Paul Johansen - CTO of Edmentum

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Paul, the CTO at Edmentum, and we discuss important things to consider when bringing in an offshore engineering team, the role that culture plays when training the next generation of leaders, and tips for how to stay connected as an organization begins to grow. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:26) This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Paul at 00:00:37) I grew up in western Minnesota in a tiny little town in the middle of nowhere called Underwood, which is a little farming town. I graduated with 29 kids in my high school class, and so it's a whole different world from there to here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:51) Is it like a tech hub today?

(Paul at 00:00:54) Yeah, not so much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:58) That's crazy. 29 kids in your class? I thought I lived in a small town. I think there were maybe like three or 400 in our graduating class.

(Paul at 00:01:07) Yeah, so it's pretty small.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:09) So how did you fall in love with technology? Were you trying to automate stuff out on the farm?

(Paul at 00:01:15) Well, basically, living on the farm, I knew at like a very early age that farming was not what I wanted to do. My family had done farming. My brother still farms. My dad loved it, but it was not for me, so I knew I had to do something different. I always loved technology from being a little kid, and anytime I got the chance—we didn't actually have a computer in our house until I was a senior in high school.

(Paul at 00:01:41) But anytime I got the chance to use a computer at school, my aunt had a computer. I'd go over there with my little programming magazines and hang out and type in programs and things. So I always loved it and just ended up just following that path.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:56) Well, how did it evolve? So you're typing up these programs from the magazines. You're messing around with it in high school. You finally get your own computer in the house in high school?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:06) Like, did you go right into college and do this? Did you self-teach? How did you continue your adventure?

(Paul at 00:02:12) Yeah, I continued to just self-teach. And actually, when I went into college, I didn't—you know, maybe it was just being from a small town or maybe just me being naive—I didn't really think that there was, you know, that that was a career. I always just kind of thought it was something fun to do.

(Paul at 00:02:26) And then, right out of high school, I went to a community college that was close to where I grew up and was fortunate to have the business teacher there who basically was like, "What are you doing? Why are you not in computer science? That's clearly what you like doing." I was like, "Oh, really? You can make some money doing that?" And he's like, "Yeah, you can have a pretty good career." Like, "Oh, I should do that then." So at that point, that's when I kind of officially transitioned to it and went to university and came out with a degree in computer science, and I guess the rest is history.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:55) Well, what was your first job? Was that—I saw you did some stuff, like some .NET architecture at HP. Was that your first job?

(Paul at 00:03:02) Right out of college, actually, as my summer internship between my junior and senior year, I worked at an ad agency basically doing a lot of HTML, web programming at that point, a little bit of ecommerce. So I went to work for them right out of college for about a year, and then I went to a small consulting firm. At the time it was called Rainier. It was focused purely on consulting from Microsoft technologies, a lot of consulting with Microsoft. So I went to Rainier, did a lot of consulting there.

(Paul at 00:03:30) They were eventually bought by Compaq, who was then eventually bought by HP. So kind of as part of that string, I ended up going from a pretty small company, which was Rainier, which was kind of a boutique consulting firm, up to being part of HP Consulting, which was gigantic at the time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:45) And then did you go right into online learning education, or how did you get involved with that?

(Paul at 00:03:53) Yeah, so I went—there's a couple of similar cycles of story. So after I got to HP, loved working at the company, but it was just it was a huge company, which wasn't really my jam. So I decided I wanted to go back to working for a smaller company. So I went to one of my clients at the time, which was called Midwest Wireless, and they were a regional wireless cell phone carrier, early 2000s, super fun industry to be in. Just kind of an exploding industry at that time. So did a lot of really fun things there, really cool things there.

(Paul at 00:04:26) I was basically chief architect on the software side at Midwest Wireless. But then the similar story comes in. They were bought by Alltel, who was then bought by Verizon. So I found myself again at a very large organization, went back into consulting for a couple years. I went to Deloitte for a couple of years.

(Paul at 00:04:44) And then at that time, in 2009, when I was at Deloitte, I got a call from a former coworker at Midwest Wireless who was at a company called Plato Learning at the time, which is what Edmentum eventually evolved out of. But he called and basically said, "Hey, we're doing some really cool things here." At that time, the big challenge was we were moving—we were shipping out CDs and computers and needed to move to software as a service and kind of bringing everything online. So I joined Edmentum, Plato Learning at that time in 2009, to help through that transition as chief architect.

(Paul at 00:05:19) And then in early 2012, moved into the CTO role, and that's where I've been hanging out ever since.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:24) Are you loving it?

(Paul at 00:05:25) I love it. I mean, education and technology is such a fantastic industry to be part of. You know, like we already talked about, I've always loved technology. It's just who I am, and I'm a builder and a tinkerer and just love it.

(Paul at 00:05:38) But to be able to do it—I've been fortunate to love every job I've ever had and everything I've done. But to do something in education technology that also has such a mission to it, you know, which has really become even more so the case over the last year with the pandemic and everything that's been happening there. It's just an incredibly fulfilling combination of what I'm passionate about and being a technologist and also passionate about giving back and having a mission behind what we do is just such a fantastic combination. It's great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:12) What's the mission?

