Tigtag Learn

Date: 2012-2014

Location: Shanghai, London, Glasgow

Roles: Product Manager

Organization: Twig Education

The Problem

Twig (since acquired by Imagine Learning) was an award-winning developer of science education content for K12. In 2014, the company entered the Chinese market. Despite an enthusiastic response from educators and licensors, Twig’s educational offerings faced three main challenges. First, Twig’s curriculum did not align with the local science curriculum. Second, the product relied on online streaming, which was limited by government internet restrictions.

My Role

This project was pivotal in my career and marked my transition from business development to product management. I had structured and closed the license agreement with local partners and organically stepped into the role of translating learner needs into product design.

Needs Discovery

To understand the local learner, I embedded myself in our partners’ classrooms for several months and spoke with instructors and parents at every opportunity. I facilitated parent focus groups and classroom observations in China for our UK-based product team to communicate differences in culture and experience.

Product Development Process

I organized and facilitated co-design workshops between instructional design teams at our local partners and HQ teams, recruited test users, and expert consultants, moderated focus groups and user-testing sessions, and produced product requirements.

Twig’s offering was a novel concept for the Chinese market in the 2010s. I worked alongside partner sales and marketing teams to model product demonstrations, provide implementation training, and cocreate messaging strategies that spoke to our target audience.

I only learned in hindsight that these were product management responsibilities, and like many, I had inadvertently stepped into the role of a PM in pursuit of better user outcome.

Outcomes

We developed and launched an offline curriculum with 120+ lessons based on Twig’s award-winning content for primary learners, Tigtag, which became a commercial success for our partners.
To solve streaming issues, we created an encrypted offline server that could be connected to local area networks (sounds quaint now, but then an innovative solution!)
Many elements of our localized product was absorbed into later iterations of Twig’s global product.