When I started working on the internship management, I knew it wouldn’t be an easy mission. The goal was clear, to make the internship process less bureaucratic and slow for companies, students, and universities, creating a more seamless and user-friendly experience.

Internships, a nearly mandatory rite of passage for university students, are still wrapped in bureaucratic hurdles and a wide variety of practices. To complicate matters, Brazilian internship legislation is vague, leaving each university free to create its own workflows and routines.

The discovery process was intense. We conducted interviews with hundreds of students, career centers, and companies, aiming to map real pain points and needs. One career center told me how they handled paperwork manually; another had proprietary systems, but poorly integrated; others barely had any digital processes at all.

This variety of scenarios demanded our product to be extremely flexible, able to adapt to each institution’s particularities without losing the ability to scale and serve thousands of users.

We divided the scope into small projects, each with its own feature. The agile methodology allowed us to quickly test hypotheses. We started with wireframes to validate ideas with the engineering team, ensuring feasibility. Next, we created prototypes for usability testing with real users, from students to university managers.

Every feedback was invaluable. We iterated on prototypes, make new tests, and adjusted flows. This cycle repeated for every feature, until the final version was ready for development. After launch, we monitored platform usage through analytics tools in Clarity and Posthog, ensuring the experience truly delivered value.

During this proccess, we create a digital product that was capable of: Receive applications for internships, create all the Brazilian legal documentation for interns inside e outside Brazil, manage contracts and delivery legal student activity reports for the universities.

Today, the system is used by about 30 Brazilian universities, easing the daily lives of more than 500,000 students.

This project was a constant learning process on how to navigate the complexity of legal and cultural processes, be empathetic to diverse realities, and build a product that connects technology and people.

Creating something that fit the unique routine of each university, without losing scalability, was the real achievement.