How do you get an edTech product over the finish line on time—and on budget? Why, develop an incredible product development timeline, of course!

No matter what tool you use to plan or create, your product timeline has everything your team needs to stay on track. This includes:

• Major project milestones
• Links to deliverables
• Roles and responsibilities
• Due dates for feedback, design, content, and more

Because timelines are the best tool for keeping your team focused and on task, it’s important to spend the time to make them right. Whether you’re an experienced product owner or leading a team for the first time, here’s what you should know about developing an edTech product timeline for launching your tool without a hitch.

4 Key Elements of a Product Development Timeline 

Project timelines are an easily overlooked element of edTech product design, but they contain a real blueprint for success. (Plus, it’s disastrous when you don’t have them!)

Here are the four things your product timeline should do:

1. Reflect Real Milestones and Dates

Begin by brainstorming the needs and priorities of both your users and your team. This will help you align on deliverables, feedback sessions, and overall constraints or parameters for your schedule. Even a tentative launch date gives you something to work backwards from to begin your road map.

Here are a few considerations to keep in mind as you build out your calendar:

• Product launch dates
• School calendars and buying cycles
• Internal initiatives, from annual reports to conferences
• The needs and priorities of your minimum viable product (MVP)
• Whether you’ve already conducted user experience research (UXR)

From recruiting for user interviews to working around vacation schedules, a thousand different variables can affect your milestone dates. 

Not sure whether you have the right deliverables on the timeline? Set a meeting to hash it all out with your product owner and make sure everyone on your team is aligned with the final results.

Is it still unclear how long it will take a specific team to turn around their part of the project? Get an estimate and refine the timeline from there. The fewer assumptions you make about milestones and timing the better.

2. Consider Availability & Resources

As with most design projects, the biggest factors impacting your timeline will be money and people. For example, you’ll have to build in time for your edTech product stakeholders to review and approve work. It should be clear from the outset who provides feedback and how much time they need for review.

Similarly, other schedules or constraints around workflow can eat into your timeline. Share your team’s out of office dates with the project manager as soon as possible, so the timeline reflects availability.

And don’t forget to consider the impact of other decisions, including contracting out work and methodology. For example, is your designer working with a new illustration resource? Is your developer exploring a new workflow? Pad your timeline to account for new people and new methods.

3. Use the Budget as a Guide

Once your team has a strong understanding of how the budget affects features and other priorities, it’s easier to make strategic decisions about designing your learning tool. 

Typically, a larger product budget means you’ll have more time to iterate and design. A smaller budget means your entire team will need to move quickly. Does your timeline accurately reflect the budget?

4. Give Everyone Access

Product timelines shouldn’t be a mystery. If you’ve just finished the first draft of your timeline, schedule a walk-through to discuss it with your entire team. 

Be sure to share the document across internal and external teams, refer to it regularly, and format it in a way that’s easy for many different people to understand. You may even want to try out different versions of the same timeline in different formats to see what works best for you and your team. (More about choosing a format below!) 

Keep your timeline handy throughout the product development process, too. This way, you can re-share it in emails or include bullet point reminders about milestones as needed. 

After all, the timeline ultimately tracks current process and progress. It indicates where the project is in real time—and which dates or milestones have changed to accommodate new user research findings, design challenges, or shifting priorities.  

Example Product Development Timelines for edTech Product Owners

edTech product timelines take many different shapes and forms. From spreadsheets to fully designed Miro boards, the most important quality of a timeline is that it works for your team—and your project.

Miro Boards

Miro is design software that supports meetings, product work, and more. In terms of product timelines, it’s easy to map out each deliverable on Miro. If you’re working on a product that involves many milestones, or you need a way to collaboratively develop a timeline, this is a great option. Because it’s incredibly visual, it’s easier to align your team on each step of discovery or concepting work.

Asana

Asana supports agile design frameworks exceptionally well. Agile product design uses the requirements for your MVP as a starting point and works backwards, identifying all the milestones it takes to reach the finish line.

