Using Context Clues to Build the Right Edtech Product
Informational Interview: Deborah Chang of Nexus Works
Informational Interview: Deborah Chang of Nexus Works
Welcome to another edition of In4mational Interviews. Like previous posts from this series, I share 4 questions and responses from a rising leader in the edtech, fintech, or real estate tech ecosystems.
Today I have the pleasure of sharing excerpts from my conversation last week with edtech connoisseur (my words not hers), Deborah Chang. Deborah is an educator and an entrepreneur. She co-founded Nexus Works, a company that takes early stage startup teams through every stage of the customer development process, from deeply understanding their user to executing on their go-to-market strategy. Deborah is also a coalition builder at #NYCEDU, an organization that cultivates, coaches, and connects coalition builders who work across lines of difference in New York City education. Below are a few excerpts, after Deborah and I realized I’m not great at taking shorthand notes during interviews and she graciously offered to record our conversation. So now we start at take 3…
OPERATOR (Siri voice): This call is now being recorded.
DEBORAH: Yes!
EARNEST: Cool now you can say all those insightful things for a third time and I actually will be able to fully transcribe them.
DEBORAH: (Laughs) I know right…alright go ahead and start Earnest…
QUESTION 1: HOW DID YOU GET TO EDTECH
EARNEST: I’m not going to put this out as a podcast…but maybe that will be later. Tell me a little bit about how you got into edtech and where your passion comes from in this space.
DEBORAH: When I was a 5th-grade science teacher there was this huge problem that was driving me batty: I needed to enter my data into three different systems. I had my traditional grade book, where I put 70% participation or 85% on a quiz or 50% on this essay. Another was an excel tracker that I created for myself. Instead of only entering that a student got 50% on a lab report, it would say ‘Sally’s mastered grammar but her understanding of the Scientific Method is only approaching mastery.’ This would help me see where students were struggling. So I had my grade book, I had my excel tracker, and lastly, my school district had a system where I had to enter grades every quarter but I couldn’t even copy and paste from my grade book or excel tracker. So I thought “Why am I wasting my time entering the same information into three different reporting systems?” I also felt so sorry for my students because I’m sure that I also entered some of their grades incorrectly, no matter how careful I was. I was frustrated, so what I did was I searched for a solution. The solution that I ultimately found was actually found after I tweeted to the universe, “Hey does anyone have any suggestions? This is my problem…” Someone suggested look into ActiveGrade. So I looked into ActiveGrade, an early stage startup, and it was the closest product to anyone out there with a grading solution that I was looking for. So I started using it for my classroom. But since it was close but not quite there I would send the company a ton of feedback. Then I introduced it to my grade level and then I sent them more feedback. Finally I asked ActiveGrade’s founding team, “Hey could I actually come this summer and hang out with you guys for a week?” And they were like, “Sure.” So for a week during my summer break I was in Iowa City living in the basement of the founders’ home, helping them create a future board of advisers and giving feedback on their data dashboards. And then when I returned to school, I helped the entire school transition to ActiveGrade. Through experiences like that I realized how fundamentally important an education tool could be for teachers. Once ActiveGrade was implemented I had more time but more importantly the feedback that was vital for helping me determine what each student needed to learn and how I could get them there. That was my first case of edtech. By the time I was thinking about what my next career step would be, this experience made it clear. I knew I would be getting into edtech.
QUESTION 2: HOW TO CREATE CHANGE
EARNEST: That’s an amazing story. How did you have the wherewithal during that process? What made you that more eager to learn about edtech solutions that made you different than your fellow teachers? How were you able to channel your ambition in comparison to other teachers that were more comfortable with the products?
DEBORAH: I would say it’s a mix of personal attributes and a very supportive environment. A personal attribute of mine is that I am super curious. I read basically a book every week* (editor note: wow, I read a couple pages a week, if ESPN counts). And I love to learn. That’s why I got into teaching and education in the first place. The second thing is that I’m very pain intolerant, which means if anything causes stress or is a little bit off, I look for a solution for it. That goes for everything from regularly seeing a physical therapist, even if nothing hurts, yet, to leaving a bright pink sticker at my door that reminds me, “Hey, do you need to bring your bright pink gym bag today?” so I could finally stop forgetting to bring it. Finding little hacks to solve solutions is key to me. These personal attributes mean that when I felt the pain of entering my grades into three different systems, I decided to do something about it and because I’m curious, this decision led me to do some research and go to Twitter asking “Hey does anyone know of any good solutions for my grading problem?” These personal attributes helped, but it was also paired with an incredible school that valued innovation. My school’s ethos was, “You are the teacher, we trust you, and if you feel there is a better way to do something, go for it.” And when I tried that and saw it worked really well, I introduced it to my grade level and they were all very open to trying it. There was no push back because they thought about it and felt that this was ultimately better for the kids. So together we changed 15 years of grading practices. My personal attributes led me to try ActiveGrade in my own classroom, but it was necessary to be surrounded by educators who were really open to innovation that allowed us to have the impact it had for our whole grade level, then school.
QUESTION 3: HOW TO PREVENT BLIND SPOTS
EARNEST: That’s awesome. So from this experience, I would assume that once you decided to go into edtech that you could lean on that prior experience of bringing on ActiveGrade to your school and having a perspective that could help a lot of edtech entrepreneurs. Could you talk about what edtech founders are blind to when it comes to implementing and selling edtech tools?
