But what about the rest of your team?
Are they so focused on the heads-down task of building and maintaining your EdTech product that they don’t stop to consider the broader context? If the answer is yes — or if you don’t know one way or the other — your product is at risk. You see, it’s incredibly easy for your team’s perspective to get “pigeon-holed” into your own product.
If your entire team doesn’t keep up to date on the EdTech industry, you may start making product decisions that lack perspective or feel out-of-date. Staying informed not only keeps your team’s perspective fresh, but it also gives you better insight into what your users actually want as their needs evolve over time.
The best way to ensure that your team stays informed is to put structure around it. Here’s how.
Use the following tips to foster an informed, forward-thinking culture at your EdTech company.
Your first order of business? Encourage your staff to refine their digital news feeds so that they don’t miss pertinent information as it comes out. To that end, your team can take a few simple steps to stay in the know:
Encouraging your team to individually read and share EdTech news is a good start. But the real benefits come when you intentionally bring your whole team together to regularly discuss EdTech news and trends. At Openfield, we’ve found that the best way to do that is by establishing a weekly moderated “EdTech in the News” discussion.
Use the following framework to organize a productive conversation each week.
With the right structure and preparation, your news roundup discussions can be brief — 15-20 minutes is fine — and still reveal new insights and opportunities. The easiest way to handle it may be to incorporate your news discussion into one of your regularly scheduled weekly standup meetings.
You may opt to pick a new moderator each week or identify a small group of committed moderators and rotate among them moving forward.
Rather than just sharing links, ask your moderators to provide context. For example, your shared document may include the following prompts:
Ask your moderators to share their chosen topics or articles several days in advance of the meeting. Make sure your staff understands that they should check the document prior to weekly discussion and read the moderator’s notes as well as the article itself. Encourage your team to add observations and questions in comments on the moderator’s notes in your shared document.
Your moderator can review your team’s notes and come up with a few talking points to give shape to your real-time discussion. Use this time to think critically about how your weekly news items might impact the EdTech industry. And, of course, consider how they might apply to your organization in particular.
Make space in your discussions for free-ranging brainstorming of hypothetical solutions. How might you address the problems outlined in an article or piece of news? A “blue sky” mentality can pave the way for outside-the-box thinking that adds a fresh perspective (and possibly new features) to your product.
Everyone in your organization, from designers and developers to product owners and executives, benefits individually from staying current on industry trends and happenings. But the combined benefits to your full team are much greater than that. By adopting a weekly moderated discussion of EdTech industry news and trends, your team can:
By adopting a weekly moderated news discussion, you and your team can stay informed about the EdTech industry. In doing so, you get smarter about the world outside your product — so that you can make better, more informed decisions within it.