This planning software also provides different views of your timeline, from a list of milestones to a kanban view. Kanban timelines, which reflect tasks that are either upcoming, in-process, blocked, or done, might work especially well for teams that are comfortable with ticketing systems like Jira.

Last but not least, Asana also allows you to add dependencies to tasks, which is helpful for both internal and external stakeholders. When dependencies cause a slow-down, Asana automatically updates your product development timeline across stages. So helpful!

Spreadsheets

There’s nothing wrong with a good, old-fashioned spreadsheet. If your edTech product timeline is straight-forward, this is a great tool to use to help your stakeholders know when design or content is ready for review. Spreadsheets are also incredibly useful if deadlines are moving hour-by-hour, especially as the engineering team becomes involved.

Whether you use a custom spreadsheet or fancy planning software, your product timeline is the place to house a list of your deliverables, including links to your edTech product designs. Designed well, your product development timeline is the one-stop shop for everything related to your project.

What to Do When Your Product Timeline Changes

Panic! Just kidding. Knowing that your edTech product development timeline will shift is like knowing the sun will rise in the east. It’s inevitable. And, if your team is used to working in an agile framework, they already know that milestones will likely change.

Here’s how to manage whatever comes your way:

1. Pad your milestones with extra time

From a product planning standpoint, it’s crucial to allow for revisions to the timeline from the very beginning. Pad, pad, pad those milestones with extra time. As your project manager tracks turnaround times and deliverables, it’s also important to realign with your team as changes occur. Whether you schedule a Slack message or send a follow-up email, make sure everyone is on the same page.

2. Be flexible—but be mindful of the launch date

Even as you make room for changes, remember that your timeline is a kind of contract with your external teams. It tracks feedback rounds, dependencies, and deliverables—all of which affect scope and budget. The more deliverables that move within your timeline, the further back you may have to push your potential launch date. And the more of your project budget you eat up with changes!

3. Review and re-evaluate your timeline as you go

As the project continues, review and re-evaluate your timeline at least every two weeks. Is everyone on your team meeting their deliverable due dates? How about those feedback and review sessions? You might be excited and anxious to see your edTech product hit the shelves, but it’s more important to be realistic about time and resources. That’s what a product timeline is for!

Whatever shape your timeline takes, it’s a vital project planning tool. Not only will it help you keep your edTech product on track, it’s also a quick and easy way to communicate with your team about needs, deadlines, and next steps.

Happy planning!

Are you about to kick off design for a new edTech product? Find out how our expert team can help you design an incredible user experience for teachers and learners! Contact us below.

Whether you’re leading your company’s entire product division or managing a specific product, you know how challenging designing an edTech product from the ground up can be. 

Once you come up with an A+ product idea, you’ll need to align all your stakeholders, develop and test features, ace your marketing plan—and everything in between.

In this article, you’ll learn how to plan your edTech tool like a pro by following the lead of our incredible project management team. 

Find out how to pick the right team members, tie your product development cycle to the school year, and more with these expert tips for product planning. 

Let’s dive in!

1. Assign Your Team

To design a great learning tool, you’ll need a strong, cross-functional team. Together, this team will take your learning tool from initial concept to wildly successful product.

Make sure they all have the right skill sets, so you can build the edTech product that will serve your users best. You’ll need the following internal and external team members to get your product off the ground:

• Product owner: The person in this must-have role has a holistic understanding of your product and business down cold. They maintain the fidelity of your product vision, and, in some cases, the spirit of the pedagogy.
  
  A strong strategic thinker and decision maker, your product owner also understands how all the individuals on your team work together, and they’ll communicate those connections to external teams along the way. They should have the final say on all decisions. 

  Skills: Basic understanding of UX/UI principles, as well as back- and front-end technical needs. Understands business needs and how your product fits into the organization, including how it will be marketed and sold. 

