Product strategy & roadmap

01Context

An online language school that asked for a redesign

OTeacher is an Iranian platform for live online language classes: learners choose a teacher, often try a first session, then book classes. The site went live in 2017 and was rebuilt twice, and in the winter of 1401, early 2023, the company changed its management and executive team.

Sina joined the product unit as its product designer, working with the product manager, and the brief was a redesign. It soon showed a larger gap. The teams did not share goals, and leadership had no clear picture of what to ask of each team to move an outcome forward.

02Problem

Seven concerns before any screen

So the work started with a plan, and the plan opened by naming what the company lacked, as seven concerns and expectations:

Big, overall goals, and a way for them to reach every layer of the organisation and the product
Meaningful links between the teams and the product, built on what all stakeholders agree
A mechanism for making decisions
Experience that is kept and written down, so it becomes the organisation’s own knowledge
One shared understanding of the services OTeacher offers
One shared understanding of its audience, its users and its market
One brand identity at every point where learners and teachers meet it

Five of the seven ask for the same thing: one picture that everyone shares.

Figure 02Seven concerns and expectations: where the plan starts.

Four weeks, fifteen deliverables

01
Goals and rolesShort-term goals, a presentation for stakeholders, business and product maps, and each team’s duties
02
InterviewsPlan the interviews and meetings, write each one up, and follow up with the teams

Strategy presentation, slide 1 — the title: an integrated strategy mechanism for the OTeacher platform

Strategy presentation, slide 2 — seven concerns and expectations

03Approach

Twenty questions for every department

Each department got its own list: twenty numbered questions under one instruction. Answer each question, and say what its result would create for each stakeholder: the learner, the teacher and the platform.

The lists went to product, marketing, education and teachers, support, the technical team, finance, management and operations. Each is titled as a first document of the market analysis, the document planned for week three. Some of the questions:

Product: What ideas do you have for improving the product? How do you use learners’ problems and feedback to improve it?
Marketing: How would you define the target market and reach it? How could more customers become learners?
Education and teachers: How can you help teachers build better teaching skills? How do you use learners’ feedback to improve the lessons?
Support: How can you cut the time it takes to answer learners’ tickets and messages?
Technical team: How can the platform stay stable and fast under heavy load?
Finance: What would reduce the project’s costs?
Management: How could conflicts and dealings between teams be managed better?
Operations: What would make the project’s day-to-day processes more efficient?

Every answer had to name who gains: the learner, the teacher or the platform.

Question list for the marketing team — twenty numbered questions in Persian

04Market research

A market-research project around the same three stakeholders

A second deck framed the market research. It mixes four modes of work, exploratory, solution-led, operational and participatory, and it defines value on the platform in six words that apply to teachers and learners alike: faster, simpler, more varied, cheaper, smarter and more worthwhile.

It then asks questions of each stakeholder. How can teachers teach more effectively and reach more good learners? How can the platform connect more learners to teachers, and keep them? How can learners get more ways to pay?

Its goal is operating profit; “unrealised profit is a loss,” as one slide puts it. Revenue scenarios (more purchases, faster purchases, more buyers, buyers who come back) and cost scenarios (a better experience, keeping users, stopping users from going around OTeacher) are tested first, then costed on a reward-and-effort grid before anything is done. The market-analysis document itself was planned in nineteen steps, from needs and competitors to surveys, interviews and talking with teachers and learners.

Market-research deck, slide 1 — the title: OTeacher’s market research and marketing project

Market-research deck, slide 2 — a quote: the ground of strategy is the organisation’s culture

05Research

Deep interviews with teachers

The plan’s interviews were not only with staff. Sina and the team sat down with teachers for long, open interviews, several of them around one table, about their classes, their income and the tools they teach with.

The interviews were written up on one template: an empathy map of what the person thinks, feels, does and says, and a profile with a catchphrase, goals, worries, what they expect from OTeacher, what holds them back, and how they learn and teach. Learners went through the same template.

The result was nine personas on fourteen boards: three teachers and six learners.

Five photographs of interview sessions with OTeacher teachers around a marble meeting table — Figure 06Deep interviews with teachers, as the strategy deck shows them.

06Personas

Two sides, two complaints

The deck sums up the teacher persona as “Learners don’t pay!” Teachers asked for better teaching tools and more income. They wanted the best teachers to stand out, with labels for experienced and supervising teachers and a stricter bar for new ones, and fairer cancellation rules, with a penalty for learners who miss class. They blamed lost learners on the video-class tool, and worried about learners who quit.

The learner persona is “What happened to our class?!” Finding a good teacher who fits was hard and uncertain. Past failures made learners wary, there was no clear learning path, and the platform itself, with no reliable line to the teacher, was the main barrier. Learners were afraid of losing the time and money they had paid.

Both sides pointed at the same two things: the class itself, and knowing which teacher is right.