(Paul at 00:06:13) I mean, our mission is we partner with K through 12 school districts across the country and help them achieve the student outcomes they're looking for. So that could be anything from helping them set up a virtual program to offer students virtual programming. It can be providing them online curriculum, online courses, online assessments that they use as their core curriculum or to supplement specific programs. So we're all about delivering—we are an education company and a technology company truly combined. So, you know, you kind of think of our business as the combination of a traditional software-as-a-service company and, you know, essentially a publisher of education content smashed together, and, you know, we're using great technology to deliver great educational content and really partnering with school districts across the country.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:00) Who's making the content?

(Paul at 00:07:03) Our publishing team does. So I have a peer, our chief product officer. Cheryl's her name. So her team is basically full of instructional designers, former teachers, subject matter experts. So they're truly building—you know, if you think about it in terms of—I don't want to say that we're building digital textbooks, but if you think about it in terms of kind of traditional—you know, when we were in school, you get a textbook with all the curriculum.

(Paul at 00:07:26) They're essentially doing the same process, but building it in an interactive online manner. So they're doing everything from building a high school algebra course to building fun games and practice for a third grader learning math or English or science as well. So it's a true kind of education publishing side of the business and the technology side, which is more of what my team does, obviously.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:50) So if you guys are doing this thing where you're helping K to 12 education, what was it like going through this pandemic? Because all of a sudden, overnight, all these schools had to go remote, and you're sitting there with this tool set, this mature tool set that helps them do that. Did you just become like a superhero?

(Paul at 00:08:08) Yeah, I mean, it depends on how you look at it. Maybe a superhero to some or crazy to others. But, you know, it went through these kind of wild phases as we went through the year. So, you know, we started about this time last year, obviously, as the pandemic set in. Being core to our mission, we just basically worked as hard as we could to give away everything we possibly could. Right? School districts needed tools right now, so we just geared up, did some crazy scaling, and just gave away everything we could so that we put resources in the hands of our district partners. And some things were used extremely heavily, some things weren't, as districts kind of found their way through it. We saw, you know, this initial spike, and then districts kind of figured out what they were doing, and usage went down a little bit.

(Paul at 00:08:55) Then there was a huge spike for summer school. A lot of districts had kind of figured out how to do this, they knew they needed to give an opportunity for students to get caught up, so we saw a much higher than normal spike for summer school. Then things dropped off again, and there was really this extremely quiet time kind of all the way through the end of July as districts figured out what their back-to-school plan is going to be, offering hybrid programs. There's a whole bunch of federal funding that got released in July. And then all of a sudden at the end of July, it was like crazy town like you've never seen before where the lowest increase we had on one of our platforms was doubling our highest ever usage, and some of our platforms were at like 75x usage. So it's just, you know, huge demand for this, not only for the technology but also for our services.

(Paul at 00:09:46) We have a service offering where we've been teaching virtually for well over a decade. We have a whole team of teachers that partners with districts to teach different courses. And so, you know, we had to try to scale that, so we went into more of a mentoring mode to help districts teach and implement programs, do virtual learning across their whole district with teachers who had never taught virtually before. So it was, you know, everything from the scaling we needed to do on the technology platform side all the way to using our services team to really help districts prepare for this huge unknown that they didn't have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:25) What about your engineering team?

(Paul at 00:10:29) We had all kinds of craziness happen in that time. So basically, you know, we were hosted in a traditional colo data center up through the end of July, and it was quite clear at the end of July that, you know, because just simply because of hardware shortages, we weren't going to be able to get what we need, but we were going to have to scale faster and bigger than we could possibly do in the data center. So we did an emergency migration over a two-week period of our primary platform to AWS. So that was quite the project to do in two weeks, but it went great. We had great support from AWS's partner, and the team put in just some crazy hours and crazy efforts to get it done, but kind of one of those heroic efforts.

(Paul at 00:11:09) So we moved to AWS, so we had that ability to get a lot more elasticity with our scale and be able to do that. At the end of August, we have a partner that we were depending on for one of our offerings. It's called a student information system. It's not one of our core competencies, but we'd outsourced it. Their platform couldn't keep up with the scale.

(Paul at 00:11:27) So over a weekend, we had to migrate to a different student information system as well. So kind of these big unplanned migration efforts that did really well. So we kind of had those emergency things we had to put in place just to make sure that we continued to serve our customers and did that really well. And then the other thing from an engineering team was just being able to pivot extremely quickly due to a whole new set of demands that were out there. So one of the biggest things that changed was the involvement of parents in their students' education.

(Paul at 00:11:57) It just completely evolved how that was. Right? And so our platforms certainly have some basic functionality that's meant to communicate with parents, but parents engaged at a completely different level this year. So being able to quickly pivot, get our teams working on building out additional functionality that could support parents, additional functionality that could support, you know, the fact that everybody was virtual all of the time, different feature sets. So we definitely kind of quickly changed the road map and moved the engineering teams on the features that could help with the pandemic and where we were at that time.