  This person is also an incredible communicator. They’re great at looping in the right internal stakeholders at the right time, leading the charge on actionable feedback, and consolidating feedback and approvals, so your external teams can get back to building. 

  Challenges: It’s not always easy to find the right person for this job! Many VPs of Product already have too much on their plate to completely own the development of a new learning tool. Because of this, your product owner might need additional support from your organization or from other team members. Just don’t try to launch a new product without finding a great person to own the process from start to finish. 

• User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) designer: A user experience design team will be responsible for creating the overall experience of your product, including the product’s structure, organization, and feature interactions. They bring strategic value to your discovery and design process, conducting competitive audits, user research, and user testing along the way. When user research is part of the overall experience design, you get better, more strategic results.
  
  With strong backgrounds in visual design, the user interface designers produce the look and feel of your product. Ideally, these teams work very closely together or have overlapping skill sets. For example, user interface designers will work from the wireframes and prototypes developed by your user experience team, incorporating brand elements like color, animation, photography, and typeface to bring your product to life. 

  Together, your UX and UI designers collaborate and think holistically about the end user experience of your edTech product.

• Front- and back-end developers: edTech tools are highly visual, complex products that require separate developer skill sets. Front-end developers focus on coding the visual elements of your product, while back-end developers support technical requirements and  functionality, as well as database development and shared services. 

  Challenges: Quite often, the dev team is brought into design and discovery discussions too late to provide meaningful feedback. In order not to waste time or resources, invite your dev team to the table early so they can be part of the creative process and identify technology solutions to support improved UX. 

  Make them aware of early strategic decisions, including the requirements for your minimum viable product (MVP). This way, your developers will fully understand what they’re building, including how design decisions impact their work. Give this team multiple opportunities to voice their concerns while final requirements are being written and approved by your business. 

  Ideally developers will have multiple touchpoints with your design teams, in order to review and annotate wireframes. At the very least, they should be asked for feedback before final designs are approved.

• Additional stakeholders: It’s crucial to get the right people in the room at the right time. Don’t forget to invite additional stakeholders along the way, including sales, marketing, content engineers, or other leaders. New to aligning stakeholders on product goals? Check out our guide to working with stakeholders throughout the discovery process. 

 2. Define Your Minimum Viable Product

In agile workflow models, you road map every point along the way in order to identify the minimum viable product (MVP) you can put in front of a user for a positive experience. Ideally, the MVP is a compromise between the business needs and your user needs.

What are the minimum number of main features or screens that will support a teacher, student, or admin user throughout their experience? Perhaps the student-facing side of your MVP is on track. But will a teacher persona find your product valuable without reporting features? (Not likely!)

With your internal stakeholders, the product owner will prioritize these features and communicate these needs with external teams before a timeline is developed.

In an ideal world, the minimum number of features is the first thing you’ll consider, aligning with available personnel and timeline before you begin.

Of course, variables like time and personnel will always affect how quickly you can move and what you can accomplish. Do you have 6 months to roll out a product, or two years? Who do you have on your team and what actions do they need to complete to cross the finish line?

While the term MVP is often used interchangeably with a phase 1 roll-out or pilot designs, we encourage you to really consider what it means to have a minimum viable product. Resist the temptation to change the parameters of your MVP to meet a pressing issue or need in the short term. Keep your eye on the integrity of your designs.

3. Conduct User Research & Testing

Take it from the UX experts: most product teams haven’t conducted enough user research before they begin designing edTech tools. Having a thorough understanding of your personas and testing regularly with users is the best way to make sure your product will:

• Meet the expectations of your users
• Create long-term solutions
• And address persona pain points.

A great project manager can help you create a scalable way to research and user test during discovery, as well as while you’re building the project. A strong UX firm that specializes in edTech can also facilitate access to teachers, students, and administrators, so you can get the right kind of feedback for your learning tool at the right time.

4.  Identify Your Deliverables

Project deliverables should be well-defined, with clear ownership and feedback processes.

