Clever GO in Ireland

CLEVER

Established 13.6K student MAUs and shaped Clever’s global expansion strategy by leading ethnographic research in Ireland

Aug - Dec 2023

TIMELINE

1 partnerships manager (joined trip)
1 product manager (remote)
1 engineer (remote)

TEAM

User researcher
Designer

ROLE

Ethnography
International research

FOCUS

At-a-glance summary

Question

The executive team wanted to know: does Clever GO have product market fit in Irish single schools?

Approach

  • I proposed traveling to Ireland to conduct an ethnographic field study and learn about the school market on the ground because methods lacking richness of context had fallen short in assessing whether Clever GO had product market fit with single schools.

  • My proposal resonated with our CPO and co-founder because it reminded him of the early days of Clever when they had to travel to school districts in-person to get a deep sense of customer need and assess product market fit with US school districts.

Impact

  • School and reseller visit insights informed product and process improvements for Clever GO, which:

    • Improved the product’s funnel performance: increased conversion rate from 33% to 92% on the most challenging step.

    • Helped team achieve business objective, build Clever’s global footprint optimizing for 2025 revenue, by exceeding our onboarded schools key result (114%) and our retained paid schools key result (102%), establishing 13.6K student MAUs.

  • Revealed risks to our global expansion strategy, which led the team to shift from a bottom-up to top-down approach.

Context

Initial focus on Canada, UK, & Australia

CONTEXT

  • Clever acquired by Kahoot in 2021. Expectation set that Clever must expand into international markets.

  • Target markets were identified prior to me joining the team in 2022: Canada, the UK, and Australia

  • Canada had a top-down structure similar to the US where a collection of schools sat under one school organization.

  • The UK and Australia had more distributed models in a bottom-up structure where single schools had greater autonomy.

Business objective: Build Clever’s global footprint and optimize for 2025 revenue

Top-down: collection of schools sit under one school organization with limited autonomy

Bottom-up: schools had greater autonomy under school organization or sat alone as single school

CONTEXT

Clever GO experiment

Focused on the primary needs of single schools in UK and Australia

  • We ship Clever GO in late 2022, focused on the needs of single school markets in the UK and Australia: providing students secure access to edtech with Clever Badges and a simplified onboarding for admins that only requires a small amount of data.

  • Product was slow to gain traction and we were struggling to speak with customers.

CONTEXT

Interest from Ireland

  • In spring of 2023 Clever GO got a sudden influx of sign ups from Ireland, a market similar to the UK but with an even higher concentration of single schools.

  • Sign ups had come from a school principal and edtech influencer in Ireland who had heard of Clever GO from our team's partnerships manager and shared a link to the Clever GO sign up page on his popular and trusted blog.

Unexpected influx of sign ups from Ireland

A market similar to the UK but with an even higher concentration of single schools

CONTEXT

Problem

  • Biggest funnel drop off was getting started and the Google Workspace configuration step.

  • Tried setting up remote interviews with very limited success.

We were getting sign ups to Clever GO, but there were a bottlenecks in the funnel

Proposing and planning a study in Ireland

PLANNING

Research goals

  • With buy in from the executive team, I collaborated with my product manager to set research goals and success criteria.

  • The purpose of setting goals and criteria was to ensure we had the information we needed to make decisions when I returned.

Research goal

Illustrate how edtech is deployed and used in Irish schools

Describe the relationship between edtech resellers and schools

Evaluate how current Clever customers are using the simplified MVP

Success criteria

We return from Ireland with digestible key insights to inform our product strategy with single schools

We return from Ireland with a clear sense of reseller needs to inform how we develop artifacts for those relationships

We return from Ireland with a summary of customer pain points that inform product improvements

Defining school and reseller criteria

RECRUITMENT

  • With my goals set, I planned to recruit from three segments each with their own criteria.

  • I chose school customers already using Clever GO to understand how our product was being used and the gaps that existed, school customers not yet using Clever GO to learn what unmet needs schools had, and edtech resellers to determine how we could be the best partner possible in the Irish edtech ecosystem.

  • However, I only had contacts in Ireland for school customers already using Clever GO and a handful of resellers. So, I needed help with recruiting school customers not yet using Clever GO and wanted to speak with more resellers.

School customers already using Clever GO

Current Clever GO user

School customers not yet using Clever GO

Primary school

Use Chromebooks

More than 100 pupils

Work with an IT provider externally or have a teacher/principal taking on those responsibilities

Have a budget for edtech (e.g. can afford a tool that would be 300-400 euros per year

Edtech resellers

Schools are their primary customers

Resell Chromebooks

Looking for a solution to simplify access for their customers

Provide IT services to set up and/or manage edtech for their customers

Creating a diverse schedule

RECRUITMENT

  • After discussing my recruitment challenge with the team, my partnerships manager introduced me to the principal and edtech influencer who had posted the Clever GO sign up page on his blog.

