Remind: Enabling student success

In 2016, I stepped into the exciting world of Remind, an education technology company valued at over a billion dollars, as a senior product designer. I was part of a 14-person design team in a thriving company experiencing the heady days of the tech boom where high valuations were commonplace, despite the lack of a clear business model.

Research suggests students thrive when parents and teachers are highly engaged and invested in their success. Our mission was to connect parents, students, and teachers through a communication network that would support a student's educational career—a Slack for schools.

But, reality set in. We couldn't figure out a way to monetize our hundreds of millions of users and we faced the harsh reality of a down round and attrition. It was a difficult period, but it also presented an opportunity for transformation.

In the wake of these challenges, I assumed leadership of the design team. I hired five talented designers and a researcher, forming a new core to navigate the company's evolution. Together, we embarked on a journey to reposition Remind away from its consumer-facing origins as a teacher's classroom tool into a robust, districtwide communication platform. This pivot marked a turning point and laid the groundwork for a sustainable future focused on enterprise sales.

On our journey to reshape our business we evolved Remind for enterprise-grade security and management features including a SIS sync, connecting back-of-house to front-of-house accounting to our sales CRM, and self-serve upgrade workflows.

For Remind to be a successful communication tool, it needed to connect to a district's single source of truth registry for all students, teachers, and parents.

Remind had impressive organic growth in classrooms driven by teachers. We built ways for them to influence administrators to leverage Remind throughout the district.

In an effort to give administrators even more visibility into the student and teacher body, we built them the Admin Observatory—a way to traverse across every district, school, and classroom connected through Remind. They had the ability to message or call individuals directly and connect with relatives as needed. Together, this product eliminated two-to-three redundant tools that administrators used everyday.

We provided tools to admins that gave them confidence in their data and clarity in their actions.

The sidebar is well understood and provides flexibility in navigating lists for quick context and actions.

Multiple select actions can be more clearly explained and visible.

We didn't abandon all our consumer-facing features. District growth followed classroom engagement and we built phone calls for teachers to talk privately with parents through Remind without making their personal phone numbers known (a common request). At the height of the pandemic, when students were forced to learn from home, we built a white-boarding and presentation tool that made it simple to host an interactive classroom.

VoIP calls worked across desktop and mobile—allowing teachers to make critical calls and stay connected with families.

At around the same time we saw an opportunity to leverage our rich student/teacher graph and build a service that would:

allow teachers an opportunity to reach more students while offering an additional income source and,
give students a private tutor for a fraction of the conventional cost.

We called it Remind Tutoring and it's a great example of a lean team building a 0 → 1 product with outsized impact. More on that project here.

While we were deploying the Tutoring service, we brought together a team to tackle Remind's core product—the composing and navigation UI. This product didn't hit production before I left, but it's a consideration for how we'd evolve the core product experience as the business grew.

I'm grateful I was able to oversee these efforts and am proud of what the team was able to accomplish. Remind was acquired by one of its longstanding competitors, ParentSquare, in 2023.

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