How Michelle Facilitated Leadership Buy-In on a New Strategy
Michelle Peck is a San Diego-based Design Leader and Strategist with over 15 years of experience specializing in the EdTech and BioTech industries. She's currently the Chief Experience Officer of Winward Academy, an award-winning e-learning platform for high school students. Michelle is passionate about the mission to provide access for all students to achieve successful outcomes, and when she's not working, she's spending time with her 10-year-old son and husband at the beach or coastal hiking trails in San Diego, California.
By Michelle Peck, d.MBA alum, with contributions by Clare Goldblatt
I joined the d.MBA Circle for Company Strategy in November 2021, where I was with a cohort of fellow d.MBA alumni who discussed what goals we'd like to accomplish professionally during the 6-week course. It was a fascinating time to join the Circle since, at the same time, I was planning for a strategic workshop to align Winward Academy stakeholders on the strategic plan going into the new year. Winward Academy is an online learning platform that aims to help students thrive in core subjects and boost scores for standardized testing, such as the ACT and SAT in the US.
When Winward Academy first launched its business six years ago, it took a B2C approach by providing families with teens with the curriculum and content knowledge required to be ready for American universities' standardized testing. Winward Academy aimed to position itself as a lower-cost and effective alternative option to one-on-one tutors, which may be cost-prohibitive for many families and underserved communities.
In order to stay lean and move quickly, the team did not have a specific strategy framework in place. Previously, we leaned on the founder to steer our next steps and make strategic decisions. With a growing leadership team, we decided to develop and align on a formal strategic plan for Winward Academy to allow for more collaborative decision-making in 2022. I aimed to prepare a working session with core members of the team, document the strategy, and seek leadership approval and buy-in.
The strategy session allowed for rapid alignment so the leadership team could have a guide moving forward into the new year—both for steering the business and the product.
Before the pandemic, Winward Academy began to shift its strategy from specifically gearing itself towards families (B2C) to working with schools, community groups, and non-profit organizations (B2B). This approach was vital in gaining access to more students who might not otherwise be accessible.
To address learning loss following school closures and remote learning during the pandemic, federal stimulus funding was released for schools to seek new technologies and online learning platforms to incorporate into their curriculums. This opportunity completely changed how we approached our business and began to focus much more on schools.
Our challenge was to take a business model that we created to target one audience and shift it to target a different audience with more growth opportunities and user needs. We also had to bear in mind that the B2C audience, targeting families directly, would still exist, but we needed to veer more towards B2B by working directly with schools and districts.
To prepare for this strategy session with the founder and leadership team at Winward Academy, I first researched trends in EdTech and online learning platforms while also using the d.MBA Circle participants as a sounding board on which frameworks and activities to include. During the Winward Academy strategic working session, I started by facilitating a 30-minute interview with the founder while capturing notes in Miro, a virtual whiteboarding tool. From this interview, we identified themes to establish primary and secondary goals which focused on increased value for stakeholders and shareholders, while continuing to provide an excellent customer experience for our students and teachers. We then used the Business Model Innovation (BMI) framework to visualize the evolution of the business model by answering the questions of who our audience is, what we offer, why we generate revenue, and how we deliver results. The BMI framework activity included both B2C and B2B audiences to highlight ways to leverage additional revenue streams and how we could create and capture value differently than we had been previously. This session was very effective as all parties were involved, and it was a process of structured co-creation to align on key strategic decisions.
Primary and Secondary Goals as one of the outcomes from the strategy session.
After we conducted the strategy session, I synthesized the data collected to craft a presentation with the documented goals, strategy, and agreed-upon metrics, which we used to gain the founder's approval of the new plan.
By agreeing to and documenting the founder’s vision as a strategic artifact, it allowed the leadership team to further foster Winward Academy’s mission of providing all students with access to the skills, content knowledge, and confidence to thrive in a life of opportunity, whilst bringing structure to this mission. We then used the approved plan to make strategic decisions as a team, carve out a product development roadmap mapped to goals, and identify market positioning differentiators to evolve the brand messaging. Ultimately, we're a student-centric organization, and that's why we all come to work every day–to help these students succeed in school and life.
Winward Academy is continuing to thrive with this strategic direction by evolving our platform to serve large government contracts which include school districts across an entire state vs single-family households. New features built around this model include a unique view for superintendents to monitor data across multiple schools, customizable usage reports for teachers that include time spent on each lesson, and student progress reports focused on lesson growth and score conversion. We also spent the last few months reviewing our platform for accessibility to confirm WCAG Level A web accessibility compliance to meet the requirements of government institutions while also serving a larger audience of students with a variety of abilities. Our biggest challenge is to help students who have experienced learning loss during the pandemic and to help get them back on track. Interestingly, the student and teacher challenges are what we discuss most often, not our challenges in scaling as an organization. We aim to be there for our students and teachers, be willing to evolve, and quickly respond to meet their needs.