Vision to MVP: A Career Platform for Tomorrow's Workforce

A large public charity with more than 30 years of history investing in scholarships and grants for the next generation, sought to move beyond traditional grantmaking. Protagona was engaged to help build an ambitious new platform: a comprehensive, personalized career development experience giving young people access to AI coaching, career assessments, mentorship matching, financial support, and learning pathways — all in one place.

The objective was to take the platform from strategic concept to a fully functioning, tested MVP across iOS, Android, and responsive web. That meant delivering a core AI coaching experience, personalized assessments, participant onboarding and profiles, an admin portal, and the foundational partner integrations needed to deliver real value at launch.

Building a greenfield platform of this scope meant making foundational architectural decisions before any code existed, all while the product vision continued to evolve. Integration partners were a recurring source of complexity — some APIs required significant adaptation, others shifted timelines, and several needed feasibility assessments before work could even begin. Those dependencies delayed the start of frontend development, compressing the schedule and forcing mobile and web tracks to run in parallel once both were underway.

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Mid-engagement scope additions, including age verification, localization planning, and analytics instrumentation, had to be absorbed without derailing the MVP timeline. Throughout, the team balanced technical execution with active product management, translating high-level program goals into a prioritized backlog that stakeholders could review and approve sprint by sprint.

Protagona built the platform on a cloud-native, serverless foundation, chosen to scale efficiently without requiring the foundation to manage its own infrastructure. Authentication was unified across mobile and web, supporting both direct sign-in and integration with the parent organization's existing identity system. At the core of the experience is a multi-agent AI coaching system: one agent manages live conversation and recommendations, a second generates personalized participant summaries, and a third runs continuously in the background to keep recommendations current as participants engage with the platform.

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The application itself spans a native mobile app for iOS and Android alongside a responsive web experience, sharing core logic and a consistent design system across both. Feature flags give the team granular control over what rolls out to which participants, without requiring a new deployment for every change. Four integration partners were connected through a normalization layer that maps each partner's data into a consistent internal format, making future partner additions straightforward rather than custom work each time. Full observability, automated testing, and a CI/CD pipeline were established from day one, giving the team confidence in system health and a maintainable path forward post-launch.