(Paul at 00:12:28) So it was, you know, really from like April all the way through most of last year, it was just kind of moving around from place to place as fast as we could and just reacting as quickly as we could to get what we needed to in front of our partner base.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:45) That's amazing. And the way that we got connected was through David at MentorMate. Right?

(Paul at 00:12:50) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:51) Yeah. I was talking with him, and I was like, "Who do you have as a customer or somebody that's experiencing crazy growth that is really cool?" And he's like, "Oh, I know just the person." And then he introduced us to our teams and stuff. So I was super excited.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:06) But how did MentorMate—what did you—I don't get a lot of details. Right?

(Paul at 00:13:11) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:12) I just talked to David. David's like, "All right, this guy is cool. Talk with him." What did you do with MentorMate?

(Paul at 00:13:17) Yeah. So MentorMate's been a partner of ours for about four years from an offshore development perspective. And the way we approach offshore development and why they've been a good partner for us is we don't do project-based development with our offshore team. We truly—you know, when we're developing and putting together a sprint team, we treat the MentorMate team members as a core member of that sprint team. So they go through just as rigorous of an interview process as a full-time team member would.

(Paul at 00:13:46) You know, we try to retain and do the type of things we would with any full-time employee that we want that person to be fully invested in what we're doing, in the business we have, in serving our customers, and caring about our students and teachers. So we've had a pretty unique relationship with them that, you know, as an offshore team member, we have extremely low turnover. We've had team members from MentorMate who have been with us for three or four years now, and that's pretty consistent. And so, you know, they just become part of the team and part of the way we operate. And so as our teams made these pivots, they were right along with us.

(Paul at 00:14:22) Right? And some of the biggest pieces that we depend on them for is that ability to scale up and scale down. So like the platform I was talking about that increased 75 times year over year, where we needed to throw some resources at that thing to continue to help, not only help it technically, help it scale, but also get some functionality in there very quickly. So we depended on MentorMate to help bring resources to add to that platform as well. And so we use them both for—heavily for talent that's really at an equivalent level to our onshore talent, as well as that kind of very flexible opportunity to be able to scale as well from a development perspective.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:01) Yeah. Because I was curious. So as a CTO, right, you have the ability to hire people directly. You have the ability to use the partner. How do you decision between the two?

(Paul at 00:15:13) Yeah, it's always a tough challenge to be able to do that, right? You want to have—there's definitely advantages to having full-time team members who are fully vested in the culture, fully vested in what you do. You're going to invest a lot of time and resources into building them up.

(Paul at 00:15:29) But it's great to have the flexibility as well, right, where you can scale up, scale back if you have to, scale and change into different skill sets as needs arise and go away. And so we've always tried to strike that balance. We run approximately, I would say, two-thirds onshore full-time, one-third offshore contractor kind of flexible resources. And that just gives us that really nice ability. One of the nice things, because of the tenure that we have with our MentorMate team members, we can also depend on them to help us scale.

(Paul at 00:16:04) Right? They know the platforms as deep and as well as a lot of our onshore full-time team members. So if we need to add two or three people to a project, it always takes time. There's no, like, flip the switch, and all of a sudden you've got 25 developers that are fully up to speed and ready to roll. But it really helps to have that scalability as well where we can depend on the partner to help scale up those teams and bring resources on and get up to speed as well.

(Paul at 00:16:30) So it's all about, for us, getting that flexibility, especially because, as needs change—just like we saw, it doesn't usually change that dramatically—but depending on what we're trying to do, where we're investing, we want that ability to be able to shift resources and shift funding around to different areas. And it gives us a really nice level of flexibility to do that without having to severely impact the organization or the culture of the team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:57) For somebody that's listening, I'm curious, because I haven't done this at your scale. What's, like, the important things to consider to do offshoring correctly?

(Paul at 00:17:10) Yeah. I think, you know, a lot of times offshoring—and I've done offshoring, all sorts of different offshoring in many different countries, really for my whole career—a lot of times you can have successful projects for offshoring, but it gets really tough to be able to just completely say, "Here's the requirements for a project. Go build it and come back." Where I've seen much more success is if you can build, again, the sustainable relationship with the offshore team where you're treating them, having the same level of expectations for an offshore team member and an onshore team member.

(Paul at 00:17:44) Right? Then you reduce kind of this friction that will oftentimes happen between the onshore and the offshore team. If you're treating them truly as team members and peers, you just get much, much better results and a much happier culture as well, which is obviously super critical in any engineering team. And I think the aspects that do that is, again, bringing them into the process. So we do all of our standard agile framework practices, whether it's stand-ups, retrospectives.

(Paul at 00:18:14) Those teams are always part of them just like any other team member. It's really important and well worth the investment to try to actually get face-to-face time with those team members as well. So, obviously, with the pandemic we can't do it, but we were fortunate enough—our last trip would have been in November 2019 where we took most of our leads. Myself and a few others went to Bulgaria and just, you know, not only spent time working, but spent time just hanging out.

