Why K-12 Companies Need Product Developers Who ‘Move A Lot Faster’

Building a successful product begins with assembling the team that will carry out the work — a task that’s easier said than done.

Finding talent in product development is a particular challenge in the education sector. Depending on the company, those teams typically consist of software developers, user experience researchers, user interface designers, and data engineers, among others. Organizations need to bring on board candidates with the right mix of technical and interpersonal workplace skills.

It’s often a struggle.

The difficulty was reinforced in a recent EdWeek Market Brief survey of education company officials. Asked which areas of their businesses are most difficult to hire talent for, 29% pointed to product development, placing it nearly the top of the list with sales/business development roles, at 30% — and well above areas like market research, at 14%, and customer success, at 11%.

The survey was conducted online from August to September 2024 and included more than 200 respondents affiliated with organizations serving the K-12 education sector.

Finding product development talent in the education space is challenging for a number of reasons.

One is that the customer base in K-12 education is especially broad. Product developers must have the skills and the knowledge to consider not just the teachers and students, but also the parents, community, school board members, and other policymakers.

Another is that the market changes so quickly. Education technology is rapidly evolving, which makes determining what’s possible with products, and what’s innovative, difficult.

“It’s definitely a challenge across the whole product development life cycle … to find the right folks,” said Zach Pendleton, chief architect for ed-tech company Instructure. You need “people who are qualified enough and can actually deliver — who’ve got the right experience to think about things the right way.”

EdWeek Market Brief spoke to company leaders in hiring and product development about the barriers that stand in the way of finding talent on those teams, how they’ve tried to overcome them, and what they prioritize in filling those product roles.

Skills Outside the Sequential

Education companies are competing to find product development talent in a market where those skills have become more precious.

The size of the ed-tech sector, and the value associated with it, has soared over the past decade, with a particular surge occurring during the era of pandemic-related remote learning.

There’s also been a proliferation of large tech companies outside of education that can attract workers, and in some cases, offer more competitive salaries than K-12 businesses can. That has raised the level of competition among companies recruiting from the same talent pool.

It’s not enough, hiring officials say, for education companies to find candidates with technical skills, even if they’re bolstered by soft skills that have been increasingly recognized as important, like communication and the ability to work in teams.

Especially in roles that support artificial intelligence and large data usage, candidates need to not only understand how to interpret data and use it to drive decision-making. They must also be able to bring groups together and bridge the knowledge gap across other teams whose staff might not have the same levels of technical understanding.

Tanner Jackson, general manager of corporate solutions for assessment company ETS, said he doesn’t view it as especially important for product development candidates to have domain expertise in education. He generally tries to get a mix of people on his team who come from other industries, so they can bring new practices and ways of working.

But when new hires come from outside education, Jackson said one thing they must understand in the creation of education products is that in many cases the consumer is not the end-user.

“Product teams may go through user experience testing with students, and that’s who they’re designing to, but that’s not who they’re selling to,” Jackson said. “So you have to keep multiple customers in mind, which is not the case for products that are outside of education.”

Technological advancements have also created a new set of demands for candidates in product development. People who fill these roles now need to be more holistic in the way they operate across an organization, said Jennifer Cunningham, vice president of global talent acquisition of educational publishing company Pearson.

Product development in the past has been fairly sequential, she said, as ideation and growth have flowed through the different checkpoints of designers and engineers.

Now the process is more unified, as the democratization of technology has blurred lines between existing roles.

Members of a team within an education company have to “work collectively and often together, with the customer, with designers, engineers, sales — the whole team has to come together now, and that never used to happen,” Cunningham said.

Wanted: An Ability to ‘Make the Good Calls’

Rapid advances in technology, particularly AI, and the availability of massive amounts of data have not only changed workflows for product development teams. They have also altered the definition of what a product is, and what it takes for all the different roles to create it, said Jana Thompson, chief product officer of educational materials provider McGraw Hill.

“A product is no longer just a textbook,” she said. “A product is a holistic learning experience that is comprised of both your curriculum and also a teaching and learning experience that is driven by data.”

