Why won’t they buy my amazing product?

Because you have built it for yourself, not for your customer’s needs!

As a product creator in the Edtech world, you may be eager to jump right into the development phase and bring your ideas to life. However, skipping the discovery phase can lead to serious problems down the line. In this post, we’ll explore why the discovery phase is so important and how it can help you create commercial products that truly meet the needs of schools and MATs.

The discovery phase is all about understanding whom you are building the solution for and understanding their needs and not wants. It involves conducting research, gathering insights, and validating assumptions to ensure that you are on the right track. Skipping this phase means that you are creating a product based on assumptions (even if you have been in the role) rather than actual data, which can lead to costly mistakes.

One of the main benefits of the discovery phase is that it helps you get under the skin of your target customer. This includes understanding their pain points, needs, and desires. By gathering this information, you can create a product that meets and solves their needs. This can lead to higher customer satisfaction and increased loyalty over time.

Additionally, the discovery phase can help you identify opportunities for innovation. By exploring the Education market and gathering insights, you may discover a gap that your product can fill. This can lead to a unique product that stands out from competitors and has the potential to generate significant revenue.

Furthermore, the discovery phase can help you save time and money in the long run. By identifying potential issues early on in the process, you can avoid costly mistakes down the line. For example, if you discover that there is little demand for your product, you can pivot early on before investing significant resources into development.

To conclude, the discovery phase is a crucial part of product creation that should not be skipped. By conducting research, gathering insights, and validating assumptions, you can create a product that truly meets the needs of schools and MATs. The discovery phase can also help you identify opportunities for innovation, save time and money, and avoid costly mistakes. By prioritizing the discovery phase, you can set your product up for success and positively impact your customers and your bottom line.

Last month, Nick caught up with former Capita MD and creator of the SIMS MIS, Phil Neal, to discuss the various changes in the education sector. As the MIS market continues to evolve and Phil gives his view on:

• The ongoing tender in Northern Ireland and what might happen there in terms of MIS supplier, as well as Scotland and Wales
• The challenges of developing an MIS to meet specific, regional-based, statutory requirements: is this a distraction for MIS suppliers?
• The big changes in the England MIS market, with views on ET-AIMS, Compass Education, IRIS Ed:gen, Juniper Education, Bromcom, Scholarpack and Arbor
• The recent decision by ESS to move to three-year, direct contracts for all schools and potential ramifications
• How more MIS solutions within the UK market might actually lead to less innovation  in the long term
• How machine learning can be used within MIS to create something truly unique
• The importance of Support Units and the role they play alongside schools

As always it’s fascinating to get the views of someone who has worked in the MIS sector for so long and knows the various stakeholders so well.

Where do you think the MIS market is heading and who will be the long-term winners?

Next in the #FinnemoreFireside series is this brilliant chat I had last month with Mike Donoghue, CEO of John Taylor Multi-Academy Trust (JTMAT). It was a great conversation providing lots of insight into how MATs work and what is important to directors, leaders, governors, staff and learners.

To provide some background on Mike, he was appointed Headteacher at John Taylor High School in January 2010 and oversaw the first change to ‘converter’ academy status of an ‘outstanding’ school in Staffordshire in November 2010. That school plus 14 others now lie at the heart of John Taylor Multi-Academy Trust where Mike is CEO.

In September 2014 he became an elected member of the Regional School Commissioner’s (West Midlands) Headteachers Board, was re-elected in 2017 and elected to the newly-constituted Advisory Board in 2022. Mike has also been appointed to the DfE’s Secondary Headteacher Reference Group, an advisory panel assisting with policy and strategy decision-making.

It’s an insightful conversation which includes, amongst other things:

• What it means to be a teaching school, and how fulfilling and valuable it can be
• The challenges and opportunities that come with working outside your organisation
• Growing into a successful MAT, and how do you define the perfect size
• Equality of entitlement when it comes to professional development
• The sliding scale between autonomy and regulation/structure, and how to create that balance as a MAT: compliance-driven vs excellence-driven
• Co-construction and why this is so important across the Trust
• How the Trust is very similar to a cycling peloton!
• Using evidence in staff appraisals and the concept of quid pro quo and ownership
• What Mike would like to see more of from software suppliers, and how major investment in one area can actually stymie innovation in others
• Where Mike takes his influence from on which solutions to introduce to the Trust and why

Just before Bett this year, Nick caught up with Lawrence Royston, Founder of teamSOS, to talk all things edtech.

Lawrence is one of the true entrepreneurs of the Edtech market. Along with his partner Joanne, he started with GroupCall messenger, the first SMS messaging system for schools in the UK, then built Xporter, supporting Third parties to have a generic way to integrate with MIS data, before looking at how they could provide deeper insights in the data they were already transferring through GroupCall XVault. He’s also supported GDPRis and has recently started a new business in teamSOS, an incident management and compliance tool for staff in Education and NHS establishments.

We’ve split the interview into two parts to make it easier to digest. In part one Nick and Lawrence discuss:

• What it means to have an entrepreneurial mindset
• Working with partners (and family!), their symbiotic skills, and how this is a great asset in business
• The thinking behind teamSOS, where the idea came from, and the problem it solves
• The importance of listening and learning from users
• ‘Successive approximation’ and continually iterating solutions to help better meet the needs of your customers

In part two they talk about:

• What advice would Lawrence give budding edtech entrepreneurs based on his own experience?
• Getting work/life balance right
• The effect of recent market changes: how consolidation makes space for speedboats!
• The innovation bubbling away in the background within smaller businesses that lead on vision and integration
• Modernising technology (case in point: walkie talkies)
• Their approach to pricing and delivering value
• How making school staff feel cared for attracts and retains the best candidates

Enjoy!