  • The principal helped me build a diverse schedule by introducing me to collection of schools that were a mix of secular/religious, rural/urban, and English/Gaelic.

  • He also helped me identify edtech resellers at large companies as well as small, more boutique, sole proprietorships that I reached out to on my own.

RECRUITMENT

Coordinating locations

  • I coordinated my scheduled visits across Ireland with 8 school visits and 8 reseller visits over 2 weeks.

  • My partnerships manager joined me for the second of those two weeks and was most interested in the reseller visits, so I made sure to plan more of those for the week that he would be there.

School visits

8

Reseller visits

5

Ethnographic field study

METHODOLOGY

I proposed traveling to Ireland to learn about the school market on the ground

  • Remote methods lacking richness of context had fallen short in assessing whether Clever GO had product market fit with single schools.

  • I chose an ethnographic field study as a method to gain a deeper understanding of customer needs in their natural environment and determine whether Clever GO had product market fit.

  • My proposal resonated with our CPO and co-founder because it reminded him of the early days of Clever when they had to travel to school districts in-person to get a deep sense of customer need and assess product market fit with US school districts.

Visiting schools

Key questions for school visits

PLANNING

  • How is edtech (including Clever GO) currently being used at this school?

  • How is edtech purchased and deployed at this school?

  • What unmet edtech needs does this school have?

How I learned during school visits

METHODOLOGY

  • To answer these key questions, I structured my school visits in three parts.

  • 1:1 conversations to better understand what role edtech has played in teaching and learning at their schools, how they normally purchased edtech, and how they rolled out edtech to classrooms.

  • School tours to see how they managed all of the school's edtech themselves and the workarounds they’d come up with.

  • Classroom observations to learn from teachers and students about their experience using tech in the classroom and, if applicable, how the Clever GO Badges had changed anything for them. I was sure to clarify the school’s student privacy and observation policy before observing classrooms.

1:1 conversation with contact

School tour

Classroom observation

Student access is key to unlocking government-mandated digital learning plans for Irish schools

SCHOOL INSIGHT

  • The Irish Department of Education asked all schools to create digital learning plans, but didn’t provide guidance or support on how to do that. Lots of schools scrambled to adopt edtech, but device and app logins emerged as a major pain point.

  • Schools came up with solutions that fit into their existing classroom routines and materials, like having students write all of their passwords in their homework planners, and expected any solution they adopted to fit into their current methods and materials.

With Clever GO

Without Clever GO

Larger, wealthier schools have IT support from resellers, but many schools cannot afford that service

SCHOOL INSIGHT

  • While nearly all single schools go through resellers to get discounts on hardware and software, only the larger, wealthier ones can pay for the additional service of IT support.

  • With no centralized IT team at a school org above them, that means if they cannot afford to pay their reseller to handle IT setup, a tech-forward teacher or principal becomes the school's IT rep and has to take on the setup work themselves.

Without IT service from reseller

With IT service from reseller

Schools IT reps have specific challenges with Clever GO

SCHOOL INSIGHT

Trouble organizing badge printouts by grade/class and Badges aren’t printing at the correct size.

Using American naming conventions as a workaround to organize Badges because not able to use local language

See Badges as Google IDs that should work across devices, not just Chromebooks

Google Workspace admin console is not easy for them to use without reseller support

Visiting resellers

Key questions for reseller visits

PLANNING

  • How do resellers work with school customers?

  • What do resellers want out of their partnership with a tool provider like Clever?

How I learned during reseller visits

METHODOLOGY

  • I structured my reseller visits in three parts, similar to my school visits.

  • If the reseller was open to it, they took me to one of their schools so I could observe them working with their school customers.

1:1 conversation with contact

Walkthrough of tools for schools

Visit school customers

Resellers want to mirror their current partnership processes when working with Clever

RESELLER INSIGHT

A reseller shows me a flow they use to create an order with one of their current edtech vendors

Schools trust resellers to provide Chromebooks and accessories so that edtech works better in the classroom

RESELLER INSIGHT

Students used baskets and charging carts that the reseller bundled with the school’s Chromebook purchase to help the hardware work better in the classroom context.

Synthesis & deliverables

Slack summaries & affinity mapping

SYNTHESIS

As I was completing these school and reseller visits, my first pass at synthesizing my findings was to post daily slack summaries for the whole company to engage with.

When I returned to the US, my second pass at synthesis was to affinity map key themes with my partnerships manager, product manager, and engineer.

Map of how personas interact

DELIVERABLES

In collaboration with my product manager, I mapped how new customers would interact with Clever GO from discovery to payment.

Presentation to the executive team

SHARING & ACTIVATION

  • I shared key insights from the Ireland trip distilled at an executive summary level.