As education companies compete for highly sought-after roles like data engineers and data scientists at the intersection of the evolution of what a product looks like, AI literacy is becoming a new soft skill, said Pendleton, of Instructure.

There’s a level of access to technologies like artificial intelligence that was previously only open to experts, he said.

Now that almost anyone has the power to compile data and interpret results with the capabilities of AI, it’s important to look for candidates who can differentiate responsible use cases for AI, determine what is accurate, and discern when situations do not call for the technology.

“We’re seeing more and more of that — it’s hard to find people that are going to understand the technology well enough to make the good calls and to apply their own kind of human intelligence on top of those data,” he said.

The Hardest Role to Fill

One of the roles that education companies are struggling the most to fill is that of product managers, whose duties have evolved greatly and encompass more responsibilities than ever before.

Traditionally, product management roles have required individuals who combined broad vision for what’s been developed and sold with an understanding of the market, and translate that into overarching product design.

These leaders manage staff across teams and bring together all the different functional groups to create the final product.

But as products shift to respond to a data-first and technology-based market, product managers need “to become a little more technical to compete and to understand what can be done,” Pendleton said.

Education companies need to look for high-quality product managers who can work quickly, he said, without sacrificing collaboration with customers and innovation during the product life cycle.

“You see a lot of folks that have not adapted to a world that demands them to move a lot faster, and to shrink those learning and iteration cycles to days or weeks instead of months and years,” he said. “There’s not a lot of people who can do it effectively.”

Attracting Top Talent

Candidates with topflight skills in product development and an interest in the education space may end up with their choice of jobs.

To stay competitive, education companies must highlight the value they bring to job candidates, rather than assuming they’re going to land those individuals, said Doug McCollum, chief product officer for education resources provider Carnegie Learning.

Organizations need to be able to explain the positive changes they’re looking to have in schools, and the specific benefits they will bring to employees, such as upskilling and leadership opportunities, he added.

“The nature of people who are attracted to this industry tend to be pretty mission-driven in terms of wanting to make a difference in education and the world,” he said. “They need to feel like the company is aligned with their values.”

Pendleton, of Instructure, said the company wants to convey to candidates in product development that they will grow, in the same way that the company’s K-12 customers do.

“It’s not just about teaching and learning in the classroom,” he said. “It’s about teaching and learning professionally, and giving you, as an employee, opportunities to teach and learn.”

Investing in professional development is especially important for product development roles because technology is changing so quickly, and employees need to keep up, he said. When employees leave an organization, it’s often because they feel they’ve lost the ability to learn.

Hybrid and remote work options have made hiring for product development easier in some respects, but more competitive in others, said Pearson’s Cunningham.

Education organizations can now hire anyone from anywhere. But widening the talent pool means that companies will, more than ever, have to “cut through the noise to get to the top candidates.”

For job openings in sectors across the economy, applicant tracking systems can filter through thousands of applicants each day, said Stef Mills, senior director of technical product development for Digital Promise, an organization that advocates for using research and technology to make learning equitable for all students.

But education companies can’t solely rely on those kinds of automated systems to evaluate candidates, she said, especially as technology advances and the concept of “human-in-the-loop” requires product developers whose skills may not be fully captured by algorithms.

While Mills is in a position that allows her to look through each candidate’s individual application, she said she recognizes that not every hiring manager has the time or resources to do the same. That’s when companies need to go into the process of looking for product development staff with a realistic sense of what the bottom-line skills they need are, she said.

“We put requirements on positions that are sometimes unnecessary,” she said. “If you’re looking for everything, it’s going to be really hard to make a decision about what the more important attributes are.”

Every talent evaluator has their own approach to sifting through applicants for the candidates who are the right fit. When it comes to product development applicants — who, understandably, try to emphasize their tech savvy — one of Mills’ screening tactics is decidedly old-school.

“Cover letters can feel like such a thing of the past, but sometimes they make all the difference,” she said. “You can tell quickly that someone made an extra effort to include something in telling us their story.”