Ed Product

Ed-Product at Thinkful

The Ed-Product team owns the business performance of each of our educational offerings. Our mission is to maximize the business value of our program suite.

Team values

These are the values that drive us as a team. They're consistent with but distinct from the company values. This is why we get out of bed and get to work.

• We're here to change lives, not to have a small impact. That's why our products carry life-changing educational promises like a new career, and why we aren't here to just give people a nice new skill.

• Our focus on students is borderline obsessive. We know way too much about them because we care about them and we know way too much about the problems they face because we invest a ton of time in talking to them.

• We want to create a sustainable business out of changing lives so that we can keep changing lives. Creating value for ourselves and other shareholders is a nice side benefit.

• We believe the market always wins; that products and companies are successful only when they solve real problems and do so better or cheaper than alternatives.

• We measure everything. We use data to support decision making without getting lost in spreadsheets.

• We move fast. We use an agile approach to product development. We limit handoffs and keep process to the minimum required to achieve high alignment. Now is better than perfect.

• We value results over effort, but we believe results rarely happen without hard work.

Our approach

Each of our products exists to solve an acute problem for a clearly defined target market: getting a better job. That job may be the first step in a career in a new field, or it may be a promotion or move to a better company. Each product should map clearly from an input (target customer / market) to an output (graduate employed with a specific job title). Read more about our product development philosophy and approach here.

Each product is owned by a Ed-Product Manager. For example, Bhaumik Patel owns our web dev programs. Ed-Product Managers may own multiple products. For example, Matt Shull owns the Data Science Flex and Data Analytics Flex programs. Ed-Product Managers are responsible for the success of their products in the market and for their products successfully delivering the outcomes they promise. For example, Terry Million is responsible for the gross revenue of Product Design Flex and Designer Track, for their satisfaction metrics, and for their outcome metrics like retention, graduation, and hired rates.

Our products are only successful when they deliver on their promise, so we stand behind each of our products with an aggressive tuition reimbursement guarantee.

Pods and collaboration

The Ed-Product team is organized into "Pods", or cross-functional agile teams, responsible for advancing program roadmaps. We think of each Pod as its own startup embedded within the Thinkful company, where the Ed-Product Manager and Instructional Designer act as founders and servant-leaders for the Pod. Each Pod maintains a product backlog (on Phabricator) and includes members from across the organization. We strive for each Pod to be autonomous and highly aligned with other Pods and Thinkful as a whole. Pod membership is dynamic, with members coming and going depending on each Pod's needs.

We try to minimize each Pod's dependency on external resources, but there are a lot of external dependencies we just can't get away from. For example: paid marketing campaigns, new program landing pages, and similar needs come up. When they do we collaborate cross-functionally with the right stakeholders to accomplish our goals. In cross-functional collaboration Ed-Product isn't anyone's manager, but we are responsible for achieving these goals, and so it is our responsibility to lead cross-functional efforts and aggressively remove obstacles.

Currently we have three Pods: Ed-Web, Ed-Data, and Ed-Design.

Ed-Web Pod

Ed-Product Manager	Instructional Designer	Product roadmap
Bhaumik Patel	Ariana Faraday	Development programs workboard

• Members: [To Come]
• Slack channel: [To Come]
• Slack user group: [To Come]
• Weekly meeting log: [To Come]