Product Discovery & Product Strategy
Validating an AI-Enabled EdTech Vision
Market research, personas, jobs-to-be-done analysis, customer journey mapping, and opportunity assessment informed the product strategy for an AI-enabled EdTech platform, validating the product vision and prioritizing a focused MVP before a single line of the build began.
- Context
- YourClass — Founder, Product Discovery
- Period
- 2026 – Present
Business Challenge
An early product concept for an AI-enabled learning platform, combining subject-proficiency diagnostics with psychometric and personality assessment, needed to be validated against real user needs before committing engineering resources to a full build.
Approach
Discovery combined qualitative and structural methods: understanding what learners and their guardians were actually trying to accomplish (jobs-to-be-done), mapping how that need moved through a realistic customer journey, and assessing which opportunities were both valuable and buildable within a reasonable MVP scope.
- Market research and persona development for the target learner and guardian segments
- Jobs-to-be-done analysis to separate genuine need from feature wish-lists
- Customer journey mapping across diagnostics, assessment, and reporting
- Opportunity assessment and roadmap planning to sequence what shipped first
Outcome
- A validated AI-enabled EdTech product vision grounded in real user research rather than assumption
- A prioritized MVP scope covering subject-proficiency diagnostics, Big Five–based personality assessment, and synthesis reporting
- A roadmap sequencing that pushed personalization and analytics features to a later phase, keeping the initial build achievable
Exhibit 12.1
Illustrative product roadmap from discovery through scale
Lessons learned
- Personality assessment via Big Five, with MBTI and DISC treated as derived views rather than separate measurement layers, turned out to be a simpler and more defensible architecture than trying to support three parallel frameworks.
- The MVP scope shrank twice during discovery, both times because a "must-have" feature turned out to serve the product's story more than an actual user need.
Consultant's note
"Building assessment products taught me to be suspicious of my own excitement. The features I was most eager to build were consistently not the ones the jobs-to-be-done interviews actually supported. That gap is worth building into any product discovery process as a standing check."
Skills demonstrated
- Product Discovery
- Persona Development
- JTBD Analysis
- Roadmap Planning
Part of Volume 3 — Delivery Excellence, Product Strategy & Enterprise Transformation.