Case study

Horizon Education

K-12 assessment platform I helped take from an early product to 250,000 users; acquired by Progress Learning in 2022.

Role: Chief Product Officer & Founding Designer
Years: 2018 to 2025
Site: horizoneducation.com

Overview

Horizon Education was a K-12 assessment company I joined as a founding designer and later as Chief Product Officer. The work mixed product, design, and a lot of time with customers: demos, support escalations, and handoffs with districts. Over seven years the product grew to about 250,000 users and $2.75M in ARR. Progress Learning acquired the company in 2022 (via Serent Capital). I stayed on while Horizon ran as a standalone product, then through its migration into the Progress Learning product suite in 2025.

Horizon Education Student Results with subsection score details and category breakdown — Student Results: subsection score details, gauges, and breakdowns teachers used at scale.

My role

My job covered the full product surface: UX and UI across major flows, roadmap and prioritization with engineering, and regular calls with district admins. I worked on Clever and ClassLink rostering and on partnerships with PowerSchool, Illuminate Education, and School City, usually alongside a tiny team. On a company that size, you end up with a lot of hats. I was grateful for the feedback from real schools, and for seeing what actually moved metrics as opposed to what we hoped would.

Horizon Education Assign Assessment flow for grade level and assessment sections — Assign Assessment: pick audience, assessment type, and sections in a guided flow.

Horizon Education Course Activities with assigned modules and lesson resources — Course Activities: assigned modules, lessons, practice, and progress in one list.

Designing for simplicity

Horizon went through several large redesigns. The pattern was consistent: when we added more freedom or “visual personality,” teachers and coaches said it got harder to get through a day. The product that held up at scale kept to large targets, clear hierarchy, and as few decisions per screen as we could get away with.

Horizon Education Course Activities with Google Slides presentation modal — Course Activities with an embedded Google Slides lesson opened in a focused modal over the dashboard.

District teams often said some version of it's easier to use when they compared us to much bigger vendors. I still lean on that: in EdTech, polish isn't the same as piling on UI, and a good day for the product is one where it mostly gets out of the way.

Outcome

By the 2022 acquisition, Horizon had grown about 25× in users and 11× in revenue. Afterward, I spent several years helping move Horizon’s SAT/ACT workloads into Progress Learning’s K-12 platform. It was a long integration and a useful reference for the kind of platform work I do now.

Yearly active users: 250K
ARR at acquisition: $2.75M
User growth: 25×
Revenue growth: 11×

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