  • I also provided my team's recommendations on how those learnings could inform product and process improvements to better address customer needs.

Personas

DELIVERABLES

  • In addition to identifying key themes with affinity mapping, I also translated my learnings into personas to show the range of how edtech makes its way into single schools.

  • This is from from the hands-off teacher or principal school IT rep that can afford to pay their reseller as an IT provider to teacher or principal school IT rep who cannot afford the reseller IT services and handles everything themselves.

Impact

School visit insights informed product and process improvements

IMPACT

After we received approval from eteam on our recommendations, I collaborated with my product manager and engineer to make product and process improvements directly informed by my research findings.

Insight: Trouble organizing badge printouts by grade/class and Badges aren’t printing at the correct size.

Iteration: Added a label to the top of the badges printout & changed the dimensions of the file from US Letter to A4.

Insight: Using American naming conventions as a workaround to organize Badges because not able to use local language

Iteration: Changed the name of the column headings to Year level and Group; removed the constraint of assigning “Other” to non-numerical values to accommodate local language

Insight: See Badges as Google IDs that should work across devices, not just Chromebooks

Iteration: Updated Clever iOS app to carry Google identities from Clever GO Badges

Insight: Google Workspace admin console is not easy for school IT admins to use without reseller support

Iteration: Hired a local customer support agent to help school IT admins through this step before they ever got stuck.

Reseller visit insights informed product and process improvements

IMPACT

Insight: Resellers want to mirror their current partnership processes when working with Clever.

Iteration: Created bundling package with reseller Getech; Clever Badges help Chromebooks work better in classrooms.

Insight: Schools trust resellers to provide Chromebooks and accessories so that edtech works better in the classroom

Iteration: Developed reseller resources such as a partner order form and a reseller welcome packet with onboarding materials.

Improvements to funnel

IMPACT

Research-informed product & process iteration helped customers achieve greater success

  • Better top of the funnel performance: increased conversion rate from 5% to 79%

  • Significant improvements to Google Workspace configuration step: increased conversion rate from 33% to 92%

Iteration to Clever GO helped team achieve business objective

IMPACT

Business objective: Build Clever’s global footprint and optimize for 2025 revenue

57

Schools successfully onboarded to Clever GO and deployed Badges

114% to key result

44

Schools paid to continue using Clever GO after 60 day trial

102% to key result

Reached business objective, but research revealed risks to strategy

IMPACT

Schools want greater support for mixed devices & identities

Although we expanded Clever GO Badges to support students' logging in with Google identities on iPads, more device and identity support would require greater investment in developing Clever GO when this functionality already existed in the more technically complicated original Clever product.

School IT reps require support, even for Clever GO

Whether that's from the extra reseller support services they pay for or from the local support rep Clever was providing. Although our intention was to create a simplified version of Clever that didn't require support, we learned that, even in the simplified Clever GO form, Clever is fundamentally an enterprise tool that requires support for less technical users like teachers and principals acting as their school IT reps.

Shifted from bottom-up to top-down product strategy

IMPACT

Updated original Clever and partnered with resellers to sell to larger school orgs

  • Language localization in data model for grade/class

  • Badge printout sizing to reflect global standard

  • Badge-focused onboarding experience with support

  • Shifted ownership of reseller relationships to partnership managers

REFLECTIONS

What didn’t work and what I would change

Wore too many hats, which added to bias during research

I acted as researcher, designer, and, at times, product manager to ensure the success of Clever GO for single schools. The desire to have schools succeed with Clever GO biased me towards wanting to fix things and help schools rather than take a step back and neutrally observe how Clever GO was being used. If I was to do this project again, I would try to set tighter constraints on my role expectations so that my role as researcher had less opportunities to be biased.

Focused too heavily on singe schools rather than larger school orgs

I chose to do deep research in Ireland, which is almost entirely composed of single schools, based on an unexpected spike of interest in Clever GO. As a result, we spent less time learning from larger school orgs, which were ultimately the customers we pivoted to serving. If I could do this project again, I would travel to a different country that had a more even mix of single school and large school orgs, like England or Australia, to learn from both.

The value of in-person ethnography vs. remote methods

REFLECTIONS

  • Visibility into existing classroom workflows let us see where Clever GO could fit best, like pasting badges into homework planners, and where we were missing the mark, like not bringing Google identities to iPads.

  • Illustration of school IT rep context revealed Clever GO challenges such as using American grade numbers as a work around instead of using their preferred local language, which otherwise would have been something that didn't show up on our radar as an issue.

  • Demonstration of resellers interacting with schools showed us how they are involved in the adoption and deployment of edtech, like bundling Chromebooks with carrying carts and charging stations, which inspired us to think more broadly about the context Clever GO would be joining to support edtech.

13.6K

Student MAUs from paid schools using Clever GO