New challenges. New solutions. A not-so-new way of working.
How we built new data tools for remote learning in a month — and what it teaches us about emergent and adaptable teams.
Before COVID-19 hit, my team’s product cycle was much closer to a year than it was to the two-week sprint cycle that Agile espouses. Over time that changed — we put new UX, design, engineering, and product practices in place that allowed us to move more nimbly and release features on a regular basis.
Even at our ‘best,’ we were still releasing new features and testing new concepts every 2–3 months. It was a substantial improvement, but it was still slow.
For many in education, everything about COVID made life exponentially harder and groundwork to a halt. There were tech challenges, capacity challenges, challenges we faced dealing with so much stress and uncertainty, and challenges of parenting while working while teaching while not going too crazy. Everyone was Zoom’d out after a month of it.
For sure we faced challenges of our own but we also found ways to grow, adapt, and learn throughout the pandemic. Before we went remote we were working on an ambitious plan to release a set of features first in April and then again in August. But the new conditions for our schools and students meant that much of what we were planning to build no longer mattered — the data vanished as old policy was set aside and priorities shifted to new unmet needs. Even if how we were working was working, almost everything on our immediate roadmap had to be set aside.
While what we needed to focus our attention on was new, how we would get there was surprisingly familiar. We were already often working ‘remotely’ because we were spread out across multiple sites in the city. Our standard practices for collaboration, documentation, and communication meant we were all increasingly comfortable with the tools needed to make the shift more permanent. And most importantly, we were growing in our ability to trust and lean on each other through challenges, shifts, and uncertainty.
What I came to learn was that the things I thought important — especially in these moments, turned out to be all wrong.
The Myth of Strategy
For many years I believed that strong processes, solid strategy, and tight execution were the key ingredients for how strong teams could adapt and grow. These principles were taught to me explicitly and implicitly growing up and working in White male dominated spaces. The signals were reinforced by the people whom I saw raising through the ranks while those around them burnt out. I embraced them because I thought they were good for me and those around me.
As I began learning more about Agile, Lean, Emergence, and studied more about teamwork and team psychology I began to understand where the myth of strategy breaks down. Put simply, teams and the connections built on trust within them can adapt to change and challenge much better than rigid strategies and structures.
Put simply, teams and the connections built on trust within them can adapt to change and challenge much better than rigid strategies and structures.
That’s a topic that I’ll come back to soon but the key lesson here is that we were able to adapt to the circumstances not because of some brilliant strategy or exceptional leadership of one person, but rather because of the collective energy we possessed to shift together. To morph to meet a new set of challenges for our users and partners.
New Needs. New Solutions
Teachers, principals, and support teams wanted to know how much students were interacting with the new digital content. They wanted to better understand their students’ engagement patterns, figure out how to address gaps they were seeing in access and support schools in building deeper relationships with their families. These ‘interactions’ were new data points that offered new ways for us to understand how students were learning in this unparalleled situation.
Our ability to adapt came from the strength of the team and the increasingly robust platform we were building (more on the benefits of platform architecture). Even a year ago, what we accomplished would have been impossible for us. The idea of putting out a new set of features with new data in a month just didn’t happen. It wasn’t even on the board of things that could happen.
But this year we were different. In the course of three weeks, we designed, tested, and rolled out a new set of tools to help schools track remote interactions and attendance with a totally new set of data and policies. We quickly trained staff on how to use them but since everything was built using existing design templates and components, the lift for users to learn what was new was relatively low.
In the years that had passed since we first envisioned a new platform for building tools for our schools, we were also hard at work building trust in each other and creating space for the team to work with greater autonomy and agency. When we needed each other — and our systems — most, we showed up.