(Paul at 00:18:44) We did a barbecue at one of the guys' houses one night, went on some hikes, and just—making sure that you get that true kind of human-to-human connection where it's not just somebody that you're sending emails or instant messages to or Teams messages to, that it's a real person on the other side. And you just build that level of respect and rapport between the team members that you otherwise sometimes don't get.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:09) How do you do a good job at teaching your people how to—I mean, you're an organization that's large enough where you've got teams of teams of teams type deal. How do you impart your experience and your knowledge onto these leaders so that they're replicating your behavior well, and so this experience continues to grow as the company grows?

(Paul at 00:19:31) Mm-hmm. So we have—there's a couple of mechanisms we have that we use that are pretty powerful, or that I think are pretty powerful at least. You know, the first is we have our set of team values. And when you look at a technologist or an engineer or anyone in the organization, there's really—when you look at it, there's essentially two things they're being evaluated on. They're being evaluated on their technical capabilities and their technical competencies.

(Paul at 00:19:55) Are they a great developer, a great systems engineer, a great DevOps engineer? And then they're also being evaluated on their adherence to our team culture and our Edmentum culture. The values are the way that we express what's important to us. And so their values are things like, you know, we own problems. We don't care whose organization that problem should live in.

(Paul at 00:20:16) We're going to pick up the ball, and we're going to own it. You know, we treat each other with respect. We always have the customer in mind. Our systems are always running. Right? So we have these core values that we reference on a regular time. And I like to put them into a two-by-two grid. And I don't remember the first place I saw this—it's not my work—but it was a really interesting two-by-two grid where you've got kind of on the X-axis, you've got your technical skills, and on the Y-axis, you've got your values.

(Paul at 00:20:43) Right? And if you think about it, if someone's got great technical skills but they don't have any adherence to the values, it doesn't matter how good of a technologist you are—you're not going to make it at our organization. Right? When we have to end up managing people out or helping them find different opportunities, it's rarely because of the technical skills. Like, we'll invest, train, build people's technical skills if we need to. It's really about, you know, will you uphold the values that our team or our company is based on?

(Paul at 00:21:12) And that tends more often than not to be what'll make or break somebody at Edmentum. So it's really that kind of top-down, true adherence all the way through our leadership of those values and then putting leaders at every level of our organization that truly believe and live in those values and move it forward.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:32) It's really clear when you can see the person and interact with them. You're like, yep, that's the person, right? But as the company grows, you get farther from that and you have to teach that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:41) I've been talking to a couple people seeing different ways that they've solved this, whether it's how they craft their interview processes or whatever it may be. One thing I am asking around about is, have you ever used any sort of evaluation tools, like interview tools where you're understanding how the person thinks? Have you ever used any of those types of tools?

(Paul at 00:22:04) We do. So it's not—it's certainly not for every team member. But for a lot of leaders in the organization, we do use the Hogan assessments, if you've ever used those before. So they're basically behavioral assessments that give you some good visibility into potential strengths, potential areas that might be flagged as zones you might want to watch out for from that person. And so it's certainly not something that we use as kind of a yes-or-no criteria for hiring, but it's very insightful to get an understanding for the person you're bringing on and where they might fit into the culture, where they might not, how you can immediately start to coach and work with them or talk through those areas.

(Paul at 00:22:45) So we've definitely started to use those type of tools more lately, especially on the leadership side, which is really good. We have a defined set of leadership competencies for expectations at Edmentum. And so, typically, when we're going through an interview process, we'll have different panels where, yeah, obviously, we'll have a deep technology panel. We'll have kind of a technology leadership panel, but we'll partner with our talent organization.

(Paul at 00:23:10) Right? And they're going to go super deep into those leadership competencies as well to ensure that they align from what we're looking for from that leadership perspective. So, you know, I'd say we use some formal tools and some less formal tools to try to get to the bottom of that. But there's no super secret method that I'm aware of to have this 100% sure process when you're interviewing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:33) Well, exactly. And with these assessments, what I have found from some of the ones I've looked at is it gives you an idea of how the person thinks that might help you with a little bit of understanding where they're coming from. So you can adjust your communication style based off of their personality strengths. But it's definitely not, like, binary, like, you know, yes or no, this person is going to be a fit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:56) Now I'm also wanting to know. So you do these interview processes. You have these panels. We're having this conversation about how you do it. There's a wide spectrum of companies listening from, like, single individual building their startup to enterprise with hundreds of thousands of people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:13) I want you to provide some context to your company size as much as you can share so that people understand, like, you're experiencing this problem. This is kind of how you're solving them. But where are you guys at today?

(Paul at 00:24:23) Yeah. So from a company size perspective, you know, just in terms of who we serve, we're serving about 8,000 school districts across the US. And so our platforms are supporting millions of students a day, hundreds of thousands of concurrent students. So that kind of gives you an idea from a scalability of the platform. So some pretty high concurrent needs from that perspective.

