Where do you see the next innovations in education coming from?

Next in our series of edtech thought leader Q&As is this conversation with Rowena Hackwood, Chief Executive Officer at Astrea Academy Trust, a family of 29 schools across South Yorkshire and Cambridgeshire with a proven track record of school improvement.

It was great to be able to get the perspective of a MAT leader as it’s something both edtech and MIS suppliers need to have at the heart of their product strategy. In this interview we talk about:

• What drives Rowena and her work in education
• Her approach to taking on a MAT, and what’s involved in the first 6 months as a new MAT CEO
• The most important factors when looking at edtech solutions across her MAT, and the biggest issues
• Innovation across the edtech sector as a whole, and what she’d like to see tackled by suppliers

We’ve split the interview into four parts to make it easier to digest. Enjoy!

I’m loving the Google 3D animals that you can create life-size versions of in your home.  What a great use of augmented reality and a good way to pass a bit of time/do a bit of home learning under lockdown! The goal of Augmented Reality is for the digital world to blend into a person’s perception of the real world, not as a simple display of data, but through the integration of immersive sensations which are perceived as natural parts of an environment.

The big difference between Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) is the users’ perception:

• In VR the users’ perception of reality is completely based on virtual information.
• In AR, the user is provided with additional computer-generated information that enhances their perception of reality.

So where are examples of AR being used to good effect in business?

Furniture

Companies like Wayfair are putting it to good use by allowing you to see their furniture in your home via their app

Home décor

Dulux are doing something similar within their Dulux Visualizer app, allowing you to pick a colour from anywhere and see how it would look painted on your walls.

Beauty

Cosmetics brands are getting in on the act. For example, L’Oreal Paris allow you to try on make up, new hair colours, eyebrows and much more.

There are lots of fun apps too which often combine augmented reality experiences with gaming.

But what about education? Where does AR belong in the classroom?

It offers ‘learning by doing’ and generally requires very little tech (a tablet and app are usually sufficient) so I’d love to see some real-life examples of it working with learners.

All suggestions welcome in the comments 🙂

P.S. If you want to give the 3D animals a go, you just need to google the animal and then scroll down to the ‘meet the life size version’ box to get going. As far as I’m aware you can find 3D versions of the animals below:

• Alligator
• Angler fish
• Ball python
• Brown bear
• Cat
• Cheetah
• Deer
• Dog (bulldog, pomeranian, Labrador retriever, rottweiler, pug)
• Duck
• Eagle
• Emperor penguin
• Giant panda
• Goat
• Hedgehog
• Horse
• Leopard
• Lion
• Macaw
• Octopus
• Raccoon
• Shark
• Shetland pony
• Snake
• Tiger
• Turtle
• Wolf

I have worked with many CEOs who say the trouble with strategizing is that is all that happens.  They want action!

People can procrastinate around the strategy.  In many cases, boards are reluctant to spend money if there are potential questions unanswered. As Donald Rumsfeld said “known unknowns”.

However, as with a lot of situations in business, how do you know what is the right amount of information to make a decision?  You’re never going to know everything at the beginning and, like the rest of the product process, you will continue to iterate the strategy as you have more information and realign.

So why is it important to have a strategy?

A product strategy is essential to product execution and achieving the product’s business goals.

A strategy lays out a plan on how that goal will be achieved. Without a product strategy, product execution is often haphazard. You risk moving from one crisis to the next – or from one deal to the next, as you will be redirected by the different priorities of your internal stakeholders.

If you do not own the strategy, communicate it and get buy-in from all your stakeholders, everyone else will set a strategy in their heads. It will become hard to own the direction of your solution(s). This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be listening to all stakeholders, but you need to own the strategy and direction of your solution.

Remember you are the CEO of your Products!!

Throughout many years of working with different companies, it is amazing how many people say the product sells itself. Yet the truth in many cases is:

• The solution has cost far more than it had to because they didn’t truly understand their market needs, so compensated by building everything a customer wants.
• They had no control on costs and this means no control on profit
• The price normally was too low, as no understanding of the competition or value was understood
• The product was not used to its full potential, so customers didn’t understand the true benefit
• The business doesn’t understand the value of the solution, so direction of where the business is going is organic, with no true vision.