DEBORAH: I would say that everyone who becomes an edtech founder brings his or her own strengths and areas of growth. Coming in as a teacher my strength was I knew education context. I knew what it felt like to be a teacher. I know the curriculum. I know pedagogy. I know the day to day experience and most importantly I had friends that were teachers so I could always ask them the pain points they felt in their classrooms. The challenge was that I needed to learn how to do product management, design thinking, and business development. People who come in from outside of education have less context but also bring their own skills. That’s why it’s important for founding teams to have a mix of skills. A team that does not have a mix of skills is much more likely to have blind spots. Another one of the most common problems I see across early stage edtech startups is a lack of access to educators, students, principals to really understand what their pain points are. An edtech founder could have amazing dreams of the future with a truly transformative vision of that, but that’s point Z, that’s not point A. How to get from A to Z is a process that requires knowing exactly what context you are working in. Is it a school that has a portable device for each student, or is it a school that doesn’t even have its own wi-fi. Is it a free form school that doesn’t require testing or is it a data intensive school that has strict data aggregation systems in place? Each of those different contexts requires deep knowledge. Ideally, edtech founders are in schools, they are in classrooms, they are volunteering with the students and speaking with teachers and principals to see what their problems are in the day to day work. Knowing these problems is so important because education across states and cities can be so different. The other issue that edtech founders typically don’t understand is that this is a very slow process. It’s slow in that school budgets are decided on a yearly basis. For school districts to purchase edtech products is not like the consumer market or the B2B market where decisions can be made throughout the year. Most of the decisions happen during the budget setting process. It is essential to know the procurement process in the district. Also it is important to know who the decision makers are and how to meet with all stakeholders in the district — from the district superintendent to the district CTO to the teachers to the students to the parents to the principal and understand what their motivations are. I would say those are the two biggest challenges: One is access and understanding the user and/or customer and the other is understanding all the policy surrounding schools in the procurement process because it is a very different sales process. And when these things aren’t understood, what I see is a company that has a great founder and a great vision, but also one that has spent a sizable amount of capital on building a product that has never been validated with the schools. They had never put it in front of teachers to see if they would use it. Which is unfortunate, because if the startup had started instead with a prototype or even with asking to learn more by observing classrooms, that would have been a much better use of resources — particularly money and time. This would have allowed them (the edtech entrepreneurs) to build a solution that is applicable to teachers and schools all over the United States.
QUESTION 4: HOW NEXUS WORKS
EARNEST: That’s a great segue way for the last question. Many times I’m looking at pitches from edtech entrepreneurs and I see they have done a great job of describing the problem but what’s the solution? So what’s the solution you are working on with Nexus Works to address some of the problems edtech founders and consumers face?
DEBORAH: At Nexus Works we focus on supporting early stage education founding teams in the customer development process. We help companies understand educators. They have a prototype of a product but need to see if it actually works with five early tech evangelists. The next step of the customer development process is to create new customers by testing their marketing and messaging. Finally, we help founders set up their company for scale: Who do we hire? What are their roles? What are our internal processes and systems? Once these early stage startups gain traction, have product-market and marketing-market fit, we tell them, “Congratulations! We support you but you are no longer Nexus Works’ target client. Customer development for early stage edtech founding teams is what we focus on. Our hypothesis is that if edtech startups know their customers and user base, they will be able to build a better solution in a way that has a lower burn rate. That’s our goal and mission. I also want to say that there are a lot of people working on this. We are not alone in the work. There is the New York City Department of Education which is bringing edtech companies to schools for short cycle evaluation challenges, which is a pilot for a semester. This type of work is happening in Chicago, Silicon Valley, and Rhode Island. There are also accelerators that also understand that when they have founding teams participating in their program, they need to make sure teachers and students are included in the design process. As for Nexus Works, we create product and services for edtech companies. One thing we do is we manage the school pilot process. If you are an edtech startup that has built a tool to help students learn math and you want to enter the New York City market, Nexus Works provides the founding team with context on the New York City market, finds the teachers and schools that are desperately searching for something that their product offers, and manages the pilot process so they can get the teachers and student feedback they need. We are in the classroom, we are taking teachers out to dinner, we are really hearing and understanding their needs. Our value proposition to the startups is never that we will guarantee them a new sale — we do not do sales whatsoever to schools — but we can get the answer to what schools need faster than anyone else because we are educators, designers, and entrepreneurs. We really understand teachers, students, and principals. We also offer Edtech Playlab, a user testing experience that matches schools with edtech entrepreneurs who want to be a part of the school community and discover how the students will react to the product. Edtech Playlab is an opportunity for schools to be introduced to really innovative entrepreneurs and products while giving founding teams the opportunity to hear directly from all school stakeholders. In this experience, we are able to bring together the innovation community with the education community so that they can collaborate.
EARNEST: Anything else? No pressure…
DEBORAH: I am very eager to see how the world continues to change when it comes to innovation and education. I think traditionally education has not been a space where it is easy to innovate in. But I think there is a general consensus that the world is changing very quickly. Our kids, for example, are going to inherit a world where 65% of the jobs that will be available currently don’t exist. No one has the answers. But if we can all ask better questions and we can all adopt this mindset of working together to solve problems together, then that’s where truly transformative change can happen on a daily basis.
EARNEST: Well said Deborah! Thanks again for taking time out of your busy schedule to speak to me your love for education and the edtech space. For those interested in learning more about Deborah, please follow her on Twitter @debryc, LinkedIn, and The Educator Entrepreneur. If you have specific questions for her, you can also ask her on Wiselike.
*A collection of the best books that Deborah has read over the past 5 years: Nexus Works on Pinterest
Earnest Sweat is a Startup Adviser that specializes in mentoring startups within the fin tech, ed tech, and real estate tech sectors. If you have any questions, comments or requests please connect with Earnest through LinkedIn, Twitter, orAngelList.
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