Since 2005, Docebo has helped leading organizations including Zoom, TripAdvisor and Amnesty International unlock the limitless power of learning. Today, its learning platform is trusted by many of the world’s largest organizations to engage learners, help people develop the skills they need to succeed and drive business outcomes.
As more large organizations recognized the power of Docebo’s learning platform, the company rapidly grew from a nimble startup into a major software provider. Its teams developed and deployed numerous new capabilities to support customers. But over time, the combination of rapid scaling and new feature and system deployments created a complex technology foundation that was difficult to manage.
So the company’s digital leaders laid out a plan to decommission legacy services, reduce system complexity, redefine team structures and processes, improve platform stability, and ensure Docebo could continue to evolve and scale for years to come.
Challenge: Decommission legacy services and build a new platform foundation against the clock
Over time, the growing complexity of Docebo’s legacy systems had begun to impact platform performance, governance and scalability. This reduced platform maintainability, delivery efficiency and internal development capacity.
The need for change was clear, but Docebo’s transformation was made more urgent by the impending end of support for PHP7. With security updates ending for its chosen programming language, there was an even greater impetus for rearchitecture and system evolution.
To tackle all its challenges simultaneously, Docebo formulated a digital migration strategy focused on reducing legacy technical debt and moving toward a modular, future-ready platform architecture. And the company selected Thoughtworks as the ideal partner to execute that strategy.
“We chose to partner with Thoughtworks for two main reasons,” explains Docebo’s Chief Product Officer, Fabio Pirovano. “First, we were very aware of its work supporting organizations like ours that have grown quickly from startups into enterprise-scale businesses. Second, Thoughtworks is a Docebo customer, and the team knew exactly what we wanted to achieve — and how modernization would impact our end users as well as our business.”
Solution: Rapid, iterative decommissioning and a multi-phase shift to a new foundation
With PHP7 support ending, Thoughtworks had to execute Docebo’s legacy decommissioning plan quickly. However, speed couldn’t come at the cost of platform stability and long-term value.
Working closely with Docebo’s teams, we adopted a cross-functional, agile governance model to balance stability with transformation, enabling us to gradually dismantle legacy dependencies. To progress the project quickly, we coordinated multiple teams responsible for extracting features from the legacy monolith, a platform team focused on building core platform stability, and support teams working on migrating libraries, dashboards and tooling.
“Reliance on PHP7 was a particular challenge with this project,” says Thoughtworker Matteo Vaccari, Technical Principal. “To overcome that reliance, we introduced a new architecture with a new programming language, to enable the delivery of next-generation microservices. We also helped Docebo build a platform team that worked on fixing stability problems, and introduced a "port & mend" process to quickly get rid of outdated PHP7 code for the parts of the system that weren’t ready for a complete overhaul.”
Even with multiple teams focused on separate streams of work, there was still a huge amount for us to decommission, migrate and modernize. AI helped make that possible, accelerating and augmenting human productivity throughout the process and enabling teams to focus on more strategic transformation tasks such as:
Helping Docebo move toward a microservices and microlibraries approach.
Conducting API-level testing, unit testing and focused integration testing.
Applying rate limiters and circuit breakers to improve platform resilience and stability.
Ensuring Docebo’s new architecture is modular and future-ready, so its platforms and capabilities can evolve and grow with the company.
The AWS cloud was selected as the ideal scalable foundation for Docebo’s new architecture. Thanks to Thoughtworks’ strategic partnership with AWS, we were able to unlock funding through the AWS Migration Acceleration Program to support Docebo’s migration and modernization journey. AWS supported us throughout the entire process, helping build calculators for the project and providing comprehensive assistance during the funding opportunity submission.
Outcome: Reduced technical debt and a return to startup agility
Docebo’s modernization journey has already yielded impressive results. Significantly reduced technical debt and system complexity. And freed up capacity and resources for product innovation. So far, the team has:
Reduced database response times by 15x for specific queries.
Improved platform throughput by 2x for some workloads.
Cut database pressure by 95%, improving platform stability.
The newly streamlined platform has also helped reduce lead time and time-to-market for new services, enabling Docebo to deliver long-awaited new features and capabilities. One new dashboard was especially well received by the Docebo team, with one team member even saying they feel like they “opened up a new toy on Christmas morning”.
“Right from the start, we could tell that Docebo’s culture was very well aligned with our own,” says Teodora Ivanova, Principal Consultant at Thoughtworks. “We understood their teams, and they understood us and how we work. That enabled us to very quickly help them achieve the results that mattered to them. We broke down barriers, upskilled multiple teams and helped Docebo get back to its agile and innovative roots.”
“We’re really happy we chose to partner with Thoughtworks on this project,” explains Fabio. “Our collaboration has been easy, our teams understand each other, and it’s enabled us to make rapid progress through a highly complex and mission-critical transformation.”
What’s coming next
It’s not just Docebo’s internal teams that benefit from this transformation. New capabilities and higher performance are already creating positive impacts for the company’s customers. When Docebo revealed its new Catalog Management Experience, customer feedback was overwhelmingly positive, including remarks like:
“Hooray! This has been needed for a long time!”
“Truly so excited for this!”
“Outstanding! I love the search enhancement!”
“This is great news, looking forward to trying it out on sandboxes”
“Can you tell how excited we all are?!”
Now, as the project progresses through its next stages and more legacy services are decommissioned, Docebo’s teams will become even more responsive to customer needs and able to roll out powerful new capabilities even faster.
