XplanaZine

(I have been sharing these five laws of product development lately as part of a seminar on product development. I share them here today as I have had numerous requests to make them available in a digital format. I am providing, along with the five laws, some basic notes that equate roughly to the content I present along with them at the seminars.)There have been a number of insightful articles of late dealing with the changes afoot in education. David Wiley’s notes for the
Commission on the Future of Higher Education and James Hilton’s keynote at Educause provide an insightful looks at the challenges to traditional views of education, and the technological and curricular currents that are shaping a new future in education.

As education changes, so must the way we conceive of and develop products for education. From textbooks to simulations, content and product providers of all kinds (publishing companies to private schools) must rethink the way they do business. Below, I have listed my five laws of product development in the 21st Century. These are intended to serve as guidelines for thinking, product planning, and business strategy.

• We no longer know how they want to know — A popular mantra is that we no longer can predict what our current crop of students will need to know in order to be successful in their future professions. From a product development perspective, that mantra is extended to not knowing how students will want to receive and process their information. We can’t know what technology they will use to experience learning content. There are plenty of possibilities, of course — e-book readers, iPods, game systems, computers, cell phones — and the most likely answers to how they will want to know are “all of the above” and “none of the above.” With regards to student preferences for handling information for learning, we have passed that point where we can think of a single product option or pretend to know what the complete list of product options will be. Yes, students will want to use gaming systems, cell phones, computers,and iPods for learning. But they will also want to use devices and platforms that we haven’t seen yet. Knowing that, successful product development in education will think less in terms of specific platform (LMS, game system, cell phone) and more in terms of content preparation so that content can work regardless of how users decide to interact with it.
• Convergence will stay ahead of content – We predicted it for half a decade. We gave the naysayers plenty of fodder for ridicule when it didn’t happen as fast as predicted. But then, finally, convergence happened — all of a user’s important features and content on a single device. Great news, right? Wrong. Users can now listen to their music, surf the Web, send e-mail, IM, read books, watch video, and play games on a single device. The problem? We’re still waiting for content to catch up and probably always will be. Content providers have have maintained a “silo” mentality in which individual chinks of content have a one-to-one correspondence with specific technologies. But wait — the new gets even worse. Convergence will continue to evolve and it will happen at a greater rate — regardless of the technology evolutions) that content response. That means that there will be a gap between the options that devices offer their owners and the actual content available that can take advantage of those options. Successful products and product developers in the education space will be those that can provide the greatest degree of convergence with regards to content. Every aspect of a course or textbook should be able to map to the technological convergence present via a cell phone or advanced iPod and should do so in such a way that allows the user to control the experience.
• One plus one equals infinity — Traditionally, content providers (publishers and educational institutions) have created products as stand-alone entities. A textbook or a course represented a single product that wasn’t particularly scalable or able to map to any other product type easily. The problem with this model is that it does not account for evolving technology platforms requiring the same information or content in different formats, nor for the increased emphasis on personalization and customization that is driving all content markets. Product developers used to think in terms of books and albums. Now they must think in microchunks of content that are abstracted from any particular final product yet mapped carefully to anticipate evolving market demands. The content that once comprised a textbook must now be reassembled into hundreds of different products on demand and on the fly.
• Time is no longer linear — In the past, educational products were delivered in linear cycles that were as regular as the lunar phases. Textbook editions were released in 3-4 year cycles and courses were offered on schedules that could be mapped out years into the future (for degree plan and teacher scheduling). Today’s market forces require a different kind of thinking. Successful products (think iPod for a moment) have more rapid and overlapping releases, a higher rate of mutation, and are much more market sensitive. Instead of traditional product thinking controlling the market, customers and market demand will dictate product thinking. In other words, all rules are off and the most crucial tools are market research and anticipation.
• Failure is a repository of possibility — Finally, the only way you can be as agile as you need to be in the 21st century is by reprocessing the old as well as the new. Product developers have to look around at all their discarded ideas and content (or code), and learn to see these past “failures” in a new way. In fact, successful product developers must develop the skill to see everything in a new way. It’s not about thinking inside the box or outside the box — it is coming to the realization that there is no box. In such an environment, it should be an unpardonable sin to utter the phrase, “We tried that before but it didn’t work.”