The education technology industry could be doing a better job serving the needs of educators and students. Most school districts rely on federal and state funds to purchase software programs, yet 65% of these software licenses go unused according to Learn Trials. This figure suggests that either educators are not leveraging these programs to their potential or that edtech products are failing meet their promises -- or a combination of both.
I’m fortunate to work at a company that takes seriously the mission to deliver academic results for educators. We believe that a relentless focus on building products that maximize student growth will naturally lead to positive financial outcomes. Having that mindset, though, has required a thorough examination and rethinking of every aspect of our product development process.
I recently spoke at the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) Summit about our journey and the four-stage process we employ to ensure our products lead to exceptional student growth. Below are the highlights of that process.
Opportunity Selection
There are no shortage of challenges in today’s schools. And, educational leaders are inundated by the vast and growing number of choices in software programs available in the market. Ensuring a winning product in the market requires not only validation of product-market fit, but just as critical is alignment to an organization’s core competencies and their mission.
We start with a crisp framework for deciding which products and features to build. The framework helps us to triage opportunities based on their market attractiveness, product complexity, and alignment to our mission. A product council vets these opportunities (which can be submitted by anyone in the organization) and further vets selected opportunities until the value proposition is succinct. By having organizational agreement on this framework, we’ve stayed true to our promise of shipping products that yield exceptional student growth.
Concept Validation
Once we’ve decided on which products to pursue, we commit (limited) design and research resources to validate the solution concept. Initially, this consists of customer interviews to flush out pain points and solution characteristics. Then, we rely on surveys to identify feature sets that make a viable product. Finally, we leverage mock sale presentations, with real prospects, to gauge the likelihood that a customer will purchase our solution.
Conducting this research at scale required forming new habits and a true culture of curiosity. We established customer advisory groups to enable ongoing and impromptu feedback on design and ideas. We developed competencies in running ad hoc focus groups at conferences and collecting inexpensive quantitative research through a survey engine. Most importantly, we learned that by having these research capabilities in place we are able to test ideas frequently while keeping the costs manageable.
Usability Testing
The root cause of many failed edtech implementations is that teachers find the programs difficult to use. According to a one district administrator I just spoke with last week, “Your program can have the best content in the world, but if it takes an hour to set up a class, teachers won’t use it.”
Fine tuning products prior to launch by conducting usability research is at the heart of our development process. Our approach to usability consists of having users attempt to complete a list of tasks with little or no guidance. We hypothesize about the approach and estimate the amount of time it should require to complete these tasks. In order for a feature to be declared “ready to ship”, 90% of those in our usability study must successfully navigate a workflow in a reasonable amount of time.
Beta Program
Educators make large investments in time, effort and money when implementing a new digital program across their school or district. We view these educators as our partners, and it is our responsibility to facilitate successful implementations by anticipating their needs. As such, the final step in our product development lifecycle is a beta program that all new products are required to undergo before we release to market.
Our beta program is designed to test the cohesiveness of our entire offering. It enables us to flush out unanticipated issues with the onboarding of large customers. It provides us with a venue to test professional development and our support and onboarding processes. Most importantly, it allows us to measure the efficacy of new products to ensure our promise of students’ academic growth.
Installing these changes to our product development process has not been easy, and have not been free. Our usability and beta programs have extended the timeline for a new product to reach the market, which is a tough concession for any business. We’ve had to create new status reporting metrics and dashboards, gain internal buy-in on release criteria, develop our employee skill sets in market research practices, and most importantly, transfer the control from us to our customers in deciding when a product is ready to launch.
Our education system is not in need of more products. It is in need of better products that drive student outcomes.