When Amara Humphry joined Abl, demand was high. She found a team full of ideas and districts clamoring for more. But there weren’t enough hands to deliver.
Instead of defaulting to more hires, she looked for a smarter way to keep momentum without burning out her team.
Abl, now part of BetterLesson, helps schools create schedules and staffing plans to support students. Each new district implementation and feature request made the product roadmap expand too quickly. It was exciting, but internally, the engineering team struggled to keep up.
“As a product leader, I had things I wanted to build, and I needed more people to build them. Hiring is hard and expensive, especially if you’re not sure how much you want to invest in that area.”
Staff augmentation aside, Abl also faced another obstacle. The company’s culture valued tight-knit, in-house teams and had never relied on outside engineers.
“A lot of people who have worked with engineering contractors have had bad experiences. The fear around the consulting or the contractor mindset is it’s not their product, so they’re not in it for the long haul.”
When Amara joined Abl, she had to challenge that belief and navigate that fear to deliver a complex product on time.
Edify began with a scoped project of building an application to help school district IT teams with data integration.
I wanted to build an app that manages data integration for IT teams. A place where they can send us their data, customers can ingest it, visualize it in graphs to QA, and then complete a workflow to sign off when everything looks right. That’s the app Edify helped us build.
As the partnership grew, Abl shifted Edify from project-based work to staff augmentation. “We switched over, because we’re a small team, and we have three different products we maintain. I couldn’t always scope six months in advance. So I asked Edify, ‘Can we do staff augmentation instead?’ Which is how we work to this day. They effectively act like an in-house part of our team.”
Over time, Edify became more than an extra set of hands; they became a trusted voice in the product process.
“The experience I’ve had with Edify, in contrast to some other folks, is that they’re not always yes-people. They ask questions, they push back, and they’re realistic about what they can do and by when—which, from a project-success standpoint, is huge.”
That mindset made collaboration stronger and outcomes better. Abl’s team respected Edify not just for its technical skills but also for its honesty and shared ownership of the product’s success.
Having worked with Edify before, Amara trusted Edify’s model to help Abl’s team keep up with its growing roadmap.
“Edify was fast because they had the bench strength to scale up quickly, and unlike most engineers I could have hired, they already understood EdTech. That’s a big deal when you’re building products for schools.”
Still, Amara knew bringing in outside engineers wouldn’t be easy for Abl’s all-in-house team. To build confidence, she made the onboarding process transparent and collaborative.
“Because of the team’s unique culture, we asked if we could interview some of the engineers who were going to join our team, which worked really well. We were able to gauge both the technical depth and communication skills of the people we were bringing on.”
Interviewing Edify gave the Abl team the agency to choose who they’d work with. It also gave reassurance that Edify’s engineers aligned with Abl’s values and working style
These outcomes reflect more than added delivery speed. They show how additional capacity, early trust, and long-term collaboration translated into products that could actually ship and teams that could work together over time.
Abl launched new products that would have been impossible without additional engineering capacity.
The team overcame cultural resistance to contractors by interviewing Edify’s engineers before onboarding.
Multiple Edify engineers have worked with Abl for years, becoming embedded partners.
They collaborate with our designers, they join team meetings, they navigate ambiguity, and they’re able to fit in with the rest of our staff. With them, it’s not transactional; it feels like a true partnership.
We’ve stuck with [the Edify team] for the last four years. The only time people have transitioned off is if we had to reduce because of budget reasons, and even still, Edify worked with us during those times.
Amara Humphry
Head of R&D (Research and Development)
What started as a single project has turned into nearly a decade of partnership across three companies.
For Abl, working with Edify meant faster product delivery, smoother collaboration, and engineers who felt like part of the team.
Rapid growth without infrastructure can be the point where things start to break. QA, code reviews, hiring—all of it strains under new demand.
Edify steps in before that strain comes to a grinding halt. The model helps EdTech leaders move faster without losing the culture or code quality they’ve worked so hard to build.
There’s a reason Edify has remained an embedded thought partner for more than a decade. Our approach works—and not just for Abl. See how we’ve helped other EdTech leaders build smarter, faster, and stronger.
If your company faces growth but funding challenges, read our blog on how to navigate this tension.
See the hidden forces behind runaway EdTech software budgets and the systems that keep them in check.
Abl’s success in building scheduling and staffing solutions for K–12 districts led to its acquisition by BetterLesson, a national leader in professional learning, on January 31, 2025.
This acquisition reflects the strength of Abl’s platform and the growing importance of technology that connects teaching, learning, and resource management across K–12 systems.