Better Product Weekly: Innovating within an Industry in the Midst of Chaos with Chris Rose

Episode Transcription

Christian Beck:

On today's show, we've got Chris Rose who's going to talk to us about Abre, which serves that K through 12 space. And this is the part of the show where me and you are going to talk about something going on in the week and to kick things off. The problem this week is that you and I kind of discussed both being a little bit down. It's been, every week has its own flavors of challenges, but I think, for us, is reading about local restaurants closing, and then you see, and then more specifically, tech companies, the layoffs continue and some big name ones this week, like Airbnb. And then yesterday reading that Disney's profits are down so dramatically. And it's just like, damn it, if Disney can't make it through. It just, so yeah.

Kicking off this show is a little bit unique this week because we don't have a whole lot of super positivity things. It's just kind of one of those days or weeks where it's just the reality kind of sunk in. But I do think you had a good point about product people though, Anna, that, that I think is worth sharing too. Because I think we are talking to product people and talking about this harsh reality is interesting with this group.

Anna Eaglin:

I think product people inherently are optimistic. And I say that not as in a overly superficial, saccharin optimism, but more of that, designing the future and thinking about the future and especially being user centered and thinking about the future, I think is philosophically an optimistic stance to take. That the world would be better, that you're improving the world. And it feels like sometimes those two things can't exist together. Optimism about the future and sadness about what is happening or just sadness that this is happening. And it just, it sucks. But I think both of those things can be true and we can hold both of those ideas at the same time, even if they feel counterintuitive to each other. We're positive about the product. Were positive about the world. We're positive about the people that we're talking to because they're doing awesome things and they're shifting quickly with their environment, but at the same time, it can just be, oh but these other terrible things are happening too. Just felt important to address.

Christian Beck:

Well, when we debated whether we are going to address this before, I felt like I didn't want to, because I didn't know what the point was going to be other than just like, oh, everything's terrible. Okay. But as you're talking, I think you kind of hit on it though that we are supposed to be optimistic and we do have to balance those two things. And I'm sure the people on our show that talk about what they're doing and they try to be positive, there's still challenges of the reality of what you're in. And even some of these patterns that we see emerging, they're not the ideal, best thing that anybody wanted to be doing.

And then in a week like this, where the chance that you've had a friend laid off is probably almost a 100 at this point, you start thinking, if you're lucky enough to be thinking about the future in your own work or even just working at all, but in product specifically you're thinking about the future, it is a really weird thing to think about it. And then go back, look around, you see a layoff, you see the negativity and think it almost feels strange as if those two things can't happen. I think you bringing it up to almost say that, "Hey, if this is how you're feeling, this is okay. And they can both coexist. You can be optimistic while also being realistic about what is going on around you right now."

Anna Eaglin:

Yeah. And I'm really interested to hear what Chris has to say, because I think, education is one of those industries that has been absolutely upended. Kids not going to school, but learning at home. Up is down, black is white. But I think it's again, an industry where we're seeing a lot of opportunity. And I'm really curious to hear what they have to say, what they're working on.

Christian Beck:

I think it's interesting too, as you said, because some industries are kind of just shut down right now. You can't go to the movie theaters and that's the worst for an industry. You just have to shut down. But there is a unique type of challenge in an industry like K through 12 where it isn't shut down. It actually has to continue at all costs, but in a totally different way. And I think you said it well, that there's opportunity there, but it's also hard. It's not the ideal situation. It'll be really interesting to hear more about that.

Anna Eaglin:

We can be sad and we can be hopeful. And I think those things, we can feel them at the same time.

Christian Beck:

Well, let us know if we pulled off being sad, yet hopeful after this show. Send us an email. But before that, we'll kick it over to our interview with Chris Rose from Abre.

Anna Eaglin:

On this week's episode, we're talking to Chris Rose, the co-founder and VP of product at Abre, an education management platform built to streamline the ed tech software in schools. Thanks for joining us, Chris. It's just a start and it's kind of, we've been starting all these episodes like this. I'm curious. What has life been like at Abre for the past two months?

Chris Rose:

Well, obviously things have changed quite rapidly for everyone in the past two months. I think for us, we've really focused on trying to do everything humanly possible that we can do to help our customers. And one of those things is simply leaving them alone to try to make sense and really figure out where they are with their school systems, considering we're in ed tech. But another thing is also turning on additional functionality that we can offer them that's currently in our product that they may not be paying for. And this is not an upgrade tactic. This is not a sales tactic. This is simply something we can extend to help them out on, get through the next few months or the remainder of their school years.

Christian Beck:

We've heard a of people sort of taking that approach, but it seems like ed tech and you're primarily K through 12. Is that right?

Chris Rose:

That's right.

