My role:

Senior Product Manager specializing in educational services (post-sales), focused on guiding students from enrollment to graduation. Dedicated to delivering an exceptional educational experience while driving student retention and success.

Case Study: Reduction of tutoring preparation time

Overview:

The main added value Northius offers its students is the tutorial service. Each student has at least one tutorial session every two weeks, during which:

• Issues are solved
• Academic follow-up and guidance are provided to ensure the student stays on track and does not drop out of the course

Due to the pandemic and the acquisition of several brands, the significant growth was not accompanied by scalable digital systems for operations, with the tutorial team being the most affected. This has resulted in high inefficiency, leading to:

• The constant need to expand the team despite the high cost
• High turnover and frustration within the team
• A decline in the quality of the tutorials

Discovery:

The issues within the tutorial team caused significant disruption in the company due to the rising team costs and its potential impact on the NPS, which had been declining (although other problems contributing to this were also identified). To thoroughly understand the problem, I carried out the following activities:

• Shadowing tutors to understand their processes and how they conduct tutorials.
• User interviews with tutors and students after tutorials.
• Meetings with stakeholders from the area and the business to understand their concerns.
• Analysis of the tools used by the tutorial team.
• Data analysis to identify insights that could help us understand the problem and, most importantly, measure improvement later.

Solution:

After the discovery phase, I set two main goals to focus on:

To address this, I begin working with the team (tech lead, full stack developer, and data analyst) on a solution, which turns out to be a dashboard that must meet the following requirements:

• Easy access for the user.
• All information should be grouped (minimize the need for navigation).
• Data must be processed to enhance understandability.
• It should allow the tutor to add comments.

The product creation process requires significant collaboration with the tutoring team, constant iterations, and extensive user testing to decide what information to present and how to group it in a way that provides agility and value. The main challenge we encountered was with the data lake, as we needed to bring in many data points we didn’t have previously, followed by the work required for data processing. The project concludes with an MVP and a defined roadmap for future improvements.

Outcomes:

• The tutoring preparation time is reduced. During the research process, it was established that tutors take an average of 5.13 minutes to prepare for a tutoring session (accessing and navigating four different platforms). With the new dashboard, that time is now under 30 seconds—a reduction of over 80%.
  
  
• Student satisfaction with tutoring has improved by 7%. In surveys conducted since the dashboard’s implementation, satisfaction has increased from 71% to 78%.
  
  
• An internal survey was conducted with the tutoring team (118 tutors), showing a 100% satisfaction rate, which clearly indicates a reduction in team frustration with this aspect.