(Paul at 00:24:45) From a size of the organization, we're well over a thousand employees now. We've been growing quite a bit, especially with all the things that happened last year. And of that thousand, our technology team is right around 120 of it. So we've got, within our development team, the engineering teams are probably about two-thirds of that. So that kind of gives you an idea from a scope perspective.

(Paul at 00:25:08) So like you said, we've got teams of teams, but not this endless hundreds or thousands of developers like you might see at kind of a giant Silicon Valley company or something from that perspective.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:21) And are you growing mainly just through your own greenfield type projects? Are you growing through acquisition? How do you view your growth?

(Paul at 00:25:29) Yeah. It's primarily all organic growth. So it's really just continuing to expand the reach of our current products, having more products being used by our district team members. We did do one relatively small acquisition. It'll be two years ago in July, but that's the last acquisition we did. So we haven't been doing a lot of kind of inorganic M&A type growth.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:53) What style of acquisition was it? Was it to hire the talent? Was it to get the customers? Was it to get the tech?

(Paul at 00:25:59) It was more to get the offering and the tech. So when you think about that, I guess the easiest way to look at it is our offering that we provide, where we provide teachers to schools, was primarily from a virtual perspective, grade six through 12, kind of your traditional what you would think of junior high and high school students are the ones doing virtual learning. There is more and more of a demand for doing fully virtual or partially virtual learning at elementary. So we purchased a company called Calvert Learning, and their specialty was elementary education. So for us, it was kind of an expansion of our market from junior high and senior high for that service all the way down so we could provide a K through 12, full K through 12 solution to our customers.

(Paul at 00:26:42) So it's extending down from both a curriculum perspective, but also the technology platform that ran that as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:49) Next up is pre-K. My daughter has been using her tablet before she could form full sentences.

(Paul at 00:26:57) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There, yeah. No joke. There is a lot of pre-K as well. There's some really cool tools and platforms and games and things that are out there. So, yeah, there's room to go up and room to go down from that. We typically centralize and focus on K-12, but—

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:14) Do you have young kids? Do you have pre-K kids right now?

(Paul at 00:27:17) I don't. I have a 15-year-old, a 12-year-old, and a 10-year-old.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:21) Two boys and a girl. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:22) All right. You got some users at home? Oh, yeah. Private beta testers.

(Paul at 00:27:26) They're by far the most critical of our platform. So if I can get them happy, I can get anybody happy. That's for sure. It's no holds barred with them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:35) I saw on here, on the notes, they said "Edmentum architecture." But, like, talk about, like, chief architecture, things like that. Is that an area that you spend a lot of time?

(Paul at 00:27:46) Not as much anymore. That's, you know, that's definitely where my background is—was doing, you know, coming up as an engineer, doing more software architecture, the design of systems. But, really, at this point, you know, from a CTO perspective, and that's—you see these huge varieties in how organizations define a CTO, right? From my perspective, the CTO role at Edmentum is the highest-level executive that reports to the CEO that's in charge of the technology organization.

(Paul at 00:28:13) Some organizations, the CTO is the best technologist, the person kind of laying the groundwork from an architecture perspective. I'm pretty sure my team would not let me get too close to production code. That's for sure in terms of writing anything and pushing it out. They might push my hands away from the keyboard there. So, you know, from my perspective, I spend my day most of the time working through leadership.

(Paul at 00:28:38) I love working through the technology strategy. So a lot of it is—especially recently—has been really putting in place and evolving our three-year tech strategy of where we're going, how we're going to evolve, how we're continuing to grow and scale, and keep the platform modern while we're also doing as much possible feature development and road map work as possible. So a lot of it is, you know, as an organization, when you're a software organization and software is your business, it is a constant kind of trade-off space that you're in of, you know, how do we continue to get things out to market, pushing features to our customers while also balancing building those in the right way, evolving the architecture, eliminating technical debt? You know? So I think every organization deals with that, obviously.

(Paul at 00:29:25) But when software is your business and software is what brings in the revenue, it's sometimes even a trickier battle, I think, to continue to play that game. So that's a lot of the decision areas that I play in. There is trying to help find that balance, working with my colleagues on the executive team on what we're going to deliver, when we're going to deliver it, and how we continue to reach that balance that's aligned to both our company strategy and then the tech strategy, of course, that feeds up into the overall Edmentum strategy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:55) So when you're doing something like this recent acquisition or when something like COVID happens and you're going to have to roll out these products, I'm curious, when things are going from the concept of idea to execution and you guys are playing with ideas and then deciding to execute them, help me understand how that works within the executive team. I'm going to take a guess at it. Here's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to reconcile my current experience of leading a company that has 15 people, right?

(Paul at 00:30:30) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:30) Across sales, engineering, production, things like that, with how that's going to look at a higher level. Because I've played different roles at higher levels, but I've never been the CEO, founder and stayed with the company. Usually, I just build stuff and sell it off, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:46) And so what I find myself doing is interacting with customers, interacting with our head of sales, interacting with our heads of production and kind of feeling it out, like what would be the next move for us. And then that kind of forms, as we do our quarterly planning, we have a lot of ideas. We kind of figure out which ones are going to be bringing the most value to our customers and also connect to our revenue because that's the most important thing. What are the least amount of hops to my revenue? And how can I focus my time there? And then it just kind of comes together. One latches on, then we execute, and then they deploy down within their teams, and then we just start meeting regularly talking about it.

