Why Mentem? Because we solve real problems for our clients
By Steve Crooks
Let’s talk about problems and solutions, and share an example of how our approach to product here at Mentem is tightly focused on our clients and our mission.
One of our clients – a very large bank – recently provided a great example of “suffering from success”.
Their pilot data analytics upskilling program was so successful that they wanted to 10x the rollout over FY24-25. This introduced a new challenge – how could they scale up from handpicking and enrolling a couple of dozen team members in a pilot to enrolling hundreds of employees into the program simultaneously and advertising for and running cohorts in parallel?
Solving real problems
Prioritisation is the most important discipline in good product management – focusing the team in on what matters most, and saying “not now” to all the distractions competing for their attention.
Our approach to edtech is to focus on what solves real problems for our customers and learners, and how we can move the needle in ensuring quality, impactful employee skill enhancement at scale.
When everyone is asking for something to get on the roadmap, how do we know where to focus our efforts? The world’s full of shiny features, nice-to-haves, and stakeholders’ pet ideas. How do we cut through the noise and be confident we’re building tools that are genuinely useful and will make a difference?
The framework I keep coming back to is the simple matrix of impact and severity.
When measuring impact, we ask the question “How many people are affected?”. The extreme ends of this scale are: something which only one user has reported (lowest) vs. something which impacts all users at all clients (highest).
When measuring severity we ask the question “How seriously are these people affected?”. Key considerations are: what’s the consequence of not having this? Are there alternatives or workarounds, or what would simply not be possible without it?
The problem: scaling up the program
Let’s get back to our client and their post-pilot scale up challenge.
The feedback from learners and buzz in the business has been so great that the program leadership are getting overwhelmed with the enquiries they receive from potential learners and interested managers across the broader business.
Scaling up isn’t going to be possible using the pilot way of working. No one person – especially when this isn’t the only responsibility they have – has the time and bandwidth to be able to:
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Promote and advertise the program
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Receive email applications from interested candidates
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Evaluate and recommend who to prioritise
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Answer the myriad of candidate questions
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Email applicants and their managers with updates
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Maintain all the candidate and enrolment information
This is a great example of a real, high-priority problem to solve – there’s no simple alternative to this admin burden. Without a solution, there’s a genuine risk that our clients won’t be able to scale up to offering programs to hundreds of learners from across the whole organisation.
Our clients and their success in running employee skill enhancement programs at scale is our number one priority at Mentem. So while addressing this part of the operational process wasn’t product roadmap, as soon as the extent of the problem became clear, it was the top need for our product team to solve for.
The solution: elegance in simplicity
The Mentem product difference isn’t the shiny toys with advanced features (although we do some clever things behind-the-scenes and the sites look great!), it’s the needs we solve for our clients and how we work together to prioritise what makes the biggest difference to clients and their people.
What this means in practice is: even within the overarching problem (“We can’t manage the manual recruitment of learners as we scale out our pilot programs”) there are individual pieces of the puzzle that can be prioritised and built first, and added to once the tool has been launched.
So here’s what we built.
The minimum viable product here was a three-parter:
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A landing page to help prospective learners know if this course they’ve heard about is really for them – from testimonial videos through to demo topics, a detailed syllabus and schedule, and FAQs on the program and application process.
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A short EOI form to capture basic logistical information and have applicants share their reason for being interested, time commitment to the reskilling program, preferred course dates and answer some technical questions on prerequisite knowledge.
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A database to securely store applications. In the interests of time, reporting could initially be done by exporting a CSV and tidying up in Excel to produce human-friendly reports.
Once launched we then immediately started work on adding an admin view with live reporting, and are building enhancements to manage outbound communications and confirm final learners directly in the tool itself – no more need for Excel!
The outcome: real problem solved
The short-term outcome? Great usage of these new tools (hundreds of applications in the first couple of weeks), a substantial reduction in the email back-and-forth and manual admin time, and a strong learner pipeline for not just the next cohort but the ones beyond – looking ahead into 2025.
Longer-term we expect this not only to help manage the admin of selecting learners, but also to have a measurable impact on the success of the programs themselves. Learners are now enrolling into courses based on plenty of up-front information and having demonstrated their suitability and motivation for this course. As a result we expect to see our already-strong metrics of learner satisfaction and success continue to hold steady or even improve as we scale these programs out to hundreds and thousands of learners per client.
I look forward to sharing some more stories from our product team and ways of working in future. Thanks for reading and if you have any feedback or questions, feel free to connect on LinkedIn.
Steve Crooks
Steve has over 15 years’ experience in education and digital product management, having built edtech teams and innovative programs across a variety of sectors worldwide.
At Mentem Steve leads a team responsible for the research, design, development and evolution of our digital platforms and tools. In his free time he runs marathons and the occasional ultra.
