If you are an entrepreneur developing a product for children, there is a good chance that somewhere along the way, an educator will become part of your customer journey. Maybe you are creating an educational app. Maybe it is a curriculum, classroom activity, assessment tool, professional-development resource, toy, social-emotional learning program, or service for schools. Whatever you are creating, there’s one important question to ask early—not after the product is finished:
Have you designed it with educators, or simply designed it for them?
There is a big difference.
Educators are not simply another group of consumers. They work within complicated environments with limited time, established routines, curriculum requirements, technology systems, budgets, administrators, families, and, most importantly, the diverse needs of the children in their classrooms.
A product can be innovative, engaging, research-informed, and beautifully designed—and still fail if it does not work in the reality of a classroom. For entrepreneurs, that means designing for educators requires more than asking, “Would teachers like this?” It requires asking, “Will this actually make sense in their world?”
Start With the Problem, Not the Product
Entrepreneurs naturally become excited about their ideas. You may have identified a technology that could transform learning or developed an activity you believe children will love.
But before investing heavily in development, step back. What problem are you actually solving? Digital Promise has long emphasized the importance of involving multiple stakeholders in the design and implementation of education products and of developing effective ways to gather user feedback and use it to drive iterative design.
That means your first conversations with educators should not necessarily be: “Would you use this?” Instead, ask:
- What is difficult about this part of your job?
- What takes too much time?
- What do you wish you had?
- What have you already tried?
- What gets in the way of using existing solutions?
- What would make a new solution genuinely useful?
- What would make you stop using it?
These questions can reveal the problem you thought you were solving isn’t actually the most important problem—or that the solution needs to look very different from your original idea.
Design Around the Teacher’s Day
One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs can make is designing a product in isolation from the educator’s workflow. Imagine creating a fantastic classroom activity that requires 20 minutes of preparation, five different materials, individual student accounts, and a complicated data-entry process. On paper, it might be wonderful. At 9:05 on a Tuesday morning, it might be completely impractical.
Y Combinator’s guidelines for edtech products emphasize making products easy for educators to understand, clearly explaining how they fit into classroom settings, and reducing friction around implementation, purchasing, support, data, and student accounts.
The lesson for entrepreneurs extends well beyond technology: Don’t just design the experience you want educators to have. Design for the experience they actually have. That means observing the context in which your product will be used.
- Where does it fit into the school day?
- How long does it take?
- Who has to set it up?
- What happens when something goes wrong?
- Can a teacher adapt it when a student needs something different?
- What happens when a substitute teacher uses it?
- What happens when there are 25 students instead of 10?
The answers to these questions are product-development information—not inconveniences to solve later.
Give Educators a Voice in Development
Teacher feedback should not be a one-time survey conducted after your prototype is finished. It should be part of the development process. This is one of the central ideas behind human-centered and design-thinking approaches. Design thinking shifts attention away from simply creating a product and toward understanding the people who will experience it, using empathy, experimentation, and iteration to develop solutions.
For an entrepreneur, this could mean creating a small advisory group of educators. You might:
- Interview teachers before development begins.
- Invite educators to review early concepts.
- Create simple prototypes and ask teachers to walk through them.
- Observe educators using early versions.
- Conduct short pilot programs.
- Ask teachers what they would change—not just whether they “like” the product.
- Continue collecting feedback after launch.
And don’t only listen to the loudest or most enthusiastic users. A product that works beautifully for one experienced teacher may not work for a first-year teacher, a special education teacher, an instructional coach, or an educator working in a very different school environment.
Different educators can reveal different problems.
Don’t Confuse Engagement with Educational Value
An appealing product is important. But in education, “fun” cannot be the entire value proposition. Educators need to understand what a product is intended to accomplish, how it supports learning, how it fits with what they are already doing, and what evidence supports its use.
Y Combinator’s guidance recommends clearly communicating a product’s purpose, content, implementation, intended users, outcomes, and research or case-study support. Digital Promise similarly recommends integrating relevant academic research into product development and revision.