(Paul at 00:31:29) Yeah. And I don't know that what we do is really a whole lot different from that. So we have a product management team that really is in charge of driving the overall road map that we're working on. We kind of put an annual road map in place that's at a higher level and rougher placeholders, right? We need the ability to be agile within that. But we start with that annual road map, and exactly like you said, that annual road map is tied to the annual revenue financial goals. So if we're going to—we have a product called Exact Path—if we're going to grow that by X percent, what are the things that we have to do from a product perspective that are going to drive that? And that filters down to multiple organizations, right? So some of that will come into my organization and say, "Hey, we have to be able to support additional configurability around how we administer tests within that." So that'll be a feature that'll drive onto my team.

(Paul at 00:32:20) But then we'll also have—we need to build, maybe we're going to build out more reading curriculum for second grade, and so that'll fall into the educational part. And we also need to continue to prove the efficacy of that product, that it really works in education. That's a big thing for us, right? It's one of the things with education is we have a responsibility to teach those students that we're putting these products in front of.

(Paul at 00:32:44) And so we have a research team that essentially their core responsibility is to say, "Hey, those features you built, the curriculum we're building is helping the students learn and understand this third grade skill." And so some of that funding may say, "Hey, we've got to do 15 research studies this year that are going to really prove out in 15 different states that this is having the effect we want it to." And so it'll kind of filter down, but exactly like you said, all those initiatives then rolling back up into that—it matches our financial goals and matches our impact goals.

(Paul at 00:33:16) We're owned—our primary investors are impact investors, impact growth investors, a firm called Vistria. And so they have expectations not only for us in terms of how we're performing as a company financially, but one of the things that's great is having them as a financial partner is they also have expectations for the impact we're making overall in terms of education outcomes for students. And so we have kind of a dual responsibility in terms of financial responsibility as well as education responsibility. That's a big part for us too. It's not only mapping into revenue, but mapping into impact is equally important as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:58) It's pretty rewarding working there then.

(Paul at 00:34:00) Yeah. It's exciting. And that's, like I said, the—for those of us that have been here for a long time and for those that tend to be successful, it's the ones that can connect to both the core technical skills as well as the core mission of the organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:17) So I want to talk a little bit about leadership, right? I'm always interested because I get to talk to all these great people like you and David and everyone. And I'm curious to know, what are you learning as a leader right now?

(Paul at 00:34:31) Yeah. So I think from my perspective, some of the things I'm really focused on as a leader is innovation and how you continue to foster innovation within your team. Our team has been, through the way that we use Agile, through the way that we do things, we're really good at continuous improvement. But in terms of truly groundbreaking innovation, how do you start to try to drive that into your team? How do you enable the team to do that, right? If you're a team that's traditionally executed kind of continuously improving, continuously improving, how do you give teams, leaders, the space to truly do innovative things, to empower them with the knowledge, the freedom that they need to do innovation? So that's certainly one area that I'm continuing to try to read up on, build new skills, build new capabilities, and is driving kind of this true innovative mindset, both for myself and for the team overall, which I think will be really important for where we're at from an education perspective. Again, just with everything that's changed, we're at a space where there's a true opportunity to do innovation as the digital side of curriculum delivery really takes off. And so that's definitely one of the places where I'm focused right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:47) Nice. Nice. Yeah. I always like learning what's going on. And I always am curious too. Do you get to meet your new engineers and talk with them? How do you stay connected to the entire org as it grows?

(Paul at 00:36:03) Yeah. Yeah. That's a great question because, especially with it being completely virtual now. So I used to do quite a bit of traveling. We have offices in Minneapolis and Dallas, as well as over in the UK, just north of London. So I would travel to those offices on a regular basis. But now, we'd started before the pandemic, but now we're completely remote and we'll have offices, but no one's going to be required to go into those offices. And so it's really opened up the need to do different things. So we do monthly department meetings where everybody comes together, we talk. That's not really a way to interact necessarily, but it's more one way, but it's at least a way to get visibility. It's a way to hear questions and answers and those kind of things. That's part of it. But what I've—another thing that I've done recently that's been really effective is I've been doing virtual coffees, and they're just these completely informal things where I'll grab a team, and we just kind of sit down and hang out. I usually force them to play some uncomfortable warm-up game kind of thing, and then it just gets the conversation going and allows them the space where it's probably 10 people or less at a time to just ask me questions or we just chat. It's a great way to get to know people and just find out. I found out so many super interesting things about what people do in their spare time, what they're passionate about, their hobbies, and just really getting—for me, what's most important is really truly understanding kind of the pulse of what's on the mind of my organization because a big part of what I have to do as the executive is I need to represent what we're doing as an organization down into my team, but it's equally as important that I can represent my team to my peers, to the executives, to our investors. And it's important that my team has trust that I can do that, right? And so it is critically important to stay in touch. And so that's one way kind of in this new virtual world that I've been able to do that is just creating the space to have these check-ins with various teams.

