Now valued at more than $2bn, Multiverse was built to ensure workers don’t get left behind by the rapid pace of technology. To date, the company has delivered more than £2bn in verified ROI for 1,000+ employers, including critical national security with Babcock and household names like The AA, Capita and Addison Lee. Here, Gordon MacRae, their former head of learning products, explains how they applied a classic product discovery approach to curriculum development.
This interview was part of a series called Product-Market Fit Academy, run by Emerge in conjunction with our Venture Partner community – operators who have founded and led the biggest businesses in our market, including Duolingo, Udemy, Beamery, HiBob, WalkMe and OpenAI, representing a combined $1tn in market cap.
Here is what founders will get out of this conversation with Gordon:
- How to think about curriculum as a product
- How to quickly validate the product-market fit of a curriculum
- Avoid investing too much before you know it’s a product people want
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“We didn’t have the luxury of being able to write a full curriculum, launch it and then it not be a big programme for us,” recalls Gordon. He’s talking about the moment the team was tasked with 4x-ing the number of Multiverse’s apprentices shortly after their Series B.
“We simply couldn’t invest in curriculum development for 12 months for programmes that ultimately didn’t work. We had to know they met a really solid need. We needed to be hitting 90-95% success rates with any new programme that we launched.”
Three years in, Multiverse had developed a reasonable understanding of what worked by being opportunistic, launching programs with interested partners and then licensing third-party curriculums to deliver them. They used high-quality materials from the likes of FlatIron, MindGym and General Assembly (Gordon’s previous employer) – essentially, no-code for curriculum.
But it wasn’t scalable: every program was different. And it wasn’t sustainable: the per-learner licensing cost too much. For the next stage, Multiverse had decided to bring curriculum and programme development inhouse. And Gordon had to make sure the programmes rapidly found product-market fit.
“We quickly needed to put in place a process whereby we knew any programme that we were investing time in building was going to be a success before we invested six months in writing a curriculum,” says Gordon. “So we started to develop a repeatable approach.”
The 3-step product discovery process
So where did they start? “We took our inspiration from the world of software,” remembers Gordon. “A straightforward product management framework of discovery, validation, development and launch. And we looked at how we could apply that to building a curriculum.”
The guiding principle, as for successfully finding product-market fit with software products, was to test early to discover customer needs and ensure that you were meeting them before investing too much upfront in something that people don’t want.
“What that meant was a three-stage process for any new programme that we were thinking of launching,” explains Gordon. “We worked very closely with the Go-To-Market Team to gather all the inputs from clients.”
This gave the team rich insights into new programmes that clients were looking to run. “We would have a big spreadsheet where we were gathering all of those inputs. And then we would run a monthly meeting with the executive team to review our product roadmap. Anything that looked kind of interesting, we would put through a three-stage discovery process.”
The stages were:
- Concept
- Feasibility
- Define
Things to apply:
- Work closely with sales to understand the opportunities
- Introduce a process to validate opportunities before taking them forward
Step 1: Concept
The first stage was one day of work. “We would ask a product manager to go away and do a market sizing exercise for us. Typically, it was a day of desk research to answer the main questions that the exec team asked us in the monthly product roadmap meetings.”
These questions typically included:
- What is the size of the overall potential market?
- What are our competitors already doing? Are there already products out there that are solving this problem for clients?
- Where do we think Multiverse could play a unique role within the market? And what size is that segment?
Product managers would then grade the opportunities on a scale from A to D. “I stole this from the way that Liverpool FC keep tabs on their potential transfer targets,” smiles Gordon. “Never be afraid to steal any great ideas from other industries.”
For Multiverse, an ‘A’ grade meant they thought it could be bigger than one of their current top three programmes with a clear pathway to £10m in annual sales. ‘B’ was a solid mid-range selling programme. For ‘C’ grades, it was probably too early but an opportunity worth keeping tabs on. And opportunities graded ‘D’ were not worth their time.
“We’d just raised a Series B and we were going through this huge growth trajectory. So we only prioritised programmes that were coming out of that research exercise with an A grade,” says Gordon.
Things to apply:
- Spend a small amount of time validating lots of opportunities
- Size the market and think about what you bring that is unique
- Early on, only take the A-grade candidates forward
Step 2: Feasibility
If the programme passed the Concept stage and the team were still excited by it, they went to the sales team to identify four or five clients that might be interested.
“One of our product managers would then go out and gather some research in client meetings,” says Gordon. “We softly pitched the idea as a new programme to identify what the pain points were for clients and identify what their end goals were. This helped us to learn about a programme that we could potentially build.”
That product manager then worked with a learning designer to sketch out a ‘minimum viable curriculum’. This was just a two- or three-slide overview of the programme, plus a couple of personas that they were designing the programme for.
“This helped us to identify what that company was looking to do with the knowledge, skills and behaviours that their employees would learn,” says Gordon.
If they were comfortable with what the curriculum looked like and we thought it was feasible to deliver, they would then go back out and validate it again with clients.
“In the feasibility stage we weren’t actually looking for someone to put money down. We were just looking to test that we were on the right track with the curriculum that we were building.”
This stage would take only 2-3 weeks. If they started to get buying signals, they would move to the next.
Things to apply:
- Quickly validate concepts with real customers to build understanding
- Use these insights to create user personas
- Build an MVP in slides and test again
Step 3: Define
At this stage the team would commit to a launch date three months out. “We would create all the marketing materials and we would set the sales team a target of hitting a minimum number of seats of at least 100,” says Gordon.
The learning design team would then start building the first modules. If the sales team surpassed their target in the first month, they would start recruitment for an instructor and a coach. If they didn’t, they would stop and go back to the drawing board.
“We’d really only ever built one or two modules of a programme before we launched. Then we were building the rest of that programme throughout the first lifecycle of the programme’s delivery,” says Gordon.
He notes that the process is “people intensive” at the start, particularly if you’re having to fix the first modules while making the next. “But it meant we could validate that programmes would be successful without investing until we knew precisely what clients were looking for.”
Things to apply:
- Once you have confidence, set a launch date and focusing on selling
- Only build just enough before you have real customers
- Use your first customers to help inform your curriculum development
Takeaways
Gordon sums up with his top tips:
- Apply the same discovery methodology to developing a curriculum as to a software product: size the market, quickly prototype and test with real customers
- Explore lots of opportunities. Early on, only take ‘Grade A’ candidates forward
- Use the sales process to build your understanding of customer needs and help you create personas for your users
- Don’t invest much until you have strong buying signals
- Only build just enough before you have real customers informing the process
“Don’t be afraid to take a programme to clients while you’re still figuring out who it’s for. A lot of founders and product teams are worried they’ll lack credibility in front of clients if they aren’t 100% sure of the product before they start pitching it,” he concludes.
“We actually found the opposite. So long as we were open that we were still developing the curriculum and transparent about bringing clients into the process, companies were eager to be involved early and have an influence on the final product.”