Slide — seven conclusions drawn from the teacher personas

Slide — seven conclusions drawn from the learner personas

07Solution

A position, one goal and a roadmap in three horizons

The strategy deck places the brand on a line: today, one option among several for learning a language online; in the second half of the year, the first choice; in the long run, a serious, influential player in the whole language-learning market. The goal under it is operating profit.

The roadmap began as the product manager’s sticky notes and was set out in three horizons. Fall 1402: a class platform, a messenger, a matchmaking level, specialist courses and group classes. Winter 1402: better teaching tools, a learner roadmap, services for organisations, and two analyses, of foreign-currency income and of a new market. Later: a shop, recorded courses, finance, a ticket manager, and MVPs of foreign-currency income and a new-market product.

Set beside the interviews, the first two horizons answer the loudest complaints: a class platform and a messenger for the broken line to the teacher, a matchmaking level for learners who cannot find the right teacher, a learner roadmap for the missing path, and better tools for teachers.

The two biggest bets, foreign-currency income and a new market, enter the roadmap as analyses and come back later as MVPs.

Figure 08Brand position over time: one option among several, then the first choice online, then a serious player in the whole market.

OTeacher’s path — the roadmap in three horizons: fall 1402, winter 1402 and later — Figure 09OTeacher’s path: the roadmap in three horizons, as presented.

Roadmap, fall 1402 — group classes, specialist courses, a matchmaking level, a messenger and a class platform

Roadmap, winter 1402 — a learner roadmap, foreign-currency income analysis, services for organisations, teaching tools and a new-market analysis

Strategy draft, slide 1 — the title: short- and long-term strategy

Strategy draft, slide 2 — culture eats strategy for breakfast

08Education unit

Teachers asked to be told apart

Alongside the product work, the deck presents a new education unit, and it answers several of the teachers’ asks. Its five actions: set up the unit to raise satisfaction and the quality of teaching; form a supervisory team of active, experienced teachers; design the standards, the teaching processes and the interviews; interview every teacher and group them; and run specialist classes to raise teachers’ skills.

Slide — the education unit’s five actions, from a supervisory team of experienced teachers to specialist classes — Figure 12The education unit’s five actions.

09Key decisions

Five decisions behind the plan

The decks and boards make these choices visible.

01
Ask every department before designing
The request was a redesign, but the teams did not share goals or a way to decide. Designing first would have meant designing for one team’s view of the product.
Trade-off
The first two weeks went on goals, roles and interviews rather than on the product.
02
One format for eight departments
Every list opens with the same instruction: answer, and say what the result creates for the learner, the teacher and the platform. Answers from finance and from education could then be read against the same three stakeholders.
Trade-off
One format fits some teams better than others; the operations list repeats itself to reach twenty.
03
Interview teachers in depth
Teachers are one side of the marketplace. Sitting with them turned general complaints into specific asks: labels for experienced teachers, a stricter bar for new ones, fairer cancellation rules.

10My role

Sina’s part

Sina worked in OTeacher’s product unit with the product manager. The strategy file is Sina’s: the plan, the question lists, the decks and the persona boards.

Owned

The four-week strategy plan and the presentation that sets it out
The question lists for eight departments
The market-research project deck
The empathy map, the persona template and the persona boards
The strategy deck that sets out the brand position, the goal and the roadmap

Co-owned

The strategy process itself, with the product manager: the plan, the questions asked and the roadmap that came out of them

Collaborated

The product manager, throughout the process, including the first draft of the roadmap
The departments, who answered the question lists
The teachers and learners who were interviewed, and the education unit

Slides on the company’s history, its team and a market-size estimate, an unfinished SWOT template and a sticky-note draft of the roadmap are left out, as are the persona boards, which carry the names of the people interviewed.

11Outcomes

A plan the whole company could read

The file records the process and what it produced, not what the company did with it afterwards, so there are no usage numbers here.

departments, each with a question list: 8; Product, marketing, education, support, technical, finance, management and operations, twenty questions each; Delivered output
personas, for both sides of the marketplace: 9; Three teachers and six learners, on fourteen boards; Delivered output
roadmap items in three horizons: 16; Five for fall 1402, five for winter 1402 and six for later; Delivered output

What was delivered

A four-week strategy plan and its presentation
Question lists for eight departments
A market-research project deck
Deep interviews with teachers, and nine personas of teachers and learners
A brand position, an operating-profit goal and a three-horizon roadmap

12What I learned

What I’d change

01
Fit the questions to the team
Every department got the same twenty-line format, and the later lists show the strain: operations repeats the same few questions to fill its twenty lines, and management repeats itself too. Eight or ten questions written for each team would have asked more with less.
02
Give every horizon an owner and a measure
Week four planned objectives, KPIs and metrics, yet the roadmap slides list items by season with no owner or target. A roadmap the whole company reads should say who carries each item and how it will be judged.
03
Say how many people each persona stands for
The personas are finished boards, and nothing on them says how many interviews are behind each one. A line per persona, with the number of people and when they were interviewed, would let a reader weigh it.

Language