Building EdTech products that matter: Brad Koch on understanding the future of education through curiosity, creativity, and innovation.

Brad Koch is a profound voice within the EdTech space. With over 30 years of experience in developing and shipping innovative products, Brad has seen the industry’s highs, lows, and transformative shifts. As a seasoned leader, he now heads Koch EdTech Consulting, where he offers strategic insights and practical solutions to bridge the gap between learning and industry needs.

Could you please start by telling us who you are and how you became an EdTech leader?

I’m a product management leader primarily in the EdTech space. I’ve taken a long journey of lifelong learning to get here. I graduated from school with a liberal arts degree in philosophy and immediately did what liberal arts majors do — you go do manual labor or sales until you can get your career moving. That’s when I embarked on a lifelong learning path, getting certified in statistical process control and selling AutoCAD. I jumped into different markets, eventually landing a publishing role at Pearson, where I focused on creating books and assessment preparation materials for technical certifications. That experience in creating content and assessment engines allowed me to transition into product management leadership roles within the LMS space. I then joined a startup called ANGEL Learning here in Indianapolis. We grew from $7 million to $22 million in sales over just a few years. From there, we were acquired by Blackboard, and I ended up leading product management for Blackboard Learn.

I then left Blackboard to take a higher education strategy and product role at Instructure, where I stayed through their IPO. After that, I wanted to travel less, so I took a role back with Blackboard, running their open-source side of things. I was affiliated with a company called Moodlerooms, later renamed Open LMS. You can tell from my gray hair that I’ve been in the EdTech space, either in content, assessment, or building LMSs, for almost 30 years. Recently, I decided to open my own consulting company to pursue a new market that I felt LMS companies were lagging behind in — the intersection of industry, learner, and education. I believe we need a more pragmatic approach to education that offers a faster return on investment for learners. The period between finishing a degree and the rest of one’s life is an underserved area in EdTech.

✨Nothing is free. Each product investment has an ongoing cost; to support, marketing, engineering, and sales. Assuming you don’t have an infinite budget to hire new team members, you’ll need to ensure you’re accounting for the ongoing commitments to maintenance for each new investment. You don’t want to end up in a situation where maintenance consumes 75% of your engineering capacity, leaving only 30% for innovation or market response.

You’ve led or been instrumental in leading products through various stages. What challenges did you face when you started developing a product, and how do they change when you move to a company with a more established and mature product in the market?

When you’re working in product or leading a product organization at a startup, you’re blessedly free from years of code debt, technical debt, and maintenance debt, which you’re not free from in a more mature company. By technical debt and maintenance, I mean that every new feature you add to your environment and every new capability you hand to a client adds work that your company must manage. You have to deliver, continually update the software, and get your support organizations up to speed. Every change, database update, or software modernization requires that all features and integration points be updated. It’s like moving houses — the more you accumulate, the more effort it takes to move. When you’re single-focused with fewer things to manage, the move is easier. The technical debt side of things means that the more you deliver or manage products, the more time you spend ensuring those integrations and products work together as intended, which sometimes means less focus on meeting specific client requirements.

At ANGEL, the focus was entirely on fully understanding client requirements and delivering a product that differentiated us in the market, adding more value than our competitors. At Blackboard, in a growing-by-acquisition environment, a lot of time is spent building integrations with sister companies to maximize the overall company investment. However, during this integration work, you might not move your individual products forward at the same pace as before. You accumulate more technical debt and maintenance because these integrations require attention.

In a bigger environment, especially one growing by acquisition, you lose some of the nimbleness of a startup. The environment becomes more complicated with a mix of hosting methodologies, code bases, and messaging, all pressured by the board of directors to create synergy across all these companies. Sometimes synergy exists, sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s always expensive to leverage. This incurs costs in real development time, opportunity costs in developing core applications, and ongoing maintenance costs. If resources don’t grow at the same pace as your maintenance budget, your innovation budget lags.

✨Integrations cost more. Technical due diligence is often done in a superficial manner during financial modeling for mergers, integrations, or partnerships. Be clear that integrations and product line migrations consume more resources in the short run.

Was there a moment when you had to steer the wheel in a very different way in terms of the product roadmap?

Yeah, there have been times in my career when we’ve had to make fundamental changes in our direction due to market conditions and technical debt. In one case, our acquisition and integration into a larger organization dramatically increased the maintenance percentage of our engineering budget. When you think of an engineering budget, you have talented engineers working to build solutions for client problems, which can be categorized into innovation, maintenance, and modernization. I’ve been in situations where maintenance consumed up to 70% of our engineering capacity, leaving only 30% for innovation. This diminishes your market story because you’re spending so much effort maintaining existing features and capabilities. Additionally, there’s the challenge of having the discipline to turn off old features that aren’t heavily used, which is another expense and consideration.

