A GoGuardian team member since 2017, Director of Product Management Nickelle Presley has been with the edtech company for more than half of the company’s seven-year existence. Even so, the COVID-19 pandemic brought about entirely new realities for the team member and her colleagues.
“Digital learning was already on the rise in education. With the pandemic, everything suddenly shifted to remote learning,” Presley said. “Demand skyrocketed for digital tools like GoGuardian. We thought we knew hyper-growth before. But this was a new level of demand.”
At the El Segundo, Calif.-based company — whose tech includes safety and well-being, classroom management, device management and content filtering tools on school-provided devices for K-12 students — charting the landscape meant ensuring its platform could support larger use at scale, said VP of Engineering Mike Rozek, who joined the organization late last year as it responded to an “unprecedented increase in demand.” According to GoGuardian, the number of schools they served grew by 40% during the first year of the pandemic.
“Beyond expanded reach, it was also the way in which the technology was being used,” Rozek said. “The pandemic really drove exceptional usage both in and outside of the classroom for a lot of technology that’s been adopted. Supporting a new pattern of usage, in addition to scale, was an interesting challenge.”
Rozek and Presley unpacked with Built In LA some of their key takeaways from 2020 — and how they’re using it to steer the organization through a shifting landscape.
A Growing Team
What have been the biggest impacts on GoGuardian due to the pandemic? How does that affect your team?
Presley: We had to move quickly to address the new needs of students, caregivers and educators. A lot was centered around creating more ways for them to truly connect with their students in these remote settings. This connection was imperative for students to continue to be engaged with their learning, especially in a remote setting as well as to address students’ social and emotional needs. Because of the state of social isolation, a lot of kids didn’t have the outlet and opportunities for social interactions that school offers. We also had to set up our platform to scale very quickly. It was all-hands-on-deck to provide educators and students what they needed and when they needed it most.
Rozek: Our business experienced a fundamental shift due to the pandemic. The team embraced this opportunity to truly address what emerged as one of 2020’s unique challenges: how to continue supporting meaningful interactions between students and educators in a fully remote environment. When combined with the need to support increased scale, significant flexibility and effort from the entire team was required to deliver on that challenge.
Our business experienced a fundamental shift due to the pandemic.”
What are some of the key trends in edtech right now? How do those impact your respective teams?
Presley: One that comes to mind is equitable access. Once kids were moved home, it became very evident that not all of them have equitable access to the internet. In some cases where schools weren’t one-to-one, not all students had access to an internet-enabled device that would allow them to participate in that type of learning. Another is the demand for simple and flexible digital learning tools, which was already there — but it has very much been heightened because there’s a big push to move to digital learning since it’s such an effective and scalable way to reach, help and impact many different students with their own unique needs. Digital learning tools also promote interest and engagement in the classroom as well as open up more opportunities to employ differentiated instruction and personalized learning practices in a much more streamlined, scalable way.
Caring for students’ social emotional well-being and safety was a trend that we were seeing, but since moving outside of school, it has really come to the forefront. Seeing the impact the pandemic has had on them is causing us to look at a child’s needs more holistically and understanding that for a student to be successful, it extends beyond how they do academically — there needs to be an understanding of their overall well-being (physically, socially, emotionally) as well.
Lastly, critical thinking: helping teach kids how to develop critical thinking skills to prepare our youth to successfully navigate a rapidly changing and evolving world, in large part due to rapid adoption of tech and how that shifts our society.
Rozek: The significant shifts in adoption and deployment of technology really caused us to shift our entire approach to make sure that we can seamlessly support that new scale, as well as understand what that responsibility means. There’s an enormous opportunity for us to lean into that and help foster extraordinary education moments through technology. I think that's both a key trend and also something that is a motivating factor for the team.
We have to remember why we’re here and who we serve, because they’re who come first.”
What are some big items on your 2021 roadmap?
Presley: There are a few specific areas we are actively working on in 2021. First is enhancements to our product suite. We want to help educators create powerful and equitable learning moments and empower students to be an active participant in their learning journey.
Second, continuing to provide districts with the tools to support their students’ safety and social and emotional wellbeing. The pandemic has shone a light on how important a student’s well-being is in order to allow them to be engaged with their learning.
Third, focusing on different initiatives that will expand our ability to support more districts and their students while maintaining a world-class experience on our platform — from opportunities to expand our reach to technological advancements that are going to be required to continue to scale.
DEI at GoGuardian
What makes the relationship between product and engineering at GoGuardian work well?
Presley: There’s very strong mutual respect. Product managers know that engineering is a critical partner in being able to build these successful tools. Before we build, engineers are brought in very early on in the ideation phase to brainstorm and assess feasibility. Working closely throughout the product development cycle, sharing in the wins and figuring out how to iterate on what we've launched has been a big part of our success.
Rozek: We’re extraordinarily collaborative. We share ownership over the global challenges of our respective teams. We communicate daily and are supportive of each other. With regards to those challenges, it really is a true partnership. That consistent communication is really the fuel that makes it all possible.
What gets you excited about the future of product and engineering, respectively, at GoGuardian?
Presley: We’ve made a deep investment in terms of making sure that we continue to hold ourselves accountable, demonstrate impact and test our products to make sure that they are moving the needles we intend to move in education. There are a lot of opportunities for positive impact, which also comes with a lot of responsibility.
Rozek: Building and scaling the team in a way that prioritizes strengthening our relationships as we move forward. Having a more consistent and focused understanding of how we can positively impact the lives of students and educators at scale is extraordinarily motivating.
