When your internal platform outgrows its original purpose
Across the public and not-for-profit sectors, we’re seeing the same story play out: teams build something powerful to solve an internal need. Then one day, other organisations want it too.
That’s exactly what happened with one cultural institution’s digital exhibition software. Built in-house over several years, the platform has grown into a key piece of infrastructure, supporting curators, enriching audience experiences, and enabling international partnerships.
Now it was time to evolve again. Could this one-organisation platform become something bigger? Something scalable? Something others could adopt, without creating more work for the team behind it?
Enter, Portable.
A familiar challenge for anyone scaling public tech
The institution wanted to offer their platform to other cultural organisations, without compromising its flexibility, or creating new headaches for internal teams. But like many well-used tools, the product had been shaped by years of live iteration. The codebase was tightly coupled to its original use case. Infrastructure decisions made years ago were limiting new development. DevOps resourcing was stretched.
Leadership were weighing two options:
- Seek seed funding to rebuild with scalability in mind
- Use customer licensing revenue to incrementally refactor
These are the same decisions facing many digital teams in government and for-purpose organisations. Product owners are stuck managing today’s technical debt while being asked to deliver a product roadmap for tomorrow.
Our job was to give this team real options, and help them plan for both.
Our approach: clarify, audit, roadmap
We structured our engagement in three phases, with a focus on momentum, internal alignment, and long-term viability:
1. Discovery and strategy
We ran interviews across digital, ICT, and leadership teams to understand current pain points, internal capability, and desired outcomes. Through a strategy workshop, we helped the group align around a hybrid funding model: using one-off investment to stabilise core systems, then building on that foundation with revenue from early adopters.
2. Technical feasibility
Our engineers conducted a hands-on audit of the platform’s architecture, infrastructure, and codebase. We found ways to reduce complexity, recommend pragmatic alternatives to the current orchestration model, and modularise features to support partner-specific needs without maintaining multiple forks.
3. Roadmap development
We delivered two clear and feasible product roadmaps: one for seed-funded transformation, the other for incremental scaling. Both included milestones across platform architecture, MVP scoping, modular refactors, DevOps resourcing, and customer onboarding.
3. Roadmap development
We delivered two clear and feasible product roadmaps: one for seed-funded transformation, the other for incremental scaling. Both included milestones across platform architecture, MVP scoping, modular refactors, DevOps resourcing, and customer onboarding.
From bespoke build to scalable product
For this team, the outcome wasn’t a flashy prototype, it was something better. Strategic clarity. Architectural options. And two future-ready plans that acknowledged the reality of public funding, internal bandwidth, and long-term maintenance.
The institution now has a clear path to evolve their platform into a multi-tenant solution, without throwing away what already works.
This isn’t just one project, it’s a pattern
At Portable, we’ve helped teams across justice, transport, government services, health, and culture rethink the future of their internal platforms. Whether you’re working with a beloved but brittle legacy system or sitting on a piece of tech that could scale to serve others, you’re not alone.
We specialise in helping digital leaders move from stuck to strategic, auditing your systems, mapping your options, and designing pathways that unlock scale without compromising what matters.
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