✨Hire for curiosity. When hiring for Product Management roles, I value curiosity, creativity, and a lot of analytical discipline. You have to be curious about what’s happening in the market, what people need, and what they’re doing. You have to be able to ask why repeatedly to get to the bottom of why people want something, what they’re trying to achieve with it, and how it helps them.

Are product people involved early in the stages of some potential integration or merger, so they can be aware of the potential consequences before hitting roadblocks?

It would be ideal if companies conducted technical due diligence at a high level of proficiency early on, but I have yet to experience that consistently. At the board or C-suite level, decisions tend to be vision-focused, with the mindset of addressing problems as they arise. This can lead to insurmountable challenges that damage the company’s mission. Often, decisions are pitched like a movie in an elevator: “This is going to be like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off meets Jaws.” Meanwhile, product people are thinking, “The shark can’t live on land. We’re going to encounter problems with this vision quickly, and we need to address them soon.”

Teams that do financial modeling for mergers, integrations, or partnerships almost never account for the compounded effects of technical debt and integration challenges. When companies merge, they typically centralize marketing, financial, and other functions. However, a generalized service will never be as effective as a specific service it replaces. Over time, they might get there, but integrating two companies takes more resources in the short term, not less. There’s no such thing as free synergy or free cross-selling — there’s work to be done to integrate platforms, and it requires significant short-term investment.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that you cannot have benefits by acquiring a company because you might have an alignment on value proposition or go-to-market capabilities. There might be beneficial and synergetic things, but that doesn’t mean you’ll need to assume you’re going to be integrating products.

That’s right. At Blackboard, an example of an acquisition that really worked out well was when Blackboard acquired Ally, the accessibility software. It didn’t duplicate any existing features and had a significant new capability that the market cared about, providing a clear benefit to the client base. Conversely, Blackboard acquiring WebCT, ANGEL Learning, and Moodlerooms resulted in no net gain for the market. Instead, there was a decrease in competition and a stifling of innovation, offering no significant win for the market or the consumers of those products.

✨Get a mentor. If you’re trying to improve your analytical skills, finding a mentor is crucial. Be creative when analyzing data — think about different ways to organize, categorize, or sort it. Early in my career, I was lucky to have colleagues who would say, “We want to see at least these three data points in your product management decisions.” But I would show up with seven data points instead of three.

What do you consider your greatest accomplishment?

I’ve had a lot of success developing and shipping products, but as I’ve gotten older, the things I’m most proud of are my maturation as a leader, which I can look back and see occurring over time. I think the thing I’m proudest of is the people I’ve had the chance to develop and champion, watching their careers and professional skills grow, and seeing them succeed in the market. That brings me the most joy in my work right now: helping people achieve their goals while they’re working toward meeting the larger company and market goals.

✨Try to prove yourself wrong. When evaluating a market, use academically valid sources of data with the goal of challenging your assumptions. I rely on academically rigorous industry surveys and reports. For example, for Higher Education research I’ll count on Quality Matters CHLOE reports, and spend time on Google Scholar, and checking UNESCO’s resources. These core research sources are worth reading and can provide a heads-up on what’s happening in the market.

On that note as well, what are the traits or the skills that a company should be looking for in a product leader?

I’m going to start with curiosity. You have to be curious about what’s happening in the market, what people need, and what they’re doing. You have to be able to ask why repeatedly to get to the bottom of why people want something, what they’re trying to achieve with it, and how it helps them. So, I look for curiosity, some creativity, and a lot of analytical discipline. When you’re on the front end of a product organization, you’re gathering input from clients, the market, and competitive intelligence. There’s a lot of information flowing into the top of that funnel. You need to synthesize all that information to create a cohesive set of requirements that you can effectively prioritize in terms of importance and sequence, supporting your business goals and allowing you to ship software sooner rather than later.

✨Take a broader view. If you elevate your mission to, “My job isn’t to recreate the classroom online, my job is to educate humans in the most effective way I can,” you open up more opportunities. Start by conducting market research around the return on investment of education, the impact of certification, industry demands, relative pay for technical certifications, and similar areas.

What advice would you give to someone trying to develop that analytical discipline?

I think finding someone willing to mentor you is crucial. When you’re looking at the data, be creative in terms of how you can slice it, recategorize it, or sort it. I was fortunate that early in my career, I had colleagues who would say, “We want to see at least these three data points in your product management decision.” Being me, I would show up with seven data points instead of three. Over time, you start realizing through workflows and other experiences which data points are the most valuable and which ones help you get to the right answer for what your product mix should be.

