DPLA, Stanford University and DuraSpace are partnering to extend the existing Hydra project codebase and its vibrant and growing community to build, bundle, and promote a feature-rich, robust, flexible platform for digital collections. The project's components including development of best of breed repository platform, a hosted service for the repository, and a suite of metadata aggregation tools designed to support institutions like DPLA's Hubs. This presentation will provide an overview of the project and insight into its design phase, including what we've learned through the process of gathering requirements through surveys, individual interviews, and focus groups.