Finding Product/Market Fit in EdTech
Schools need software that meets their specific needs. Off-the-shelf solutions simply do not gain across the board buy-in by teachers. This leaves teachers and administrators with two options: develop their own software or settle for something that only solves some of their problems. Option 1 is not viable, as schools lack the funds and expertise to develop software in-house. Option 2 is not ideal.
Edtech startups and nonprofits have the know-how to develop technology, but they often lack feedback mechanisms to enable them to iterate effectively through the product development process, i.e. they don’t have real-time input from teachers who would actually be using their product. “Some startups don’t know the classroom well enough to even take a good stab at the MVP (minimum viable product),” states Dreamit managing director Andrew Ackerman. “But many promising edtech startups have someone with classroom experience on their team. The issue is taking something that worked for that one person and generalizing it into something that will work broadly.”
Case Study
Leadership Public Schools faced a problem. About 80% of incoming 9th graders were below grade level in math. To get students up to speed, one teacher named Mike Fauteaux took an old-school approach to personalized learning; he taught small group sessions before and after school and used a spreadsheet to track progress and make personalized learning recommendations. But this was not a scalable solution.
Around the same time, Gooru, an nonprofit edtech firm founded by an ex-Googler and a Stanford engineer and designer, was developing products for teachers to search through a database of millions of learning resources from across the web. The team successfully built the product, but teachers were not adopting the technology; the product did not seem to be in alignment with the teachers’ instructional needs.
Gooru had not built its product with a particular teacher use case in mind, so teachers had to do a lot of thinking and experimenting on their own to figure out how to adapt the technology to their specific teaching styles.
The EdTech Challenge: Aligning Technology with Instruction
Feedback from teachers is a given in edtech, but how that feedback gets incorporated in the development process is critical. The Gooru team had initially been soliciting feedback from teachers after their products had already been developed. They would soon learn that in edtech it is necessary to allow teachers to “play an equal part in the development process” to get figure out product/market fit.
This is not as easy as it sounds. An effective edtech partnership requires many factors to align to create a symbiotic working relationship between the development team and teachers. Eventually, Gooru got this relationship right. These are the three pillars that led to the success of their developer-teacher partnership.
Lesson 1: Let Teaching Guide Product Development
Gooru and LPS began their partnership by agreeing on a set of core design principles to be adhered to through the product develop process; these included priorities such as showing real time data, giving students’ the ability to monitor their own progress, and including non-cognitive skill building such as time-management and goal setting. Note that these design principles did not attempt to alter the teaching practices, but, rather, to transform teaching methods in subtle and manageable ways.
The teams also prioritized flexibility, realizing that there is no one correct way to teach, given the large diversity of teaching styles and contexts. The Gooru/LPS team recognized that teachers would adopt or ignore aspects of the product based on their unique needs. If a teacher doesn’t need the part of Gooru’s product that organizes students into teams, they can simply not use it. Teachers can decide whether or not they want their students to grade each other's exams or to administer real time assessments. The core functionality remains, but the features are optional.
Lesson 2: Build In Rapid and Deep Feedback Loops
Arm’s length feedback is not sufficient in developing edtech products; partnerships thrive with frequent formal and informal communication. Fauteux went to Gooru’s offices twice a week to work with the design team and communicated with someone from the company on almost a daily basis. Note how this relationship is magnitudes more involved than simply having educators as advisors who give feedback on a weekly or bi-weekly basis.
Minor design decisions can have major effects in a classroom environment. If you are not constantly communicating with teachers using a product, you’ll waste time and money developing features that actually negatively affect classrooms. As an example —
When building the assessment features in Gooru, Gooru’s design team programmed the tool to give students immediate feedback on their responses—based on the assumption that immediate feedback would help students learn. But when LPS teachers reviewed the tool, they pointed out that immediate feedback could be problematic if students were working together on a question as part of a class activity because it would reveal the answer before all students had time to work through the problem. With input like this from LPS teachers, Gooru’s design team could better align the learning navigator’s features with teachers’ actual instructional needs.
To incrase the speed of feedback, Fauteux would create a ‘duct-tape prototype’ of the proposed features and have his colleagues test them with their students. This allowed the team to validate assumptions quickly and move on. Designers are not the ones doing the teaching, so it is critical to get this input from someone who knows the answers, i.e. the teachers.
Lesson 3: Prioritize the Partnership
You have to to show teachers that you are willing to invest in a solution over the long-haul because schools have to make significant changes in shifting resources, dedicating time, and utilizing their own social capital to make the changes occur. This is why schools tend to work more with established players. As Erin Griffith put it in Pando, ‘they can’t afford to get burned.’
In terms of funding, Gooru had an advantage over many edtech startups in that it was able to finance development through grants from foundations and from licensing its software to large organizations like Teach for America. Similarly, LPS relied on grant money to execute on this project and would have been unable to pull it off if it only relied on per-pupil funding provided by the state.
For more traditional edtech startups who are still in the process of developing product, it’s important to find schools that are committed to adopting technology. Accelerator programs like Dreamit connect startups with educators who have the autonomy and desire to work with startups. Some schools districts or school zones are given additional budgets to explore edtech solutions. iZone NYC is one such project, designed specifically with the goal of aligning educators with edtech startups.
Conclusion
During the first year of the Gooru implementation, student learning growth in math was 2.82 times the national norm. The two teams successfully collaborated to create a personalized learning product, and Gooru knows that it now has an effective, teacher-ready solution that it can start to actively market to schools.
With a relationship it place, developers can iterate quickly until they achieve product/market fit in actual classrooms.
Charles LaCalle leads recruiting for the Dreamit Ventures accelerator program, which focuses on post-seed digital health and edtech startups. This article is based on a case study developed by the Clayton Christensen Institute. View the full report here.
