GetBoarded
A career-profile platform that builds profiles from knowledge and personality-based transferable skills — kept alive through the schema changes that kill most early products.
What they needed — in their own words
“People should build a profile from what they can actually do — transferable skills, not just job titles — and organisations should find them by capability. The skills model will keep evolving as we learn.”
The system they run on today
- Profile builder mapping knowledge and personality to transferable skills
- Capability-based search and matching for organisations
- A migration process that survives taxonomy changes against live data
- Multi-tenant workspace for partner organisations
Arrived, assessed, hardened
Every Neolen engagement follows the same path: an honest assessment of what's actually there, then the hardening work that makes it a system. Here is how it played out on this one.
What arrived
A live platform whose core asset — the skills taxonomy — needed its second major revision, with thousands of real profiles built on the old one. There was no migration history: every previous schema change had been made by editing the database directly.
What the assessment found
The assessment ranked schema-change risk as the existential item: one bad migration against live profile data and the product's entire value evaporates. No backups had ever been restored-tested, and there was no staging environment to rehearse on.
What we hardened and shipped
We put backups, restore drills, and a staging environment in place first, then ran the taxonomy migration as a staged, reversible rollout — old and new models served side by side, profiles re-mapped in batches with verification at each step, rollback path held open until the error rate read zero.
What the client runs on today
GetBoarded has revised its skills model multiple times since without downtime or data loss — the kind of change that permanently ends most projects built without an engineering function. Each revision is a request, not a rescue.
Added to the playbook
The staged re-mapping procedure became our standard playbook for taxonomy and schema migrations against live data — rehearsed on staging, shipped in batches, always reversible.
Hit a wall with something you've built?
The audit is fixed-fee and standalone — a plain-language report of what's actually wrong, ranked by risk, yours whether or not you continue.