I read this post and I find it quite intimidating, because you're using an analogy in which there is no good scenario, implying that edtech companies should be sub-optimal by default since all past edtech companies have been sub-optimal.

I only agree with the 2nd part of that (all past edtech companies are sub-optimal by design, failing to scale up learning. We can see this by looking at how valuable the top 3 edtech companies are, compared to the top 3 social networks for example. there’s a 16x difference. Both industries need heavy attention management, but only 1 pulled it off.). But I have a different analogy to remind us that it is possible (and necessary) to build companies that truly scale up learning and help anyone learn anything, joyfully and efficiently at scale.

Here's how I see it:

Edtech Ops can be pretty counterintuitive.

Retention and learning are 2 different problems that need to be solved together, at the same stage of a company’s growth.

It’s not possible to focus on engagement and retention first and then crack learning quality later. The team and goal setting that it takes to nail engagement and retention can’t be turned into a team that gets learning right later.

Too many companies have made this mistake and either started off only focusing on learning quality and content and curriculum and ended up having terrible drop off rates (95% ish), or they optimised for stickiness and built something people pay to use daily for a year and still not learn anything (aka edutainment🙃). and yes those companies are also many years old and they’re stuck. The only exceptions here are coding bootcamps but they overfit badly to the topics they teach and it's unlikely they'll ever be able to repeat the same model inother fields.

To get this right, first we need to acknowledge this is an order of magnitude more complex than product/market fit. In edtech, you can achieve product/market fit without helping people learn. Example: Duolingo. Don’t get me wrong, p/m fit is damn hard, but it’s insufficient in the learning/education industry.

It’s like a space launch. You have a carrier, and a payload. Their performance is independent of each other, but you need both to function for the entire operation to succeed.

In learning, the carrier is what captures a block of user’s attention, consistently. The payload is the experience that leads to learning, measured by a positive change in a person’s behaviour.

Operationally, there’s no playbook for measuring that sort of change, or for the sort of team structure that is required.

I believe the future of education starts with innovation in edtech organisations, which will then unlock product and business model innovation.

That, at scale, will disrupt our today’s definition of education.

At my company, we’re meticulous about the product development and customer development process AND we meticulously craft learning hypotheses (some of them pass, many of them fail, and we learn and iterate and grow).

I think the carrier + payload analogy is a more suitable analogy for edtech. It sets the bar higher.

What do you think?