Christian Beck:

I think there's been changes all across the board for education, but for you all, your customers are still teaching, are still doing things with their school. What's been the biggest change for them since they've had to all go remote?

Chris Rose:

I would say that there's definitely a much stronger emphasis on things such as remote learning. Typically in education, we call those learning management or learning management systems. You'll hear the LMS thrown out a lot. Also the communication between school districts and parents has become pretty monumental. And that sort of speaks to some of the origin story of Abre. When you simply throw a lot of tools at a few people, it becomes overwhelming. If a parent is at home or you have a student at home and they're using multiple learning management systems and they're using multiple mechanisms to get their homework done, it becomes very, very cumbersome to try to figure out what's happening. When is it happening? What am I supposed to do? Where's my guidance coming from? I was speaking with my wife, who's a high school counselor and they basically went around and asked teachers where they were posting their assignments. And many teachers use many different tools, which is great, but Abre for us, it's really focused on how can we simplify learning management? How can we simplify communications with remote learning taking place?

Christian Beck:

Is there anything in your roadmap that helps teachers learn how to use Zoom better? Because I feel like that's half of the things that I do help with around the house is going over and helping with Zoom. That was not really a serious question, but kind of is because that's been challenging.

Chris Rose:

It's a funny question. Many of our schools obviously are Google districts. They've been primarily using, I would say Google Meets. It's interesting too, some of our customers, some in ed tech, privacy has been a concern with Join or Zoom or many other things with encryption. It's interesting to see different takes on that. But yeah, video conferencing, especially with teachers working and giving guidance at home, it's become not just a eight hour job, 7:00 till 3:00 or 7:00 till 4:00, it's become a, well the student has a question at 7:00 at night, 8:00 at night, 9:00 at night on a learning management system or hopping on a call. That's changed a lot of things as well.

Anna Eaglin:

You mentioned that you're leaving customers alone right now, but also like you said, turning on additional functionality. How has what's been going on in the world affected kind of the way you're selling and marketing? I'm curious kind of how you shifted those strategies.

Chris Rose:

I say we're leaving them alone and we are, because I think that for many of our customers that we've talked to, they have gotten, as probably many industries have gotten bombarded with an email every day or an email every week asking what's going on and an email from every CEO of every company saying here's what we're doing or here's our stance. The last thing we wanted to do was provide more emails and more annoyance if you will, to customers. But we do still send out monthly newsletters. We do still send out regular communication when it's appropriate, when it makes sense. And part of what we decided to do, we've been discussing for a while before COVID-19, and that was giving away some of our product for free. And that started with what we call the free Abre Hub.

The free Abre Hub is essentially that centralized place that a school district, no matter what learning management system they use, no matter what grade book, no matter what video conferencing system tool they use, they can give to their students, their teachers and their parents, all a central place to go that delivers those role based communications for the school district. It also allows the school to link to the third party tools that they use such as perhaps a Zoom or perhaps Google Classroom or whatever it is to just give that centralized place. We decided to offer that for free and basically school districts who did not have a centralized place, they might have not had a learning management system. They may have not had great communication tools. We've done that.

But I would say sales is then of course, adapted and evolved to how can we really aid? And like I mentioned earlier, remote learning now that this is taking place either solely remote learning or as we're starting to hear and see in Ohio and other states, what does the fall look like? Does it look like a hybrid environment? Does it look like going to school two days out of five days a week? Remote learning and learning at home is here to stay for a while at some capacity. And so, how can we help aid that to a user? Also, if you think about learning management systems, traditionally speaking, they're designed for the teacher, student and parents. Part of Abre, we're also very much pushing in the sales process, what we can help with engaging community partners.

Community partners are wraparound services, if you will, such as the YMCA or Boys and Girls Club or mental health services that not only can the school district use Abre to interact with their students and parents, but how can we align and help recommend services that are organizational, nonprofits or other services that the school already partners with that now they can connect with the larger sort of ecosystem of that K-12.

Christian Beck:

Leveraging the community partners, I think it clearly made sense even before this happened, because schools are a part of a larger community network for children. But now it seems like Abre maybe has more responsibility if you choose to have that, to then also help those sorts of organizations in this sort of hybrid environment going forward.

Chris Rose:

It works both ways as well, just to add to that. Obviously for parents and students to connect to partners that work with the school, but also it can work for the partners because the partners prior to Abre, many of times, don't have insight to their effectiveness with students. For example, we work with a pretty large school district in Ohio that we've developed a lot of this technology with. And many of their community partners were not able to see, okay, well, I have a math tutoring program, or I have a sports program. Are those efforts making a difference over the course of a year? And by aligning partners to goals and services, you can track growth and positive impact in those programs.

