The digital journey of a non-technical CEO (I)
TL; DR
In a series of different articles, I will narrate my endeavour as a non-technical CEO. Our company aims to challenge the industry with meticulously thought out digital insertions to enhance and deliver the best learning experience for our students. That sounds awesome, disruptive and “unicorny” but reality is much harsher, especially to a CEO who actually thought the framework Django was spelled Jungle (shame on me!). It is however a jungle out here, and hopefully you’ll find my learning journey, in the least, amusing.
As this is my inaugural post on Medium, I’ve decided to announce it point-blank: “I might be the least technical CEO any tech startup has ever had”. However, for that exact reason I believe there is a lot that I can share about this journey that might resonate with the people who are currently working — or trying to — in tech without having a technical background. And hopefully this can become a full series of posts through which you’ll be able to understand the nuances of what we are doing here at Edify Education and how we’ve become the most disruptive Edtech in the English Language Learning environment.
Who are we?
For those who may not yet understand what we do: we are a one-stop-shop in English Language Learning solutions for PreK and K12 public and private schools in Brazil. We have developed a bilingual solution integrated with the Brazilian core curriculum through which we will be able to make this generation, a bilingual one. Our current client base comprises around 250 schools and 60k students as of today all across the country (when we launched in 2017, we had 3k students mainly in Rio de Janeiro). We are an Education company focused on delivering a seamless learning experience to our students and that means combining online and print (and many times a whole bunch of props) to foster the best in class learning journey, because there is still much need for offline within our classrooms in Brazil.
Having said that, offering students aged 2–17 an omnichannel English learning experience is a huge challenge, hence my need to put down “on paper” what we’ve done so far and some of the challenges we’ve faced throughout this last year.
Team and Organizational Structures
First of all, I cannot emphasize enough how spot on Jim Collins’ “First who, then what” sentence is. Now, product development has become more of a science and a recurring process of understanding client’s needs and converting them into product features than breakthrough a-ha moments. This means we never know exactly what we are building up until the moment our clients say they love it and can’t live without it. And we need very special people (Discovery Product Managers and Designers) to take our clients through this discovery journey. Then, we need an adequate — please note I haven’t said perfect — organizational structure so that they’ll be able to design features and communicate in the best possible way with their developing teams. We have operated with 3 different team structures in one year, because we are still trying to find the optimal way towards a high-performing technology organization. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes!
Clear digital strategy — why are we doing it?
With the best team in place, it is important that we have very clear beliefs on the part digital plays within our curriculum and the pedagogy behind it. Our main belief as an education company is that students and teachers’ digital experience must be meaningful. And where does digital add the most value in Education?
Undoubtedly by enabling us to personalize in scale, in the B2B delivery but also in the student level. That means offering our partner schools a great deal of possible combinations of content and services to make sure each school gets their value for money and deliver what we promise parents fluency in English without having to go to an afterclass learning center. In order to do that, we must deliver an omnichannel, seamless, meaningful experience to teachers and students, where digital products come to play in the personalization arena.
That strategy must be amply communicated to all employees but especially all PMs — Discovery and Delivery, here we work with a dual track strategy — must be not only aware but committed to delivering such an experience.
MMC: measuring, managing and communicating
The very next step would be choosing great tools to manage collaboration between teams and checking in constantly on how Stories are flowing from one team to the next. Being completely honest about it, for us it actually means that for a little while our CTO, Product Lead and UX Lead were reading a sample of all the stories coming their way. Challenging, yes, but this dull endeavor has been the way we found most effective in order to give them instant feedback and act on what’s not running line clockwork within the production line. Tools are here to help us out: Shortcut, WayDev are guiding us through the darkness and helping us see the gaps we must address when managing towards a high performing tech team.
On the communication front, I also cannot stress enough the importance of release notes that actually mean something to the Operations, Sales and other teams in the organization. This is most definitely one of our greatest challenges in a traditionally non-tech industry. To be able to communicate what’s been done to the rest of the company means to be able to communicate it properly to our customers, and to deliver greater value to them in the end. This is one of the reasons why our Product Structure lies underneath our CMO — probably a topic for a whole new Medium article. Even so, we are still a looong way of doing this perfectly.
The data frontier
Last but not least, the silver bullet of any digital transformation process: DATA! One of the most repeated phrases in management “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it” (or “If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it”) means the world in tech. The sky is the limit for data in tech, and still we have to force ourselves to use it when making product decisions. For companies that are digital natives, this goes without saying, but for us, it has been a major cultural shift. Education is an industry in which measuring for learning seems obvious and yet it is a hassle to do it in scale and to tackle the gaps that appear within our students learning journeys.
We have been dwelving into the Assessment world and have come across the differences in measuring learning x measuring for learning. We want data to help us, educators, tackle the challenges each student is facing in developing a specific skill. Measuring is not the aim in itself but a tool to show us the way towards a more successful learning journey for our students.
Having said that, teachers are eager to cross that bridge and measure for learning instead of measuring with the sole objective of filling in a report card. And Edify is here to help them through it. And, if the next frontier in Education is acessibility and personalization, there is no running from huge datalakes and AI, which has to be a pillar of a decent digital transformation process.
Digital transformation is all about the journey and it is definitely NOT one size fits all. There is no clear path to success and whatever company preaching a “sugar, spice and all things nice” digital transformation experience is either doing it wrong or not doing it at all. For me, personally, it has been an amazing experience to manage such an amazing Product/Tech team here at Edify. It has been a transformational experience to say the least. Word of advice: if you’re not an adrenaline junkie, do not engage.
