5 Practical Tips to Build Impactful Educational Products with Ope Bukola
Shyvee Shi
Product @ Microsoft | A forward-thinking product leader combining creativity, user psychology, and AI to drive growth and scale communities | ex-LinkedIn
Welcome to the latest issue of the Product Management Learning Series - a series of live streaming events and newsletter articles to help you level up your product career! ??
In our eighth installment, our speaker was Ope Bukola , Co-Founder & CEO at Kibo School, a new online university providing affordable and high-quality STEM degrees to African students. She has spent the majority of her career building mission-driven educational products and previously was the Product Lead for Google Classroom, Product Manager at Amplify Education, and Partnership Lead at CK-12 Foundation. She is a board member of Zeta, a network of high-performing, next-generation schools in the Bronx, NY. She is a founding member of Level, a multiracial network of women who take action for racial equity by investing in black women. Learn more at her personal website: https://opebukola.com.?
Below are the main takeaways from my conversation with Ope:
Take signals from the market to identify breakthrough product opportunities.
When fleshing out product features it’s easy to delve into the ideation phase without fully understanding the market landscape. Ope explained the importance of learning about market characteristics, specifically the demographics of the users she was building for. Within the African region she mentioned? “more and more young people are growing up in the continent… [and] the education system just really doesn't have the capacity to educate the number of people who want it.” By understanding this market gap she was inspired to begin building educational products within Africa.?
Besides demographics, she also highlighted the importance of adapting to global market conditions, as COVID transformed user’s needs so that they could learn remotely. She found out in her research that there was a dearth of technical talent. Taking these signals, she built the Kibo School to hone in on STEM education to help students land meaningful technical positions. By zooming out and understanding market attributes she was able to expand on what she built and learn how to more effectively serve her users.
Start with an MVP to validate problem areas and adapt the product to fulfill user needs.
Given the ambiguity of problems in the education space and the broader recency of the ed-tech industry, Ope explained the importance of starting with a small product scope and iterating as the problem area is validated. In the case of the Kibo School she mentioned “we started last year in August, offering very short online Python programming and web development courses for learners in Africa because we had to validate if people actually want to learn online in these markets.” Through the initial MVP launch she learned of the challenges related to infrastructure and the African market that allowed her to evolve the product rapidly to adapt to user needs.
Keep the focus on the end user when building for multiple personas.
In the world of education, Ope explained the nuances of the multiple stakeholders involved and the importance of prioritizing the end-user when building out product requirements. She explained “often in education, the person who is buying your product might be the administration…but the person who needs to use it every day is a teacher or students in the classroom…as a product manager, really ensure that you're building for your user and not just your buyer”. It’s very easy to feel pressured to build a product around the perceived needs of the buyer of the product, but in order to ensure long-term success of a product, it's very important to craft a delightful user experience for the end user.?
Additionally, she explained the importance of understanding the dynamics between the different personas. In the case of Google Classroom she mentioned “it was mostly focused on students and teachers…[but] parents asked [for] access. But teachers are really protective of what's happening in their classroom, they don't necessarily want parents reading everything and second guessing the decisions that they've made. So understanding that, yes, teachers want parents to have access, but don't want them to have too much access [is key].” Understanding the nuances of the different groups and building features that help and don’t hinder the relationships of the stakeholders is essential for building strong relationships with customers.?
Be transparent about product decisions to make your users feel heard.
Through her various past roles and in particular in her time at Google, Ope mentioned the importance of “collecting user feedback in a thoughtful manner and then acting on it.” Even with tens of millions of users on Google Classroom, Ope made it a point to update her users on the product roadmap and the decisions made. She would communicate the feedback that her team was hearing, how they were taking it into consideration, and the features that they looked to build from it. She explained, “We try to give users a sense of what we're focusing on and why. And I think that goes a long way to just making people feel like ‘yep, we're being heard.’ ” Although there are limitations on the extent to which product roadmaps can be shared, it’s extremely valuable to share the overarching direction that products are taking to prevent users from looking to competitors that are more receptive to their feedback.?
Use advanced tooling to fill product gaps and scale customer value.?
Ope explained that the largest gap in the education sector is a global teacher shortage. As a result she explained “ed-tech entrepreneurs have to figure out how to build tools that scale the impact of individual teachers, because we're just not having as many people join the profession.” One of the tools that she is excited about is conversational AI. She mentioned that “one on one tutoring is really powerful for learning” and that augmenting the experience of what teachers do to support their students and magnifying the impact of each teacher will be essential to widespread strong educational outcomes. With limited resourcing, it’s extremely valuable to lean on advanced technical tools that can fulfill product gaps and serve as many users as possible while still maintaining high quality in a product.?
Additional gems from Ope:
?? Readwise is Ope’s current favorite product; she used it to get the most out of what she reads
??? Deborah Liu is Ope’s product role model and Deb is publishing a book coming this fall, Take Back Your Power: 10 New Rules for Women at Work. Pre-order here.
??Lenny’s podcast is one resource that Ope recommended for PM to check out.
?? Special kudos to Musa Khan for writing this article.
Next up,
More sessions to be added later… subscribe to stay tuned!?
Learn more about the Product Management Learning Series and view past recordings here.
EdTech Product | Leader | Ally | Problem Solver | Teacher
2 年Shyvee - thanks so much for this conversation. I enjoyed hearing from Ope, how she's navigated product within Ed Tech, and definitely the lightning round of questions. I look forward to more in this series!
Platform + AI Product Manager @ Discovery Education
2 年Is there a recording? I’d love to share it with my team, really enjoyed Ope’s talk!
Founder @ The PM Mastermind, join our community of PMs helping each other level | Xoogler
2 年Cc ?? Jae Taylor
Collaborative Product Leader | Product Management expertise: Healthcare, Wellness & Fitness, EdTech, D2C Retail, FinTech
2 年Hi Shyvee, The TpT team enjoyed your engaging and informative discussion with Ope. What a treat! I have to say the lightening round at the end was great. I too consider Deb Liu a product pioneer especially in her focus on women. I mentioned to Deb the kudos Ope gave and she responded that “what a compliment and I also follow Shyvee!”