Christian Beck:

Is that something new that you're adding because of this? Or did that already exist and now this is sort of heightened the focus for that type of work for Abre?"

Chris Rose:

Yeah. We had released that solution of Abre, we call it the Abre Community Engagement Solution, near the end of last year, so at the end of 2019, and then we've continued to work to refine that product over the past four months, continue to roll out new features. That's been a pretty big product push for us as far as time goes. And now it's just starting to, I would say, get off the ground in a sense that we have many community partners logging in now, utilizing that within Abre. We're actively building our knowledge base and training on those resources. And I think it's lined up well with sort of the state of education in the sense of, again, just bringing remote connections to services that didn't really have the ability to do a remote service before. It was face to face or person to person.

Anna Eaglin:

You mentioned what you're working on in your building and launching. Thinking about the fall semester and not really knowing what it's going to be like, is that affecting your roadmap at all? I see that your roadmap is publicly available and anyone can go look at it, but I'm curious if you're going to be revisiting it, modifying it, or what are your thoughts about that?

Chris Rose:

Well, we do. We are a, just over a two year old company, so we can, I think there's a lot of benefits in that, in the sense that we can be pretty agile in our development. We obviously have commitments in our current roadmap that can't be changed and things that we've agreed upon and promoted that customers are relying on that we can't remove. However, I would say it's definitely encouraged us right after I would say Ohio, where we're located, started to close its schools. We really sat down and Cindy Daumeyer who's in charge of our customer success at Abre encouraged us. And I thought it was awesome to really sit down and think innovatively, how can we best serve schools? And those might be tasks or features or items that weren't in our current roadmap. And what could those be? And the sky was really the limit.

We didn't think about what those features were or functions were in relating to the solutions we were currently offering. If they lined up with solutions, great. But we didn't box ourselves in in that standpoint. I think we left with some really great ideas and many of those ideas, of course, as I mentioned, keep mentioning, communication and learning management, remote learning. That's something that's here to stay. And what we found to just elaborate on that a little bit is, we heard this from our customers and we hear this a lot, which was when remote learning happened essentially schools had bought some of the very traditional, full featured learning management systems and without mentioning names, they're very powerful. However, what I think schools quickly found out was, oh, wow, our teachers really don't know how to use them. We bought them but when they had to teach remotely on them the next week, they were massively under prepared because they were complex systems that they had to learn and had to go through many hours of professional development. They just didn't have time to do.

I think that really started to raise the question in many districts' minds is, are we really getting our return on investment from adopting some of these remote learning tools if they're not being used? They weren't obviously being used to full capacity before COVID, how can we get people caught up? How are we supposed to do professional development remotely? And so that's really, again, been an influence on our product roadmap to really start to dedicate more time to needs of remote learning.

Christian Beck:

It almost seems like all the challenges that existed before are heightened when you're remote. If you didn't fully understand how to use the tools, once you're remote, you're really in a tougher spot.

Chris Rose:

Yeah, absolutely. One of our value propositions is, we want you to use a 110% of the product. We don't want it to be a product that you're paying for a 100% and you're using 10%. And so, I think from a user perspective, we very much rely on that. And one of our mission's core values has always been, allow teachers and students to focus on what matters most and that is teaching and learning, not on using technology.

Anna Eaglin:

Are you seeing anything that's going on right now in the way that things are changing and things are so different, but anything that makes you hopeful or makes you really excited for either the industry or what's to come in education or big changes that you think that Abre is going to be a part of?

Chris Rose:

Yeah, I think as time evolves, I think people, this is forced K-12 education that's been somewhat the same for the past a 100 years. Which was 30 kids per each class, typical core area subjects with some electives. There's been innovative districts that have done things such as remote learning or hybrid classes, innovation lounges, and different tools in which that they can learn on their own and have office hours and things. But I would say that we're very much gearing up and want to be a part of the next generation of how K-12 is going to look.

And I don't think that it's going to overnight be rapidly different. And I don't think that school buildings are going to cease to exist. I think that that will be something that carries into the future, but I think this is definitely getting people in the mindset of learning can take place anywhere and how can that take place essentially when you're spending some time in school, some time out of school, how can I be connected in an efficient way and take advantage of the things that I can do outside of the classroom that I could never do before.

Anna Eaglin:

Thank you, Chris. This has been super helpful.

Christian Beck:

That was Chris Rose giving some of his time to come talk to us. He's the VP of product at Abre, which is based in Ohio. And I think it was great having him on the show because they're working in a space that is really affected by this, but still has to continue on. Anna, what's something that you took away from that?