For example, when building consensus around prioritization, we conduct ranking exercises across all our constituents — customer support, sales, our client base, marketing, product, and DevOps. Everyone has a different perspective on what’s most important. We might rank things one through five and then look for areas of big disagreement. If your DevOps team says, “This is the most important thing we have,” but sales doesn’t care about it, as a product manager, you better ask why it’s so important to DevOps. If the answer is, “Your application will break in six months if you don’t do this,” then that item goes near the top of the priority list.

By building consensus and identifying areas of disagreement, and probing deeply, the whole team understands why something is important or ranked where it is. This alignment reduces “I don’t know why I’m working on this instead of that” background chatter, improving productivity and ensuring people feel they’re working on things that matter. When product management, engineering, and DevOps are aligned, you get better work from everyone — they fully understand what’s going on and work together well.

✨You can’t do everything. Pursuing new initiatives will also require stopping old ones. You might receive requests for better product telemetry, to see what features are actually being used, and to find enhancements that improve efficiency. The first step is aligning everyone around a broader vision and continuously asking, “Why are we doing this?” Figuring out the next steps is often the hardest part.

In terms of secondary research or third party information, what sources do you use to stay current?

I take advantage of highly vetted and peer-reviewed academic research. You can run lots of surveys yourself, but, for example, I use Quality Matters. They publish market-standard information and data regularly. That research is done in an academic, rigorous way. The data they gather is clearly identified, where it came from, how it was gathered, the methodology, and the products are peer-reviewed. My internal team does surveys based on that or uses other research papers done by PhDs who surveyed thousands of people. Their results are likely better than our own surveys. So, yes, I rely on industry academic surveys and reports. I spend time on Google Scholar, and use UNESCO’s resources. These core research sources are worth reading and can provide a heads-up on what’s happening in the market.

✨Create a coalition. Product Managers need to partner with and take the entire company with them as they chart a roadmap. Marketing, Engineering, DevOps, Sales, Design and Finance should all be clear on the vision and direction of the company. This collaboration clarifies what’s important to figure out, what’s important to say, and what’s important to communicate. If you don’t know why your product is going to matter to the market, you probably shouldn’t build it.

Speaking specifically about the LMS, which is a big part of your expertise, how do you see the LMS as a product today?

We’re at an inflection point. Ten to twelve years ago, the LMS was about recreating the physical classroom online to support a blended learning environment where students could access materials off-campus. This was the initial use, but COVID-19 and other factors have pushed it into full-time use, with big online schools growing. However, the market for simply recreating the physical classroom has reached its end. Now, the focus is on more engaging content and other enhancements, but it’s still the same basic model.

What I’m seeing in the market is happening at a higher level. There’s a danger for LMS companies and the institutions they serve because the market is shifting behind them. If you continue to see yourself as just an LMS company, you’ll get stuck. But if you see yourself as a facilitator of skill acquisition, you break out of higher education and into lifelong learning. This challenges your models.

The market is shifting because higher education has become prohibitively expensive for many, especially in North America. The return on investment for higher education may not justify the cost. People are looking for less expensive ways to improve their education, employment prospects, and lives. The market is moving toward a B2C model where learners have more control and power, and content providers can offer content directly to learners without going through educational institutions.

A prime example is the rush to get trained in AI. If you’re pursuing that education and you’re not still in college, it will come from Google, OpenAI, or Microsoft, not from your local university. Those skills are industry-related. So learners and content providers will have more control. Learners will own their education’s output directly, including digital certificates and proof of skills. This shifts control from institutions to learners, who won’t need to request transcripts from their institutions. Instead, they’ll have their achievements and proof of knowledge at their disposal.

If you’re focused on polishing an LMS to better replace a physical classroom, you’re adding features that don’t deliver significant value. But if you think about engaging with learners throughout their lives, offering one-to-one consumer relationships, your total addressable market expands immensely. Everyone needs to learn something, and if you provide educational opportunities in an accessible and affordable way, you advance the conversation and education of humans.

Legacy LMS vendors and institutions aren’t meeting the new market requirements. Private equity and investment focus on growing markets, and EdTech is growing at 15% compounded annually. This includes everything beyond higher education, like corporate learning and lifelong adult learning. If you’ve built a great replacement for the physical classroom but can’t see beyond that, you risk missing new market opportunities. You must think of your platform as a toolset that educates humans.

Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma discusses this issue and remains relevant despite being over 30 years old. That book has been on my bookshelf for a long time and is still on the money.

What’s your take on the impact of AI on this industry in particular?

I think there are certainly technical leaders in this space, such as Khan Academy, and their Khanmigo initiative is amazing. However, most AI efforts are currently focused on low-hanging fruit. For example, creating a course in an hour might sound impressive, but the quality is likely to reflect the rapid development time. There will be some growing pains as we figure out where AI makes the most sense.

