0→1 Business Intelligence
Creating a unified analytics platform to help career schools understand student performance, intervene earlier, and improve outcomes.
Role
Senior Product Designer & Design Manager
Team
Myself, Product Managers (3), Product Designers (2), Engineers (16), QA team (2)
Opportunity
Moving from an attendance point solution to an essential business intelligence tool for career colleges
The business problem
Coursekey, an EdTech B2B SaaS startup, secured a Series B funding round in early 2021 with the success of their attendance and academic tracking solutions. However, those solutions weren’t enough to significantly scale their client base and become an essential system in their client’s tech stack.
The customer problem
Most career schools have a similar issue; they buy and use various products to provide point solutions, but no system offered a complete picture of student performance. The sales team at CourseKey knew this well because it affected many prospective clients’ decision to add CourseKey - another point solution system - to their tech stack.
Our idea
Integrate with other point solutions to provide aggregated insights about student performance and become the go-to interface for accessing and understanding career schools’ data.
My Role
Leading product design and building and managing the design team
Prodcut Strategy
Defined core feature concepts, updated site architecture and created the ‘workspace’ concept.
Design & Execution
Updated design system, designed prototypes, and defined functionality and interaction behavior.
Design Manager
Managed two product designers, assigned work, provided resources and support.
Research
Identifying career school management pain points and opportunity areas
We needed to understand better what kind of data schools needed to compare and how they would act on the insights provided by such data. So, I interviewed school executives, campus presidents, program directors, academic advisors, and instructors from 12 schools to hear about their pain points.
Fred C., Admissions Officer | Milan Institute
Fred C., Admissions Officer | Milan Institute
John C., CCO | Concorde College
Shari G., Registrar | Central Coast College
Key takeaways:
Student retention was the top investment priority across schools.
Schools lacked an efficient way to understand why students were struggling and intervene early.
Comparing performance across programs and campuses required time-consuming manual analysis.
Compliance and accreditation reporting created significant administrative overhead and pulled staff away from students.
Strategy
Build a premium product (Cortex) for schools to track data across the student lifecycle from acquisition to post graduation job placement
The CEO, VP of Product, and I worked together to define Cortex’s main functions:
Integrate with other widely-used products to pull critical data relating to enrollment, retention, placement, and compliance into Coursekey.
Display key insights from compiled data for staff to quickly understand areas that need improvement and students who need assistance.
Automatically informing the appropriate people about important insights, events, and changes.
Update core product architecture to account for premium analytics pages
I knew it would be essential to redesign our site map and page linking structure as a foundation for new Cortex functionality. So, I took the initiative to draft and implement such changes and used the opportunity to enhance other everyday user flows that I knew clients struggled to navigate through.
Product Site Map Updates (2022)
Create ‘Workspaces’ for the most important areas of the student lifecycle to track
Schools break up the student lifecycle into three stages; Enrollment, Retention, and Placement. I created the concept of the Cortex workspaces to organize data and automated actions for each stage.
System updates
Design system evolution & core page enhancements
In 2020, I designed the first CourseKey design system, which featured large components and typography with plenty of padding, creating a clean and focused interface. However, to fit the new data visualizations and tables for Cortex features, it was essential to size down fonts and components, adjust container styles, and expand the color palette.
Design system: Added data visualizations and refined typography, color palette and container sizes
Student Page: Added retention risk score and trend charts, program progress and activities log
The Final Experience
Managing school performance with unified enrollment, placement, and compliance insights
Enrollment: Identify Day 1 attendance issues, improve student status conversions, and automate outreach.
Placement: Track job placement outcomes, compare performance across programs and campuses, and surface opportunities for improvement.
Placement: Track job placement outcomes, compare performance across programs and campuses, and apply insights from high-performing programs to improve others.
Compliance: Monitor graduation and placement rates in real time and alert staff before metrics fall below accreditation thresholds.
Impact
Building the AI Chat, then scaling the AI Platform
We launched AI Chat Beta in 3 months and reached 30% activation among visitors in the first month. The Horizontal AI Platform then expanded to power two in-app Calendly experiences, an external Gmail agent, and a Calendly MCP server integrated with Claude and ChatGPT.Launching AI Chat, then scaling the AI Platform
8
Schools signed pre-sale deals for Cotrex
Based on sales calls demoing my prototypes
$1.5MM
Revenue from pre-sale deals
Revenue grew to 3x after 1 year of the Cortex launch
3
Series-C funding offers
Prompted by the revenue growth after launching Cortex
Professional growth
Advocating for scalable product decisions and managing a team
Working with the executive team taught me to advocate confidently for my team's needs while directing multiple projects simultaneously. The opportunity to grow and manage the design team encouraged me to seek leadership training, mentorships, and professional communities outside CourseKey. I learned from product leaders around the globe how to create a safe and productive environment for my team and provide feedback to help them grow as design professionals.