Insights

EdTech teams should use AI as a strategic multiplier, not an initiator. Start with human-led strategic thinking to define goals and user needs, then use AI tools to enhance ideation, refine concepts, and accelerate prototyping. This approach creates products that solve real problems rather than impressive demos that fail during user testing. The key is following a structured 6-phase process that keeps human expertise at the center of strategic decisions.

When product leaders begin a partnership with an outside UX team, the discovery process presents a unique challenge. All stakeholders must gain alignment about the product problem to solve and come to a shared understanding about your users. And in order to understand your users, you need to consider their flows. Task flows, user flows, and user journey maps can all be useful in the UX discovery phase. All of these tools share a sense of establishing and tracking user movement. But they are discrete tools that have specific purposes and appropriate uses. You should know what outcomes each of these three tools provide, how they overlap, and how they support each other. That way, you’ll know where your efforts will be best applied in our discovery work together.

Stop implementing AI features that don’t deliver value. As an EdTech product leader, you’re facing impossible pressure. Your business demands AI integration to stay competitive, but rushed implementations often create features that impress in demos yet fail to solve real problems for educators and students. Get the strategic framework that turns AI pressure into competitive advantage.

As EdTech companies mature, they inevitably look to grow their user bases. When you find yourself at such an inflection point, it’s more critical than ever to refine your research, design, and development processes to ensure you don’t create or compound your UX problems. In this first article in our series on optimizing your UX program to enable smooth growth, we’ll examine what this means for your research process.

Your EdTech product has found its footing with a dedicated user base. The intuitive, fast-moving approach that got you here has served you well. But now you’re at a critical juncture — perhaps you’re expanding functionality, targeting new user segments, or completely reimagining core features. Whatever the catalyst, one thing is clear: a focus on engineering that often propels products’ initial successes might now need a shift towards researching users’ needs and experiences.