Mastering product with speed and scale

Springboard’s Chief Product Officer, Kara Sasse, covers the foundations of product — from the speed-quality trade-off, to product roadmaps and managing conflict as a product leader.

Welcome to the Emerge Product-Market Fit Academy series, where we bring you practical insights and advice from the leading operators and founders in edtech. This series is dedicated to helping early stage edtech founders accelerate their path to product-market fit.

Kara Sasse is Chief Product Officer at Springboard, the online learning platform preparing students for in-demand technology careers through mentor- and instructor-led programmes. With a long history in the edtech space, her recent roles include CPO and COO at Knowledge to Practice.

She was one the first employees at EverFi and, as EVP of Product Development, she created and led the curriculum design, product development and customer support teams that built EverFi’s award-winning learning platform. It achieved an annual reach of more than one million students at 5000+ schools and universities across the US and was acquired by Blackbaud in 2021 for $750 million.

Kara Sasse, CPO at Springboard, Venture Partner at Emerge

A veteran of the edtech industry, Kara was also an early employee of Blackboard and spent six years in several global product marketing positions.

Drawing from her expensive experience building edtech products and managing product teams, here she shares her insights on managing limited resources, navigating trade-offs, designing a product roadmap and navigating conflicting inputs into the product vision.

In this article we cover:

1. Balancing speed vs quality in engineering
2. Managing an evolving product roadmap
3. Aligning product roadmaps with business objectives
4. Managing conflict as a product leader

BALANCING SPEED VS QUALITY IN ENGINEERING

In early-stage startups, there is a constant trade-off between speed and quality as you build your product and seek product-market fit — often simultaneously. One tactic Kara recommends is using outsourcing and engineering agencies. They can play an especially important role when a startup needs more time to make key hires, but still needs to move with speed.

When done effectively, outsourcing is not about delegating tasks but engaging in a partnership where the outsourced team becomes an extension of your own. To achieve this, Kara recommends that startups look for agencies that:

• provide a dedicated lead to bridge the gap between the startup’s vision and the agency’s execution
• have teams in a compatible timezone
• you can build trust and share accountability with.

“I was in a smaller stage company where we had one senior developer — no head of engineering. We were looking to extend our engineering resources with a partner.

The traditional model is hiring talent through an agency. The agency places somebody with you, then you’re responsible for everything. It’s not a development team that is thinking about embedding in your product and engineering structure and having joint accountability for those outcomes. I wanted a much more embedded, integrated team — someone that could be a partner versus just talent sourcing.

When you’re building something for the first time, or you have hypotheses, experiments, risks— you want to make sure you have a partner with you.”

Of course, there are some differences in how startups should navigate the speed-quality trade-off, depending on whether they are building B2B or B2C products. Kara has experience building both, and notes that, in B2B, where the sales cycles are elongated, and the stakes on quality are significantly higher, so startups must tread carefully. Initial enterprise clients can inadvertently dictate a B2B startup’s innovation trajectory and this calls for a delicate balance between meeting a specific client’s needs and adhering to the broader product vision, while maintaining speed.

In B2C, the emphasis shifts towards rapid iteration and growth, where customer feedback loops are shorter and the product roadmap can quickly adapt. However, the challenge lies in maintaining this agility without compromising the core value delivered to the customer, a juggling act that requires a strategic mindset and continual customer feedback to build a deep understanding of the pain points your product is solving.

MANAGING AN EVOLVING PRODUCT ROADMAP

A key component of balancing speed and quality is having a strategic roadmap that allows you to understand and assess your priorities at any given moment. However, it is important not to treat a roadmap like a finished product. As startups evolve, the roadmap must evolve with it. Kara outlines four core principles for how to manage the moving parts of a product roadmap as a startup scales.

• Define the intent: always be clear on what the roadmap is meant to achieve. It’s not just about listing features with deadlines; it’s a signal of intent and sequencing, showing where you believe the biggest problems and opportunities lie for the business. Review it regularly and, where necessary, update the intent with every iteration of the roadmap.
• Visualise the strategy: embrace visual tools to communicate the roadmap. Move away from spreadsheets to more engaging representations and clarify the vision and current priorities for the entire team. This makes it easier for them to grasp the long-term vision and how to get there.
• Manage complexity continuously: as the company grows, avoid clutter by maintaining focus on the biggest problems and opportunities. This requires constant re-prioritisation in alignment with the strategic vision. Empower your product leaders with frameworks to make it easier for them to prioritise — and actively review them.
• Communicate changes and rationale: when priorities shift, communicate the reasons with the rest of the team quickly and clearly, to prevent the changes from feeling abrupt or jarring. This approach fosters a culture of transparency and adaptability and avoids team members feeling left behind.