(Paul at 00:38:04) So I've met with our QA teams and engineering teams. I'm meeting with our DevOps team in the UK tomorrow morning to do one of these check-ins, and they've been really fun. And it's funny too because each one of these groups has their own personalities, and some are super quiet, and some are extremely talkative. And you can't always pick and choose correctly who you think is going to be what. And sometimes I had to do a lot of probing to get the conversation going, and other times, it's just free flowing and outgoing. So it's a lot of fun to do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:38) Give me an example of one of the fun or awkward warm-up games. What do you do?

(Paul at 00:38:43) So one that I typically do is I'll—I just have these random questions like, "What was your favorite movie growing up?" Or, "Tell me one thing that you can't live without." So there's these questions that I've picked up off of websites and things, and then I'll take—I basically take the set of questions. They're numbered one to 10 or however many people are in the session. And then I've been accused of actually taking the team members and putting them to questions. So I'll bring up, do a screen share with a random order generator with all the team names so they can see that it's truly being randomly generated. And we assign it. We go. And those questions have been so interesting, right, where you get—the one that's turned out to be one of my favorites is this, "What is the one thing you can't live without?" The first couple times I did it, it was something that you would expect, like my cell phone, but there's been some super thoughtful around family, around religious beliefs and things. So all of a sudden that question has gone from kind of one extreme to where it might be your phone or some other device or your car to some super deep thoughtful thing. And that's where I think you just learn so much about people just by the—even these silly questions that are meant to be warm-up questions, you can actually get some pretty interesting responses that give you insight into people that you just maybe would have never otherwise gotten.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:06) 100%. But now you've got so much intrigue from me. What is the one thing you can't live without?

(Paul at 00:40:13) Yeah. From my perspective, that is a good question. I've probably—yeah. I don't think I've ever actually been assigned that one in one of—because I participate too in these. I don't think I've ever been assigned that one, but I would probably go more on the gadget side of phone or watch. But, um—

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:31) We won't tell your family.

(Paul at 00:40:32) Yeah. That's what I was going to say. I feel a little bit guilty and petty. They're over in the other room there. They can't hear. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:39) You know what? It's so—I get what you're saying because here's the interesting human part. It comes down to the context of the frame that your mind is in when you're asked the question, right? Because if I'm hungry, I'm probably going to be like water because we're life forms and we that's just the most technical thing. We definitely cannot live without water. We could go that. We could go spiritual and go with religion or some spiritual answer. We can go with the feel good, the warm heart, like my wife, my kids. There's a number of different ways to answer the question. And so, uh, it is. That's the fun part is when you—you mentioned earlier, you like to understand what's on top of mind for your team, and asking these questions, they would all have an answer for any one of the categories. You could say, "What's your spiritual thing you can't live without? What's your health thing?" You know, you could go down the list, but you're getting—you're tapping into what's on the top of their mind by asking this interesting question. I think it's fascinating.

(Paul at 00:41:34) Yeah. Yeah. It's been, you know, it's something that kind of just organically came from my desire to—I just knew I needed to stay in contact and connecting with the teams. And so it's just kind of, over the last year, organically evolved, but it's something I just really look forward to, and I love doing it with the team. So it's a good time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:51) We'll officially agree, as of today, that for any CTO, VP of Engineering, tech leader, a gadget, a type of gadget is an acceptable answer given it's our career.

(Paul at 00:42:04) I think so. I think it's become official today that that is okay. Needed really for success in the career, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:11) Right. And at home because I need that little disclaimer for my wife.

(Paul at 00:42:16) Yeah. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:18) Oh, man. All right. Dude, this is a great conversation. I want to make sure that we give you a few minutes here. Was there anything that's on your heart or on your mind that you wanted to talk about that we haven't covered yet?

(Paul at 00:42:31) You know, I think one of the things that's on my mind is that I think is just fascinating from a tech perspective, and I'm sure you've had plenty of these in the conversations. But just the role of AI and how it's becoming so real and so part of what's accessible for almost any software team out there, right? There's been a long time where it's always—it's existed for a long time, but it's been the accessibility of building real, applicable technology with AI and machine learning is just amazing what's available, whether it's through the cloud providers or others. And for me, that's one of the most exciting things that we're doing from an education perspective is how we're using AI to be able to understand how can we onboard teachers faster, how can we bring them up to speed, how can we recommend better—if you think of recommendation engines, how can we recommend better curriculum to teachers to provide to their students, how can we recommend better things, and even evolving it beyond there to—I think that we'll get to a point where we'll never replace teachers. The best thing we can do is enable teachers with more information than that teacher-to-student connection is absolutely amazing. But I think there's going to be a time where we can depend on AI and machine learning to understand from a full perspective the way that a student's learning and where they may need help that will provide just this fantastic information to a teacher that just doesn't exist today to be able to look at that in kind of the full context of their learning, of their social-emotional learning. And so there's a lot of—that's what gets me super excited about kind of this next evolution of where we're going from a tech perspective is just the what felt like science fiction for so long is becoming very real and very applicable, and it's not just a gadget or fun. It's real.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:24) I'm becoming more demanding too. I saw a movie the other night. It was a 2002 or 2003 movie called Paycheck or something with Ben Affleck and—