Getting the Product culture right

This is where Product Managers are able to add value to a company. They drive the commercial success of a product and lead the cross functional teams to deliver a solution that meets the needs of customers and drives the greatest growth for the business. It is an important organisational role that:

• Sets the Vision and Strategy for the business solutions,
• Communicates the roadmap
• Defines the feature definition for a product or product line.
• (The position may also include marketing, forecasting, and profit and loss (P&L) responsibilities. In many ways, the role of a product manager is similar in concept to a CEO of a solution)

Product managers provide the deep product expertise needed to lead the organisation and make strategic product decisions which is why they analyse market and competitive conditions. They lay out a product vision that is differentiated and delivers unique value based on customer needs. The role spans many activities from strategic to tactical and provides important cross-functional leadership most notably between engineering, marketing, sales, and support teams.

The Product Manager needs to lead cross-functional teams from a product’s conception all the way through to its launch. Therefore, they are the person responsible for defining the Why? When and What? of the product that the engineering team builds – and it’s ultimate success.

I have now been working with a number of companies across the Edtech market for over 18 years. The one thing that always inspires me is the innovative, engaging companies that want to get it right.

However, there are a number of companies that just do not understand the Education market.  And so, while they may have a great solution, they are not really working on their Product Strategy and how they need to adapt to a market where relationships and advocates are essential to strong growth and success.

The Education market is unique in many ways to other private sector markets and as an Edtech company you need to be able to talk the right language and work in a slightly different way. If I was a MAT or a school there should be 3 key things I would be looking for in a company, never mind the solution they are selling to me.

Relationship

Does this company want to work in partnership?  This means not going missing, once you have sold to a school or MAT.

A School is an exceedingly busy place with lots of challenging priorities for peoples time. The person in the office could be putting a plaster on a knee one minute and then dealing with the police on a bullying incident the next. But ultimately the children come first, not embedding a solution. A school needs support throughout this process and then ongoing support with new functionality and getting the most out of a solution.

Just because a school is paying for a solution doesn’t mean they are using it, eventually a school will stop paying and never go back. As a company stay in touch, help out!!

Also there are companies that can add support which are local to schools, engage with them to help make the most of a solution.

What the solution does now

Many schools don’t have the time to do an audit on their solutions, but I suggest they should. Remember, a solution is there to support a need.

Schools should look at their own processes and ask the question:

• Can this be done better via a technical solution or by a different solution?
• Are my incumbent solutions really meeting our needs anymore?
• Are our needs the same as a bigger school down the road? if not consider looking at lighter solutions or a reduction in cost due to the amount of the solution you are using.
• For the need that the solution meets, is the cost acceptable, is there an alternative?

Needs change along with your ambitions, so should companies to meet your needs.

The Future

Technology and challenges in schools are changing at a rapid pace. As a school or MAT you need to be comfortable that the Edtech partners you have are able to rise to this challenge.

To this end, I would be asking the companies you are working with for a view on their vision. Where they see the Edtech market moving towards, and how they are going to meet these future challenges for schools and MATs.

Gain an understanding of are they nimble or slow, will they let you down in the future? Will they listen to you and help find solutions to your needs in the future?

I am sure there are many other things a school or MAT is looking for in a company, when they are dealing with them, let me have your thoughts?

In Systems engineering and Requirements engineering, a Non-Functional Requirement (NFR) is a requirement that specifies criteria that can be used to judge the operation of a system, rather than specific behaviours. Previously this would be mainly Architecture of the system. For example: Scalability, Accessibility, Capacity. These are all still important, however, it should be about more than this in a SaaS world!

Why do I think this is far more important then ever to get right? From an Architecture perspective, you need to get this right or you will have heavy costs fixing issues in the future. But more importantly you should be setting out to the business what are your expectations of the overall customer experience. You have to remember that software is not a solution on its own, everything from the purchasing journey to the training journey and how you are going to support your customers, are also part of the overall solution, and getting this right will retain customer loyalty.

