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My experience as an educator, principal, and Chief Officer of School Improvement in some of the nation’s most struggling schools forged my path to creating an education talent management system whose success relies heavily on the initial groundwork or “homework” we completed well before a launch date was even penciled in. We simply cannot allow schools, teachers, or students to be guinea pigs for a prematurely launched product. Ed tech organizations need to do their homework before launching a solution. Without field experience, strategic partnerships, and extensive, reliable research, my organization would not have been prepared to serve schools with the level of efficiency, credibility, and usefulness they desperately need and deserve.

Success in ed tech solutions requires the following initiatives:

• Fieldwork Experience
• Strategic Partnerships
• Extensive Research

Fieldwork Experience

Anyone in marketing will tell you that the best way to reach your customers is to understand them. Ed tech solutions should be designed with the needs of schools, administrators, educators, and students at the forefront, not as an afterthought. Educators need tools that can adapt to and improve their practice, not the other way around. This is where fieldwork comes in. Fieldwork is an important part of doing your homework as it offers exclusive insight into the problems your solution aims to solve, making the solution stronger and more impactful from the start.

As a teacher, I experienced the day-to-day challenges of low-quality professional development and inadequate classroom support. As a principal, I observed students become disengaged and unproductive when a teacher was ineffective in the classroom. And finally, as a district-level administrator, I realized that teachers are the single most important factor in student success. These experiences shaped my vision for a solution and brought me to the realization that in order to create a meaningful education product, one must understand and address the intricacies of the challenges our administrators, teachers, and students experience.

Not every ed tech entrepreneur will have the advantage of previously working in education, but there are other ways to gain the experience to support and validate your vision. In addition to being hands-on in the field, we conducted teacher study groups throughout the development process to gain invaluable feedback to ensure that educators felt supported by our solution.

I encourage any leader reading this to reach out to and leverage their network, especially those within the target audience, and have meaningful conversations about the struggles individuals are facing and their vision of what a “dream” solution would look like. Reach out to schools in your community, send surveys, or do whatever it takes to get these important conversations started! The insight gained will give you a strong sense of what it’s really like to face the problems your solution aims to solve.

Don’t assume that you know what is best for the folks you look to support. Ask them. You may be on the right track, even in the homestretch, but it is their feedback that will get you across the finish line. In this spirit, we engaged educators at every stage of development, ensuring that feedback was ongoing and actionable. Following new-start best practices, we built a minimum viable feature, put it out there to see how educators reacted, and only added the features that educators felt were most useful.

Strategic Partnerships

Isaac Newton said, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” I understand this to mean that the likelihood of making your vision a reality is directly correlated to the people you surround yourself with; they are your partners in the path to creating a relevant, timely, and successful product. It’s about bringing the right minds, expert competencies, and experience in the field together strategically and collaboratively. From educational colleagues to university research partners, I was fortunate to bring together an exceptional group of founders, board members, and academics with diverse backgrounds and expertise, effectively eliminating any doubt that we were on the right track.

From the start, it’s important to assemble a team of people and/or organizations that will contribute to the core elements of your vision. From software development to specialties like predictive analytics, it’s essential to find partners that have the necessary, specialized skills so all the moving parts seamlessly come together.

Extensive Research

As an industry, the last thing we want to do is offer schools technology that is susceptible to dysfunction, error, or low performance. I can still look back on my days as a principal and see my teachers, arms crossed, heads shaking, with the “and this too shall pass” mantra rolling through their minds. It is our responsibility as the creators of tools to ensure educators are given quality products that make their lives easier and make them better teachers. To that end, an education solution needs to have objective evidence that demonstrates its value. Objective evidence is more than a testimonial or positive review. It’s data that demonstrates and proves that the technology can and will deliver results. The only way to get this data is through extensive research, a crucial part of doing your homework.

For example, my vision for TeacherMatch was to offer schools a scientific way to hire more effective teachers in an effort to increase student achievement. In order to achieve this, my team and I collected, analyzed, and later conducted an extensive amount of research on each core component of what our platform would address. We partnered with the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) and more than 50 school districts across the country to conduct a research study on teacher effectiveness. We worked with the University of Chicago’s and the University of Utah’s predictive analytics teams to research how to create a predictive hiring assessment. Furthermore, we continually perform adverse impact studies and adapt our technology based on ongoing research.

I urge anyone thinking about creating or even improving an existing education solution to research each and every core component of your idea or solution so that the technology is done right the first time.

We ask much of our administrators, educators, and students; don’t ask them to test-run your solution. Do your homework and do it well.