Case Study: Skillshare accelerates engineering cycle time 12x and unlocks robust A/B testing with Split

Making Software Development a Creative Process at Skillshare

Skillshare is an online learning community with over 30,000 classes and more than 8 million students that needed to move faster and safer when shipping product changes. Their stack (PHP, React, Node, GraphQL) supported CI/CD, but internal A/B testing and release controls were rudimentary, forcing large, risky monthly releases, preventing reliable QA in production, and limiting the team’s ability to run rigorous experiments and target users.

In 2019 Skillshare partnered with Split to add feature flags and robust A/B testing, integrating SDKs and server-side controls across their microservices for phased rollouts and targeted experiments (e.g., a search migration and a company-wide brand refresh). The result: engineering cycle time sped up ~12x (monthly to weekly releases), 5–6 concurrent A/B tests representing 64+ app versions, safer production QA and rollouts, faster innovation, fewer user-facing issues, and a stronger data-driven, collaborative development culture.

Skillshare

Jean Steiner

VP of Data Science