ALIGNING PRODUCT ROADMAPS WITH BUSINESS OBJECTIVES

When building (and re-building) your product roadmap, it’s crucial to avoid siloed teams, as this can lead to divergence between the goals of the product team and the broader key performance indicators (KPIs) of the company. There must be a conscious effort to continually align the product roadmap with a company’s business objectives.

Kara highlights outcome-based roadmapping, an approach that shifts the focus from merely adding features to your roadmap (“feature factory mode”) to achieving specific, valuable outcomes for both the company and its customers. This approach is about asking why you are building something and what you hope to achieve with it, ensuring that every element of the roadmap is tied to tangible results.

• Integrate with the company strategy: begin by linking the roadmap to the company’s strategic plan, which might span six months to a year. This includes identifying key business objectives, such as breaking into the B2B space or acquiring a certain number of users.
• Incorporate KPIs: define clear KPIs that relate to both product and business outcomes. For example, if the goal is to acquire 5,000 new users for a mobile app, determine what product features, enhancements, or marketing strategies can directly contribute to achieving this goal.
• Determine the success metrics: the roadmap must balance advocating for customer outcomes with achieving financial goals. This involves selecting a few key metrics that represent success, and ensuring that product developments are directly contributing to these metrics.

“Product’s job is to be the biggest advocate for the customer outcome — and how that customer outcome translates to financial outcomes for the company.”

• Engage product and engineering teams: these teams should participate in strategic discussions — not just execution, contributing ideas for solutions that align with company goals.
• Make space for experimentation and feedback loops: in early stages or when KPIs are hard to track, prioritise experimentation and direct customer feedback in your roadmap. This approach helps validate hypotheses about user engagement, stickiness, or renewal rates, adjusting the roadmap based on real-world insights.

MANAGING CONFLICT AS A PRODUCT LEADER

Engaging non-product teams in the strategic discussions around the product is critical — but it brings its own challenges when different teams bring diverse perspectives, which often leads to conflicting opinions on product decision. For Kara, encountering strong, conflicting opinions within and across teams is inevitable — and can even be desirable. It demonstrates that you are engaging with a range of individuals in the product strategy.

However, a core challenge for product leaders is effectively managing this conflict. This becomes increasingly crucial as they guide their teams through the complexities of meeting both customer needs and business goals. Kara underlines three key principles for how she approaches clashing opinions on the product direction.

• Empower teams for decision-making: encourage product teams to navigate conflicts independently, promoting autonomy in resolving disagreements. This empowerment is underpinned by a clear understanding of roles and responsibilities, often clarified frameworks and processes such as RACI, which make clear who on the team is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed.
• Effective communication and alignment: articulating the rationale behind decisions, especially those involving de-prioritisation or strategic shifts, is critical in ensuring team alignment. This involves not just stating what changes are made but also why they are necessary, linking back to the overarching business objectives and KPIs.
• “Disagree and Commit”: a pivotal strategy in conflict resolution is the “disagree and commit” philosophy, especially in the early-stage startup world where speed can be a determining factor in a company’s success. This acknowledges the presence of differing viewpoints while emphasising the need for a unified path forward. It’s about making a decision when consensus is unreachable, ensuring progress isn’t stalled by indecision.

“Most of the time you can figure out a way to disagree and commit, amicably and professionally — because, ultimately, you must.”

Ultimately, a product leader’s role in managing conflict is about fostering an environment where decisions are made thoughtfully yet swiftly, while maintaining an understanding across the team of shared goals and outcomes.

SUMMARY

This article encapsulates Kara’s expert strategies for leading product development in the edtech sector. Drawing on her experiences at Springboard, EverFi and Blackboard, Kara shares insights on balancing speed with quality, evolving product roadmaps and aligning projects with business goals. She emphasises the benefits of outsourcing, visual roadmapping, and the importance of a unified team approach through the “disagree and commit” philosophy. Kara’s guidance offers a roadmap for fostering innovation and navigating the complexities of team dynamics and product management in the rapidly evolving environment of early-stage startups.

Emerge is a global pre-seed fund backed by 100+ of the world’s best edtech operators. Our vision is to democratise access to opportunity — by being a catalytic partner for early-stage edtech founders. If that’s you, get in touch and submit your deck on our website.

This article is part of our Product-Market Fit Academy, where we bring you practical insights and advice from our world-leading community of Venture Partners. To keep up to date with our episodes, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Medium, YouTube and Spotify. You can also subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date with our latest insights for early-stage edtech founders.