Our next fireside chat this year is with education thought leader, Sue Macgregor of Alps Education.

Sue brings a wealth of sector experience to our chat, having had a long and varied career in teaching and leadership, before moving to Alps Education to lead the Education and Product Development teams.

At Alps Education, their focus is on providing the right analytical tools to schools so they have the power to help every student achieve their full potential. Their platforms provide KS4 and KS5 performance insights that help teachers and leaders to celebrate strengths, action any gaps and drive-up student achievement.  

It’s a great fireside chat, and Sue provides loads of insight into:

• Her background in education, the trials and tribulations of Ofsted (and the pride in obtaining ‘Outstanding’ rating), her move into the world of edtech, and why she works at Alps Education
• Her role at Alps Education leading teams including many other former education leaders, and the context and experience that brings
• How tech has to work for the people who use it – not everyone loves data so it must fit in with what they need. Data can’t solve your problems but it can flag potential issues.
• The value and importance of asking the question “So what?”
• The ways assessment policy has changed, and how schools can work without baseline data (as a result of covid lockdowns)
• Given what we’ve all learned through the pandemic and homeschooling, how assessment policy might look in the future; it’s a wasted opportunity to simply return to what we’ve been doing for the last 50 years.
• How Alps methodology is different, and their mantra of “what’s next?” and allowing students to move forward
• What edtech companies should be thinking of when developing new solutions for educators and leaders, both now and in the future.
• The importance of being transparent, and empowering school leaders, teachers and staff
• Future plans for Alps Education, and developments and innovations the education community can expect to see in the coming months and years.

We’ve split the interview into three shorter parts for you to watch and listen to – enjoy!

This weekend, we’re looking forward to meeting up with edtech and educational innovators at #GESSDubai, a leading education conference & exhibition in the Middle East region.

Following on from our first fireside with the Senior Product Director at IRIS Software in November 2020, we’re delighted to welcome Winston Poyton back for a follow-up conversation – especially given so much has changed in the world of school management systems in the last 12 months alone.

In this fireside chat, Nick and Winston discuss:

• Developments across the IRIS business since our last Q&A session when iSAMS had only just been added to the portfolio
• How IRIS is busy reinforcing its education credentials through building relationships and listening
• Their thought leadership work including this webinar with Lord Jim Knight, and their recently published whitepaper “Are Education Management Systems Future-Fit?”
• The wellbeing challenges faced by schools – especially in the light of Covid – and how technology can help
• The ways in which the MAT landscape continues to evolve and why academies are demanding more
• Innovation and what this means: it’s not just about new tech, but new ways of doing things
• How IRIS is working hard to make sure their customer experience is as intuitive and friction-free as possible

We’ve split the interview into 3 parts to make it easier to digest. Enjoy!

We’re almost the end of term in what has been another weird year. We spent the first 3 months in lockdown so lost all face-to-face contact again (the fact we didn’t start the year by attending the Bett show was a novelty in itself!) so we’ve been continuing to catch up with people by video and share the recordings with you all – I really appreciate your positive responses!

As humans we all want to deal with other humans; it’s so important to have a real face and a real person behind your solutions. It’s been great to have so many people involved in our ‘fireside chats’ to talk education, management and innovation.

So thank you Martin Hall and Stephen Bilboe for giving us an insight into the MIS market which has continued to see big changes in 2021.

Thanks to Will Jordan and Luke Pargeter for talking to us about the things you do alongside the MIS solutions and the ways in which you help schools.

The insight Rowena Hackwood and Jeff Marshall provided into how MATs and academies work has been invaluable, both for edtech suppliers and education professionals alike, so thank you for this.

And finally thank you Phil Neal, Mark House, Andre Skepple and Priya Lakhani for your views and ideas on what might happen next and the big trends in edtech.

Sarah and I have thoroughly enjoyed making the series, and already have some great sessions ready to go in the new term with industry thought leaders Duncan Baldwin, Keren Wild and Tony Lockwood – watch this space!

In case you missed it, here’s a round-up of all our thought leader Q&A sessions from 2020.

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Continuing our series of edtech thought leader interviews, I recently caught up with Martin Hall, Senior Product Manager for MIS at RM.

Having spoken with almost all other major MIS suppliers in England, I’ve been wanting to speak with RM on their plans for the Integris solution for a while. RM Integris is the second-largest MIS supplier in England in terms of market share, and RM also offers an ecosystem of other school management solutions which work alongside their MIS, including their own finance solution.

In part 1 of this fireside chat, we discuss:

• How RM has changed over the years, having started as a couple of people building servers in their garage to becoming a global education company
• The 3 key pillars of business for RM, and their plans to invest in their Integris MIS and finance solutions
• How customers expectations have changed, and how RM works with them to allow them to focus on students’ progress – the most important thing
• Where RM are currently with their Integris MIS: how it works with RM Unify, what’s their partner strategy, plans for growth into new system areas (such as HR, compliance, safeguarding, etc.) and also into new phases and markets
• Their approach to future development

In part 2 we cover:

• RM’s focus on the MIS market and current competitor solutions
• What makes RM Integris different
• How the market might change in the future given recent consolidation and acquisitions
• How support has changed, especially as businesses such as SBS and Strictly Education have been acquired by one owner
• The role of LAs v the new role of Trusts: how MATs act and work differently, using data centrally and intelligently

Finally, in part 3 I ask:

• Where does Martin see the MIS market going in 5-years time?
• Can and should data be used to inform policy?
• How does RM work in partnership with schools and academies?
• How can edtech suppliers get better at delivering disruptive, and is this a good thing?

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