How to build a university — the customer-centric way

I remember this very odd moment at the beginning of the year: The CODE team was standing in front of our #firstclass students giving a presentation with lots of announcements to them and I just thought: this kind of event could never have happened at the university I visited.

How did everything start?

I am Eva and professor for product management at CODE. Working in Product Management in several positions over the last years I always found it crucial to develop a deep understanding of the customers and their needs in order to build a product which really solves a problem and which the customers love. And if you recognize that something is not working as expected you need to iterate. When starting at CODE I automatically applied these core principles to my educational work and to build up this university (so do my amazing colleagues).

At the beginning of the year we received lots of feedback about the structure of the study programs, learning formats, organizational stuff, etc. So we sat down together as a team and prototyped several ideas as an answer on the feedback, talked to several students and then presented them on the said day.

Empathize, design, implement, learn

We started to use different methods in order to gather structured feedback enabling us to empathize with our students and make quick iterations:

• Meet regularly with our student representatives (being an important touchpoint for the rest of the students)
• Send out online surveys (also using the NPS to evaluate workshops and seminars)
• Ask for feedback in our personal (every student has a personal mentor throughout their studies) and team mentoring sessions
• Conduct structured interviews

Every feedback is documented, aggregated and analyzed. The findings are spread and discussed within the team(s) regularly to ideate quickly possible solutions or amendments. In most of the cases we discuss solutions with several students first to make sure that we are on the right track. And finally, we implement the preferred solution (measuring its success after a while).

One example:

Guilds — Every week the students of a particular study program are meeting to share updates about their project, to peer-review code, to discuss designs. In the product management guilds we mostly talk about the progress of the team, applied methods and the gathered learnings and possible impediments within the projects. My actual role is to facilitate and moderate the conversation between the students who should give each other feedback. However, if you are new to something, it’s really hard to a) talk about it with confidence and b) give others feedback. Based on the feedback of the product management students (who were not so happy with the Guild format by then), we introduced bi-weekly workshops, which should support the students with topics of their actual project phase, e.g. how to conduct user interviews, how to write user stories etc. We kept the peer-to-peer feedback sessions every second week (got much better over time) and received grateful feedback from the students on the implemented changes.

The CODE way

Our goal is to support our students in learning and to co-create an outstanding learning experience. Therefore we rely heavily on their feedback to continuously iterate our way of teaching and learning. Sounds exhausting? Yes, it is. But it’s worth it and now I think there should be no other way education should work. Since: it’s not about professors with a great reputation, sharing their knowledge on a good-will basis but actually being more interested in doing research and writing papers. It’s about the students and supporting them to build up their competencies and enabling them to apply their knowledge to make a difference and do good for society.