The Oxygen principle to building B2B products

A few years ago, I had the chance to lead the digital transformation of one of India’s largest K12 education groups. This was a group that had enrolled over 400K children across 500 schools.

While our initial discussions with the management led to expectations of feature heavy solutions like video content, digital note taking, adaptive testing, analytics dashboards and peer to peer learning, there was a lot of resistance and skepticism in the rank and file. The group had a 50 year legacy and it did not help that a trust deficit had to be bridged as a number of solution providers before us had tried and failed at making this digital transformation happen.

On immersing ourselves into the everyday life of students, teachers, principals and deans, we realised that a set of ‘weekend tests’ seemed much more important than every other form of pedagogy. Successfully executing these tests was the lifeblood of the entire group, as the 5000 odd teachers used the results from these tests to determine the weekly learning diet for each student. If we were to have any chance of succeeding in our goal, we had to get these tests to happen online.

On digging deeper we found that to run these offline tests, a whole bunch of high frequency and low importance operational activities like sourcing, matching, tagging and selecting questions were taking place in a highly inefficient manner. I wondered if solving for this ‘non glitzy’ set of inefficiencies could become the much needed catalyst for the bigger vision.

And so, our first solution was to build a digital bank with a much improved way to source, manage and edit questions across all subjects. This helped us build a lot of credibility with the senior Deans. We then layered on a simple digital testing engine and found an internal champion to pilot an online test with 50 students in 1 school.

3 years and thousands of iterations later, over 200K children were concurrently taking their test online with additional access to learning videos and a parent information system. At a later stage, an analytics app was built for all 5000 teachers to help them with recommendations on how to improve students’ performance. The grand digital dream had been realised at scale, but it all started with solving for that question bank and 1 pilot weekend test which eventually became like oxygen for the entire system.

When building out a B2B product, ask yourself these 5 questions:
1. Why have previous solutions (if any) failed?
2. What are the high frequency, low importance and non glitzy activities that you can make better for your customers?
3. How can your solution become like oxygen in the customer’s life?
4. Who is the champion on the customer’s side that you can work with to pilot your solution?
5. How can you leverage the results from the pilot and the voice of your champion to scale your solution?