When thinking of your NFR, think about the experience you want your customers to have and draw out all these journeys, so that every area of the business is aware of their responsibility.  Some questions to ask are:

• Are we going to offer free trials? If so, how are we going to support them? What do we need from development, sales, pre-sales, marketing?
• What is the work flow for customers to purchase? Do we have Account Managers selling? Are we expecting customers to purchase from a portal? Who across the business needs to be involved?
• Are we going to do all training online? Will this be self service? Do we have partners who need to train the software? Are we going to sell the environments?  Who across the business needs to be involved?
• How are we going to support our customers, once they are trained and on-board?

There are many more questions, but all of them will have a potential impact on the overall solution (incl. Architecture) and customer satisfaction. Once you have been through this exercise, most NFRs will be the same for subsequent solutions. But always review the NFRs and learn how you can make the solution better.

According to McKinsey, if a software company grows at only 20%, it has a 92% chance of ceasing to exist within a few years.

This means that software companies – particularly SaaS companies – must look at every advantage possible to stay alive in an ever-competitive market.

Remember it is the small margins that can be the deciding factor as to how successful you are.

Customer analytics can be just one way that gives you that competitive edge.

Whether it is measuring retention, product usage, or on-boarding, SaaS businesses must have comprehensive data collection and usage analytics. This enables them to make agile decisions as to the priorities and direction of their overall solution.

When starting a project, make sure that usage analytics are part of the initial NFRs (Non-Functional Requirements).  Think about: what information do you want to understand and act upon.

Ask your stakeholders what information would they find useful to support their business area so they can offer the best service they possibly can.

Ensure the Architect and development lead build in these analytics from the beginning – you want the feedback at every opportunity.

A “Persona” is a fictional representation of an actual user and is applied in the early stages of product development or product redesign.

Personas are vital to the success of a product because they drive design decisions by taking common user needs and bringing them to the forefront of planning before design has actually started. Personas provide the team with a shared understanding of users in terms of goals and capabilities.

The Benefits of Persona Development

If you don’t think Personas are worth the trouble, think again. Benefits include:

Personas give stakeholders an opportunity to discuss critical features of a redesign: This is especially helpful when you have multiple stakeholders with different ideas about what needs to be developed first. Using Personas to walk stakeholders through common interactions unveils frustrations and pain-points that will help clarify actual user priorities over the stakeholder’s personal wish list.

They help team members share a consistent understanding of the user group: Personas take data and make the stories more compelling and fun, thus making them easier to remember and consider when the team is working towards a solution – together.

Personas help designers develop informed wireframes and site architecture: Since Personas focus on the needs of the users, the team can walk through scenarios and determine optimal placement of content to specifically support the goal of the product. This is vital to the success of a website or application, and will save your client thousands in budget and/or man-hours reworking a product after it’s launched (and “officially” tested by actual users).

Personas provide a “face” to the user story, creating more empathy and understanding about the person using the product: This prevents designers and developers from applying their own mental models to the product design which may not align with actual user needs.

I am interested in what Product Leaders think makes a good Product Manager? And what is your way of identifying a good Product Manager?

I am constantly asked what makes a great Product Manager and what do I look for. I am a great believer that a strong Product Manager is the CEO of their solution. They need to get involved in all aspects, from inception to launch, and then in-life management.  It’s for this reason that I am a strong believer in ‘You hire for attitude, train for skill’. If someone has the right behaviours then you can teach them the skills to be a great product manager. I have learnt over many years that a title doesn’t make the person good at their role.

My approach to interviewing is that the first interview is to understand the candidate’s personality. So I tend to ask myself:

• Can they fit into the team dynamic? (If you want to disrupt the ‘status quo’ to strengthen then that is OK too)
• What does their personality bring to the team that is currently missing?
• Do I think they can work within a team, yet be focused enough to work on their own and drive the solutions that they will be managing?
• Are they tenacious and can they prove this?
• Have they got the right social skills to be able to work with a number of disciplines around the company? They will need to be able to communicate and influence different types of people.
• Are they someone that thrives on ownership and responsibility?

Using this approach means they get to know mine and the company’s expectations. And at the same time, this 1-2-1 personal approach to the first interview allows the candidate to understand if the company is the right fit for them.