From a personalized learning standpoint, AI’s ability to evaluate text streams could provide meaningful feedback to learners and assist teachers in helping students understand concepts better. AI’s role in education will continue to grow. However, current LMS implementations mostly incorporate low-level AI features, like generating quiz questions or setting up classes on simple topics.

As AI improves, we might see a shift in the EdTech industry, with some companies hesitating to make significant investments until AI’s capabilities are clearer. Personally, I use AI daily for its strengths, such as overcoming writer’s block. It might produce a C-grade output, but editing that to an A is easier than starting from scratch.

AI’s rise will place a premium on core educational skills like critical thinking, comprehension, and writing. The quality of your query directly impacts the quality of AI’s response. Without strong foundational skills, you might struggle to ask effective questions and get valuable answers.

I owe my philosophy professor a thank you for making me think through difficult things.

Let’s talk about this moment in your career, the services you provide, and how you can help companies right now.

I launched a consulting company, creatively named Koch EdTech Consulting. I offer fractional product leadership, helping organizations develop product strategies, establish effective product management practices, and train or upscale their existing product managers cost-effectively.

The calls I’ve received during my first 30 days tend to focus on strategic roadmap reviews. Having 30 years of experience, companies often ask me to review their product plans to ensure they make sense. I also assist with new product category launches, particularly in the context of shifting educational experiences towards more consumer-centric models.

Additionally, I provide consulting services to review existing strategies, focusing on the intersection of learners, industry, and education. My goal is to shorten the gap between obtaining a degree and securing a job. We should simplify this transition for everyone, ensuring that industry hiring processes are clear about the skills they need and that learners can effectively present their skills to potential employers. There’s plenty of work to be done in this area.

How do you get an edge as an LMS product in the teaching and learning space, given that it’s a very mature market?

I think it’s about refining your strategy and vision statement so that you don’t limit yourself to being just an LMS company. If you elevate your mission to, “My job isn’t to recreate the classroom online, my job is to educate humans in the most effective way I can,” you open up more opportunities. Start by conducting market research around the return on investment of education, the impact of certification, industry demands, relative pay for technical certifications, and similar areas.

As an educational technology company, you can then say, “We’ve got the LMS. How can we help our client institutions maintain a meaningful relationship with their alumni?” For example, why are alumni turning to Coursera for lifelong training instead of returning to their alma mater? In my conversations, the answers to that question have ranged from “we just hadn’t thought about it yet” to more trivial reasons. Ensuring you view yourself as solving a broader problem and not restricting your scope allows you to explore adjacent markets effectively.

Let’s say you have every LMS product leader in the world in the same room right now. What would you tell them is the most important practical advice for refining this strategy when you’re so consumed by the day-to-day?

Part of it is leading and helping them discover how the market is changing. Rather than dictating, show up and ask the important questions: “How is the market evolving? What do lifelong learning and client engagement mean for us?” If everyone arrives at a consensus, you can start implementing small changes that don’t overburden the team, allow you to ship early and often, and measure the success of those changes.

Pursuing new initiatives will also require stopping old ones. You might receive requests for better product telemetry, to see what features are actually being used, and to find enhancements that improve efficiency. The first step is aligning everyone around a broader vision and continuously asking, “Why are we doing this?” Figuring out the next steps is often the hardest part.

For example, making it easy for the LMS to push skills into LinkedIn might seem straightforward, but it’s worth investigating its feasibility. Small, impactful changes can make a big difference over time. Remember, no one changes the game in a single moment; breakthroughs come from consistent, gradual refinement and changes over years.

And what would be good advice for both product and marketing teams and leaders?

I would say to product people, “marketing is your friend.” As much time as you spend listening to the market and figuring it out, you need to take marketing with you on that journey. In these conversations around vision and problem-solving, asking why, your product marketing person needs to be in the room with you.

Marketing teams in EdTech often lack context around the problems they’re trying to solve. How important is having a shared vision and understanding of what you’re trying to achieve?

It’s crucial, for sure. The ideal client profile worksheet you see people doing can feel a bit rote and painful. But I like making product managers and product marketing work on it together because it helps them jointly nail down what’s important. This collaboration clarifies what’s important to figure out, what’s important to say, and what’s important to communicate. If you don’t know why your product is going to matter to the market, you probably shouldn’t build it.

Read more!, Growth experts insight you.

The EdTech Mentor Interview Series.

Conversations with the product, marketing, and startup leaders shaping the EdTech space.

The EdTech Mentor is a 27zero publication. Let’s start a transformative EdTech marketing conversation today.