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I’ve sat in on many vendor meetings since leaving the classroom. And I’ve heard some version of this sentence more times than I can count: “Teachers aren’t in our ICP. We sell to districts.”
Fine, that’s fair. Nobody expects a 7th-grade history teacher to whip out a purchase order.
But here’s what that logic completely ignores: The teacher is still your end user. Every. Single. Time.
"Student-facing" doesn't mean "teacher-free"
I taught middle school for 13 years. In that time, I tried a lot of EdTech products. I loved trying them (still do!). I was usually one of the first in my building to raise my hand for a pilot.
And I can tell you exactly what happened with every product that wasn’t built with the teacher in mind.
I dropped it.
Not because I didn’t see the value. Because I didn’t have the time.
Teachers are the ones who set up your product, train students on it, troubleshoot it at 8:09am when half the class can’t log in, and decide whether it's worth pulling out again next week. If you’re not thinking about their experience, you’ve already lost.
A story about a virtual textbook and a very bad Tuesday
In the latter part of my career (just before the COVID-19 pandemic), I adopted a virtual textbook from a well-known publisher. Seventh graders. History. I was pumped to use it.
What followed was one of the more, erm, demoralizing setup experiences of my teaching life.
There was no SSO integration. I had to go to my IT department to get a file of student emails and IDs, download a bulk import template from the publisher, reformat all of my students’ data to fit the template, and upload it manually. For each class section.
Then I designed little username and password cards (they were clouds, get it?), cut them apart by hand, and spent an entire class period having 12-year-olds glue them into their notebooks, log in for the first time, and troubleshoot every problem that came up.
New student enrolled? Manual import. Student moved sections? Manual import. Password reset? That was me. Problem too big for me to fix? I had to call the company, because until someone solved it, that kid didn't have a textbook.
I stayed with it anyway. Because future me would thank present me: no lost books, no "I left it at my mom's house," no end-of-year invoice for three missing copies. The product delivered real value once it was running. But the road to "running" was designed as if teachers didn't exist.
The admin signature is a contract, not adoption
I’ve seen this play out in a few different directions.
Products get purchased and quietly die because nobody brought teachers along. Products get used badly because teachers weren’t trained. Contracts don’t get renewed because there’s no one in the building advocating for them at budget time. And sometimes, products that teachers truly loved get discontinued or gutted by the vendor, or cut by administration, and the people who actually used them daily have zero say in any of it.
On the flip side, I can think of at least two situations where I felt so strongly about a product that I told my entire team, praised it to my IT department, and got school-site licenses purchased because of it. Once, when that didn't happen fast enough, I bought a single license with my own money just to keep using it. And last week, an educator friend who works at the district level texted me: "We are buying a $40K product because a teacher suggested it." She checked it out, liked what she saw, heard surrounding schools were using it, and signed the PO.
A superintendent can sign a contract. A teacher decides whether anyone actually uses it.
Stop praising us and then ignoring us
I watch executives light up when they find out I spent 13 years in the classroom. “That’s incredible! We need more of that perspective in our marketing.” And then, in the very next breath, my opinion about a product decision or messaging angle gets politely set aside.
Which means my voice, as a former teacher, is exactly as valued in this industry as it was when I was in the classroom: praised loudly, ignored quietly.
If you work in EdTech and you genuinely believe that teachers matter, prove it. Talk to them before you build or change anything, not after. Include them in your product feedback loops, not just your case studies and testimonials. Design onboarding like their time is worth something. Because it is.
Yes, the district signed your contract. But Mrs. K in room 322 is the one who decides if it was worth it.