For entrepreneurs, this suggests a useful development sequence:
Need → Research → Design → Test → Revise → Evidence
Rather than:
Idea → Build → Market
Research should influence the product itself, not simply become a few citations added to the website once development is complete.
Make Data Useful—Not Just Available
For many education products, data is part of the value proposition. But more data does not automatically mean more value. A teacher does not necessarily need another dashboard filled with graphs and numbers. They need information that helps them make a decision.
Digital Promise specifically cautions that data can become less useful when it is overwhelming or difficult to interpret, while emphasizing the importance of presenting information in ways educators can understand and act upon.
So instead of asking:
“What data can our product collect?”
Ask:
“What decision could this information help a teacher make?”
That question can dramatically change product design.
Design for the Diversity of Real Classrooms
There is no single “typical” student—and there is no single typical classroom.
New America’s work with developers and designers of educational materials highlights the importance of considering culture, identity, family structure, abilities, socioeconomic context, geography, language, technology access, and students’ lived experiences when developing educational materials. It also emphasizes involving audiences in development rather than relying on assumptions about them.
For entrepreneurs, this is both an inclusion issue and a product-quality issue. Ask yourself:
- Who might this product unintentionally leave out?
- Does it assume reliable internet?
- Does it require a particular device?
- Does the language work for English learners?
- Can children with different abilities participate?
- Do the examples and images reflect a range of families and communities?
- Can educators adapt the experience for different learners?
Designing for variation from the beginning is often much easier than trying to retrofit inclusivity after the product is built.
Remember That Educators Are Experts
Perhaps the most important mindset shift for an education entrepreneur is this: You don’t have to be the classroom expert. You may be the expert in technology, product development, psychology, business, design, marketing, or another area. Educators bring a different kind of expertise. They understand what it’s like to actually use a product with children in the middle of a busy day.
Use that expertise. In fact, educators can become some of your most valuable product-development partners. Recent work around ISTE’s Teacher Ready framework similarly emphasizes educator voice, usability, learning science, and the value of giving schools better ways to evaluate whether products actually support teaching and learning.
That is an important shift in perspective. Instead of asking teachers to become buyers of your finished product, invite them to become partners in creating a better one.
The Entrepreneur’s Takeaway
Designing for educators isn’t about making your product less innovative. It is about making your innovation useful. The strongest education products don’t simply answer the question, “What can we build?”
They ask: What do educators and children actually need—and how can we create something that fits naturally into their world?
For entrepreneurs, that means talking to educators early, observing real environments, testing assumptions, incorporating research, designing for diverse learners, making information actionable, and continuing to listen after launch.
Your idea may be the starting point. But educators can help you discover what the product needs to become.
Bonus: “Entrepreneur Checklist”
Before you launch, ask:
- Have educators helped define the problem?
- Have we observed the context in which the product will be used?
- Can a teacher explain the product’s value in one sentence?
- Does it fit naturally into existing routines?
- Can educators adapt it for different learners?
- Is the research or evidence easy to understand?
- Have we tested the product with real educators?
- Are we collecting feedback and actually using it?
- Does the product respect educators’ time?
- Have we considered accessibility, inclusion, and technology differences?
References
Buerk, S. K. (2020, June 12). Design thinking for educators. Engage2Learn.
Digital Promise. (2014, November 18). Five recommendations for developing better education technology products. Digital Promise.
Misha, A. (2023, June 26). Empowering educators and enhancing product quality: Unveiling a powerful solution to EdTech. EdSurge.
New America. (2022, July 12). What designers say about creating educational materials. New America.
Y Combinator. (n.d.). Guidelines for EdTech products. Y Combinator.
About Daffodil Creatives
Daffodil Creatives serves as a partner to entrepreneurs in creating outstanding child-centric products and services by bringing deep expertise in child development, education, psychology, parenting, and technology. Services include planning, design, reiteration, promotion, testing, and business coaching to provide you with skills that will pay dividends in child-centric products & services that are appropriate, evidence-based, and resonate with your target audience or customer. Visit www.daffodilcreatives.com to learn more and connect.