(Paul at 00:44:33) I remember the movie.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:34) Yeah. You're doing some advanced technology. And I literally thought to myself, I said, that was imagined, like, 2003. Why don't we have that yet? Like—

(Paul at 00:44:43) Yeah. It's like, come on. Yeah. Somebody should be working on that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:47) Oh, man. Dude, this is great. Alright, so I'm gonna ask some tough questions. I have a new section at the end that we're trying out with you first time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:56) So I'll be—

(Paul at 00:44:57) The guinea pig. Let's do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:58) The title is called Love on People. That's the title of the section. And some of the notes in the section is I wanna know, like, what drives you as a person?

(Paul at 00:45:10) Yeah. From my perspective, what drives me as a person is just truly making an impact. You know, I just feel fortunate. I live a great life. I've been blessed with a lot of things. And so what drives me as a person is, how can I make an impact and how can I do great things? So that's what, you know, I love about being at Edmentum and that connection to the mission. I do a lot of volunteering outside of Edmentum as well. I'm a scout leader. I love—

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:36) You know, Boy Scouts was a—

(Paul at 00:45:37) A big part of my growing up that I loved. And so I've been a scout leader for over a decade and just love hanging out with youth and youth programs, do a lot of volunteering for nonprofits and things as well. So for me, it's all about what motivates me is giving back and impact and just building great things. I love to do things that surprise and amaze people, and I think that's what's always kind of connected me to the engineering side of software as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:05) I love that. Dude, that's a great answer. I'm gonna keep this section.

(Paul at 00:46:09) Thanks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:10) I'll share, like, for me, or one of the things that I thought of as you were answering that was when I was less mature, when I was immature, younger, I would hear people talk about volunteering. And for some reason, whether it was because I was negative or whatever it was, because I did used to be more of a negative person. Until then, like, life wasn't great. So I was like, let's be positive. Life's much better. But at that point in time, when I would hear people talk about that, I'd say, oh, they say that or they do those actions because it sounds good to say later. Later in life, I end up volunteering and getting involved and started sharing, like, do this stuff. And I realized that the reason why you do it is because it feels better than anything else. Like, you can definitely volunteer selfishly because once you do it, it's like, what is this feeling? What is this like? It's like selfish to be selfless. Right? It just feels really, really, really good. And so when I hear you say that now, I guess, I'm kind of proud that, like, I don't know. I feel like you're really genuine. I'm like, I get it. He's pouring into these kids. He's helping them out, helping them grow. You know, you probably play a larger role in their experience than, you know, because every once in a while, a teacher or someone in society has really impacted me and they didn't necessarily mean to. They were just being, you know, themselves.

(Paul at 00:47:29) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:29) So I think it's pretty great. So I love that you're doing that. If there's ever anything that I can help with, you know, shout outs on the show or maybe you're running like a donation drive or something and, you know, whatever you can think of, put me on your list for, like, the email list for when you reach out and you're doing something and you want contributions or help or anything because I'm down. I'm in.

(Paul at 00:47:52) That's awesome. I appreciate that. No. And I think it's, you know, what's important is to find the—you know, it's one thing to volunteer, but to find things that volunteer for that you're passionate about. And like you said, just kind of, you know, get you excited about doing it. You know, I think that's the biggest thing for people is to just find what makes you feel good about giving back, and it's just so rewarding and so enjoyable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:15) Boom. Dude, we nailed it. I wanna wrap up a little bit here.

(Paul at 00:48:18) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:18) I like to do calls to action to kind of help you guys grow as a business. You've got a good culture. I like you. How can people learn more about your products? Maybe some CTOs of some districts are listening, and they wanna look into you more, look into the company more. What do they do?

(Paul at 00:48:34) Yeah. I mean, the easiest way for sure, I guess, is the answer that you would think is go to edmentum.com. You know, it's got a lot of great information about our products there, and we'd love to connect with people. The other for me, the kind of cooler part is, you know, one of the hashtags we often use is hashtag educator first. That's our, you know, it's kind of our mantra. The coolest thing about educator first is that it wasn't some intentional thing. It's not our mission. It's not our vision. It's not the values. It just became this organic thing of who we are. And so if you're looking for information on our products and wanna understand how they can help your district or a student, definitely go to edmentum.com. If you wanna understand more what Edmentum is about, if maybe you're looking for a change—you know, there's a lot of, 100% of our services team are former teachers or district administrators, right, or if you're a technologist or a curriculum writer. Just go on any social and look for hashtag educator first, and that's what gives you kind of the best insight into, you know, who Edmentum is and who we are.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:40) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.