How much time will teams take to review and provide feedback? What’s a reasonable turn-around time between iterations? The more you clarify processes in the early stages of product planning, the easier it will be to deliver assets on time.

Here are the five most common edTech product deliverables you can expect your teams to work on throughout discovery and development:

• Initial research. What pain points or problems are you trying to solve with your learning tool? How will your edTech product be used in classroom or administrative settings?
• Competitive audit. Knowing what other edTech brands are doing right and wrong will help your team determine how your product can replicate successes or fill a gap.
• Personas & user journeys. Research-backed user profiles and narratives designed to help you with decision making. These assets will address questions like: What do you know about your users? What does their day-to-day look like right now? How will that change once your learning tool is in their hands? Depending on the type of tool you’re designing, you’ll want to account for personas as varied as teachers, students, administrators, and parents.
• UX Wireframes. Gray scale, structural outlines of our learning tool, including sequencing and interactions. Once you approve wireframes, you’re committing to the overall structure and navigation of your learning tool.
• Designs. Designs encompass visual direction, including the product look and feel, which always reflects your brand. This look and feel is also applied to wireframes as a first step to developing your full user interface.
  

5. Develop Your Timeline

Plan, plan, plan—and plan some more. Whether you’re using an agile or waterfall workflow, you’ll need a strong timeline with well-defined deliverables and flexible milestones. These milestones should include launch dates and adequately timed feedback sessions, as well as meetings to confirm product requirements. 

In order for timelines to work well, make sure your product owner can communicate what consolidated feedback looks like internally and externally to your project management team. How long do your internal teams need to review design decisions? How can you collect the most actionable feedback or clarify internal decisions for your external teams?

The more you work with project managers to clarify these details early in the planning process, the easier it will be for your external teams to receive  stakeholder sign-off and keep meeting deadlines. 

6. Align Your Timeline to the School Year

Speaking of timing—edTech companies should align their product development timelines with the school calendar. 

Take advantage of administrative buying cycles by launching your products in spring, when administrators are beginning to make decisions about products and allocating their budgets. This means you’ll need to start planning and designing a complex product at least 8-12 months—or more!—before the school year begins, kicking off in the prior fall or winter.

Your sales team will want in on this timeline, too. They’ll begin selling the product to administrative buyers in the spring or summer before your learning tool launches. Planning to have the major features of your product completed by this point will help this team develop marketing materials.

Want to test a pilot of your product with users before you officially launch? Plan to conduct a pilot program, as well as additional user testing, in the summer leading up to your launch date.

7. Clear the Communication Channels

Every major project needs a well-organized and accessible hub for sharing assets, in addition to a tried and true communication system. By making all documents easy to find, you’ll cut down on project management hours and speed up your work. Similarly, transparent communication channels help everyone stay on the same page. 

Here are common tools we recommend for project management and communication:

• Jira. A bug tracking and project management tool designed specifically for agile workflows.

• Google Spreadsheets. Track timelines, product requirements, resources, and ongoing questions or needs.

• Slack. Communicate asynchronously and in real time with your entire team.

• Microsoft Teams. An alternative to Slack and Google products.

At the beginning of your project, choose the tools and processes that will best support your needs, whether that’s weekly or daily touch-base calls, design reviews, or stand-ups. All communication should be documented and easily accessible across your teams. 

8. Have Fun!

edTech is a special industry. Everyone is focused on supporting the needs of teachers and students by making products that really work in the classroom. This is fun work! By striving for flexibility and building camaraderie, you can keep your project moving forward while leaving room for ease and delight.

Well-planned edTech product design is worth the effort. Keep your stakeholders aligned, your external teams informed, and your creativity flowing with detailed timelines and regular communication.

 By the time you’re ready to launch your learning tool, you’ll have prevented headaches, heartaches, and hassle—and you’ll already see ROI from everything your teams have learned along the way.

Are you planning on launching a new edTech tool next year? Contact us below to find out how we can help!