform
The first teacher test and mentor review made the core problem visible: OLE needed one repeatable reason to return. Groups, direct messaging, and other social surface area were removed or deprioritized while resource discovery, structure, and immediate value moved to the center.
- 10+ teachers tested the broader product direction
- Mentor review sharpened the reason to return
- A focused iteration was tested with 5+ teachers
April – May 2025
A deliberate stop
Archive the product without rewriting the lesson
Shared capacity changed before OLE reached a public launch. Active development paused in April and was consciously concluded in May. The final result is a functional beta snapshot—not an active service—but the research and iteration became a durable lesson in product focus, evidence, and team ownership.
- No claim of a full public launch
- The product remained available as an archival snapshot
- The team documented the lessons before moving on
The turning point
The redesign was a change of priority, not a coat of paint
The first direction deliberately explored many ways OLE could help. Testing showed that the product could not ask teachers to navigate all of them before proving the simplest benefit.
Prototype 01 · Broad platform
Many reasons to enter, no single reason to return
The early product combined resources, saved material, a planner, profiles, direct messages, groups, and a community dashboard. It was valuable as a learning prototype because its breadth made the trade-offs visible.
ResourcesPlannerMessagingGroupsSaved items
Focused direction · Archived MVP
Lead with material teachers can use today
The focused direction put structured resources, search, school level, subject, type, and difficulty filters first. Some broader navigation remained in the archived build, but social features no longer carried the core promise; useful content did.
SearchFiltersResource cardsLibraryClearer onboarding
What changed
Broad communityImmediate utility
The first visit was redesigned around something useful to browse or download, rather than a network that needed activity before it felt alive.
Social surface areaResource relevance
Groups and direct messaging left the core flow while subject, school-level, type, and difficulty filters became central.
Feature completenessA return trigger
The team stopped asking what else the platform could contain and started asking what would make one teacher choose to come back next week.
The focused product
A calmer path from need to usable material
OLE’s strongest flow was intentionally ordinary: find something relevant, understand it quickly, keep it, and contribute when you have something worth sharing.
Useful in the first minute
The interface should reveal real material and clear actions before asking the teacher to build a profile or participate socially.
Relevance over volume
Subject, school level, resource type, difficulty, and ordering controls help a small library feel more useful than a large unstructured feed.
Community must earn attention
Discussion and sharing are valuable only when they reduce work or improve practice. They should support the resource flow, not obscure it.
Core resource flow
- 01
Search
Begin with a need, subject, or school level.
- 02
Filter
Reduce the library to material that fits the lesson.
- 03
Evaluate
Read the type, level, difficulty, and description at a glance.
- 04
Use or save
Download now or keep the material for later.
- 05
Contribute
Share useful work back when the value is clear.
My contribution
Research, product decisions, and implementation stayed connected
Within a small startup team, my work moved between teacher research, information architecture, interface design, implementation, content, testing, and deployment. That closeness made it possible to turn feedback into a changed product quickly.
Role
Product and development contributor responsible for much of the working prototype, including UX structure, resource flows, frontend implementation, Supabase-backed features, responsive behaviour, and deployment.
ReactTypeScriptSupabaseLovableVercelUser research
Product framing
Translated surveys, interviews, mentor reviews, and tests into scope decisions instead of treating every request as a feature commitment.
Experience design
Structured navigation, registration, resource metadata, filters, cards, feedback states, and the visual language around the OLE brand.
Working prototype
Built and maintained the React, TypeScript, and Supabase product through a GitHub, Lovable, and Vercel workflow.
Outcome
A paused startup can still be a successful product case
OLE did not become a launched company. It did produce a tested product, a meaningful external signal, and a much more valuable understanding of what to build first.
External signal
A Techship Demo Day award
The team won a development-package award after rebuilding the pitch and prototype around mentor feedback.
Product signal
Two tested directions
Teacher testing exposed the limits of the broad platform and gave the focused resource experience a more defensible foundation.
Honest status
Functional beta, then pause
The project stopped before public launch when shared capacity changed. The remaining deployment is an archive of the last active product.
The durable lesson
A community is not the first feature. A reason to return is.
OLE taught me to separate a meaningful problem from an oversized solution. Research made the opportunity credible; testing made the first answer disposable; focus made the product clearer.
Product archive
The interface
Archived prototype · not an active service