I led the UX discovery and Product Management, and provided creative direction of a new data insights tool for school leaders.
We launched quickly, and have proven impact of school leaders using our insights tool to improve teaching and learning.
Situation
School leaders at our schools were telling us they wanted more data from our platform to make decisions at a leadership level. They expected Firefly to be used extensively across the school to support teaching and learning and parental engagement, but had limited visibility into whether it was actually being used well or consistently. They needed to know how Firefly was being used by teachers, students and parents, which departments needed extra support, and they needed to identify any students who were struggling so that they could intervene.
Objective
Create a new data insights product that could be sold as an add-on product to the Firefly platform, that can offer school leaders actionable insights that support them in reaching their strategic goals. We needed to be able to launch the product within 3 months at BETT, a major educational trade show, and release a first version within 6 months.
Discovery Approach
• I ran user research with school leaders who were both customers and non-customers to explore the needs in the market and refine the product opportunity.
• I ran a 3-day design sprint with representatives across the business to define the core problems we needed to solve, ideate on solutions and explore a feasible and sustainable technical approach.
• I curated a cross-functional team and we worked collaboratively to craft a marketable value proposition and prepare for launch.
• Pre-launch, I designed and built a microsite advertising early access to the tool, to test the appetite in the market.
Delivery approach
• I released a beta, as well as providing early previews to our community forum users, to get early feedback from users, giving us a chance to iterate and refine before launch.
• I provided creative direction and continual feedback to the agency who built the data dashboard to make sure it matched our visual style, and was easy to use, and would be meaningful to users.
• Periodically reported back to our partners, Innovate UK, to ensure continued funding (£1m) throughout the development process.
• Post launch I collected feedback and drove additional user experience improvements as well as proposing a longer term, higher value strategic opportunity, which I continued to validate, and is currently in production.
Challenges
Customers wanted visibility into a lot of data! They wanted breadth and depth, so defining a minimum valuable product was hard. I developed a strategy that offered foundational insights about core usage that we could build on over time.
Outcomes
• We launched in time for BETT, so our Sales team showcased our Data Insights tool to demonstrate the return on investment of introducing Firefly within a school.
• We doubled our goal: getting 20% of our customer base to adopt this tool within a quarter.
• Increased ARR by attracting a key client in a new strategic region with our Data Insights tool, whose influence has now opened up a significant number of new leads.
• Proven impact where school leaders were able to use the insights to improve teaching and learning, most notable during the Covid-19 school closures where there was limited visibility into how students were coping, and there was increased reliance on technology to deliver teaching and learning.
Stories from school leaders
“During lockdown, Insights identified that students were working during the night. We investigated and found that it was because the whole family was sharing one laptop to work and do homework. We were able to issue school laptops to those students so that they could do their schoolwork during the day, and rest overnight”
“We noticed a spike in activity from parents around lunchtime, so we changed our communication strategy to message parents late morning instead of at the end of the day, when parents were too tired of looking at screens, and we saw an increase in parent engagement with our communications.”
Related articles
A blog post I wrote for the Firefly blog as part of the launch.
A blog post I wrote about how I run inclusive discovery workshops, based on my experience leading the discovery of School Data Inisghts.