Anna Eaglin:

Yeah. I think we've seen, again tying back to previous episodes, we've seen some themes start to repeat themselves a little bit. I think the idea of offering up free functionality, seeing that come through again, it has been really interesting. It sounds like it's something that they were planning to do, but then they're like, this is a great opportunity to kind of get that out and get that in front of people. And I think we've seen that before this, there are some things that people have been nurturing in their backlog or nurturing in their idea bank. And then this is happening. COVID kind of upended the world and they're like, this is the great opportunity for us to go forward with this plan or this idea or this something that's a little bit different and get it out there. Because it almost feels like so many things are in chaos right now. It's like, you know what? This is free and that's free and try this out. I think people are open to newness in a way maybe they haven't been before.

Christian Beck:

Yeah. I think that's definitely something we're hearing a little bit. What felt a little different is he spoke on two sides where they're staying close to customers and supporting them, but also leaving them alone. That was kind of a, I think we've quite heard it put that way, but I like that aspect of what he's saying. It's just being helpful by not being overburdened. It's like sometimes you need help and you wants somebody to come by and I don't know, bring you chicken noodle soup or whatever when you're sick, sometimes you're just like, the best thing you could do is just stay out of my way right now or something. I think that was an interesting balance that he was describing there.

Anna Eaglin:

Yeah. It's almost like if every single person you ever knew decided to stop by when you were sick and you're like, you know what, guys, it's too much. Too much right now.

Christian Beck:

Well, and he spoke about that in a way that reminded me of even stuff that we've been dealing with our agency, which is the acknowledgement that we're doing a lot of things for the first time. And I think even if a teacher is savvy to handle the technology, they're still doing a bunch of things for the first time suddenly. A lot of the schools in K through 12 shut down right before spring break for a lot of places. There was kind of like a free week there where there's, just get by. And over spring break I think a lot of schools got ready for virtual learning, but still they basically had one legitimate week, a week they were supposed to be on vacation, to get prepared for that. And then they have to go do it. And so then every single day they're coming to work. They may have been using a tool a little bit when they're in the classroom. Now that's their full day. I imagine even just the stress of having to have your day dictated by the technology makes everything really hard to consume.

Anna Eaglin:

Yeah. That idea of, this is the first time thing and the first time is hard and a 100%, yeah. There's so many of those happening right now. And he said something again, tying back to some themes that we've heard that it's so interesting to think about, but yeah K-12 education has not changed in a 100 years and this is forcing them to say, "What does the world look like now when maybe you'll never have a 100% of your class back in the classroom at the same time, how do you support students?" It's not just about a sick day. It's not just about an e-learning day when there's snow. It's about, they all may never be in the classroom together. What does that new classroom it look like? It's kind of like, we've had these theoretical classrooms as a future, but it's really, this is where the rubber meets the road. And I think it's an interesting conversation around access to education and just even social inequity of if people can't be in the classroom or they're in rural areas, it really opens up this Pandora's box of access to education.

Christian Beck:

It reminded me too, of something he said where he's talking about the gap between sort of what a school district buys and whether a teacher knows how to use it. And it got me thinking, as you're talking about these stages that it's tricky for Abre and for a lot of companies that you have to figure out a way to help people in this fully remote environment. And then you have to figure out how to help them in a hybrid environment. Because if we're optimistic that they'll return to school in the fall, you still have to be prepared to go remote. And so you need this hybrid state. And then you also, what does Abre look like once classes do resume? I'll say my opinion is that things are going to change in that in the medium term but at some point we are going back because people enjoy human interaction and parents, Lord help us, it is, we need these kids to give us a little bit of a break. Just going to say this out loud. But so we need them back in the classroom.

But it's interesting thing about Abre, because they have this challenge of dealing with the immediate situation, then helping people hybrid. And then what does Abre look like in 2021 and 22 again, once they're back in the classroom, how does the product need change? I don't know. It just seems interesting. I don't know if that's particular to Abre. I think even, Zoom is dealing with more demand than ever, but then when people do go back, how do they serve us with video calling and knowing we're in person again, it's a weird state to think that you actually have to design for a couple of different potential environments that we're going to be in for the next couple years. And that's hard.

Anna Eaglin:

It is hard. But to be Abre and to be in kind of a place that organizes and categorizes, it does kind of seem like they're in a good position to help with that.

Christian Beck:

Yeah. Well, this was a great conversation with Chris. Good connecting with you after, Anna. And as usual, I hope that we gave you some new, fresh perspectives to tackle your own product questions during this time. I want to remind you that if you want to hear more, or you want to learn more, or connect with other people and product, go over to betterproduct.community to sign up. We're going to be having more events there. We'll be doing more outreach and connecting people, even if we can't do it in person. And then lastly, you can get a hold of myself and Anna on LinkedIn or email us at podcast@innovatemap.com. For this week, I'm Christian.

Anna Eaglin:

I'm Anna. And thanks for listening to this week's episode of Better Product Weekly.