Aula Education is an education technology company building teaching and learning software for universities. I co-founded Aula in 2015 with Anders Krohn and Oliver Nicolini and was Chief Product Officer until my exit in 2020, leading efforts on product vision, management and design. The company was subsequently acquired by Coventry University in 2022.

At Aula, our goal was to support educators in creating engaging educational experiences. We had all recently graduated and had been first-hand users of teaching and learning platforms as students.

The technology landscape at universities was particularly fragmented, outdated, and incredibly unintuitive, but with good reasons. Universities are complex - There are many stakeholders, all with different levels of decision-making, teaching methods are varied and open for debate and technology systems need some level of integration for sensitive data to travel fluidly amongst a university.

As we grew the product team to over 20 FTEs, we were able to split our focus into several product areas. Each product area was equipped with a product manager, a lead engineer, a designer and support them with a pool of fullstack engineers. These teams could fully focus on specific parts of the product and would organise their work in the way they saw fit. Some teams were fast at iterating with incremental improvements while other teams had longer term projects with more user research involved.

In the early days, we were struggling to understand if we were building Aula for students, for educators or for universities. We realised how central the educator was in the educational experience and we decided they would be our number one focus when taking product and design decisions.

This meant designing for all types of educators - and a wide array of tech-literacy. Some of our educators were already users of messaging platforms while others had a hard time understanding the difference between an email and a simple message on the platform. We decided to focus on the latter, the educators who had high levels of technology anxiety.

In a pre-covid world, fully distributed companies were still somewhat uncommon. In the company's early days, we were struggling to hire engineering talent in London at the pace we needed and did not manage to secure a visa for one of our first hires in Albania - we therefore started working remotely and completely embraced it a few months later by shutting down our London office.

In a distributed company, there are no lunches, no coffee breaks, no drinks with colleagues, therefore information does not spread through the company unless it is clear, available and deliberately designed. Whether it’s about company structure, work culture or the product roadmap, everything becomes documented and available to all team members at all time and asynchronicity becomes the norm.

One of the important moments in keeping everyone on the same page, was when we moved all communication and document storing from Slack and Google docs to Aula itself. As if we were a mini-university with a number of different classes. This empowered everone in the company to share feedback and suggestions. It increased motivation for the product team to fix that small annoying bug that would have never been prioritised and increased honesty and transparency around the quality of the product and what the experience of Aula really was.

We had a comprehensive version of our product roadmap with owner, timeline and detailed description of each item, as well as a more high level public facing version which would be shared with educators and university leadership.