At BitDegree our mission is to enable a billion people to learn, earn and grow. We will achieve this by providing anyone in the world with the state-of-the-art education experience. BitDegree’s online education platform will feature high-quality gamified courses that are affordable and accessible. We aim to pay people to learn the skills that are demanded by the tech industry. BitDegree’s token scholarships will be a game-changer when it comes to providing motivation to keep on studying. For some, it might even be an alternative to unskilled work.

We have no doubts in our mind that on our way to achieve this highly ambitious mission, our team will run into a lot of complex issues and face uncertainty. Assumptions will prove to be wrong, but we’ll need to push forward at all cost. We need to be prepared and have a clear framework to discipline our work.

We are inspired by the story of Duolingo, and would like to share it with those who haven’t followed the development of Duolingo. It is an educational application that offers free services to their users. People can learn different languages for free using Duolingo. Back in 2009, the founders had the initial vision to enable users to “learn a new language while translating the web”. Their team has worked according to the principles of the lean startup methodology. Hence, they kept changing their approach constantly if they felt like there is a more efficient solution. You can find the full story of Duolingo here.

If Duolingo had stuck to their original plan to monetize based on B2B services, they might not have developed all of the interesting and genuinely useful consumer use cases that they have now. Being flexible and experimenting with their business model has allowed them to make important changes that pushed the company forward while staying true to their original mission.

Since its inception, it was absolutely crucial to the BitDegree team to see the big picture at all times. We will not divide our attention by trying to solve different problems simultaneously. We shall focus on what the most important.

The roadmap approach was never our way for continuous planning. The roadmap was a snapshot of how we saw the future of BitDegree development at the time of initial planning in November. Now, we are trying to find our footing in the market, and the roadmap narrows our field of view too much. We want to be customer oriented, madly. And the customer intelligence that we have already collected lead us to depart from the initial roadmap point of view. Hence, being true to the principles of the lean startup method, if we see a better way to build BitDegree — we will act on it. We will gather data, analyse it, see the insights, adjust our assumptions and find the new best solution to grow BitDegree.

The roadmap is simply a tool that serves a limited purpose, we’ve always known this. Deep analysis and understanding of the situation have led us to explore other methods and tools. We utilized the tools that would allow us to improve our team’s productivity and increase our speed on the journey towards our vision.

Duolingo did something that no one in the translation and language education space would have ever thought was possible. They created a free language learning app that has tens of millions of users hooked around the world, and grew a successful business along the way. No matter what space you’re in, Duolingo’s commitment to their vision and the way that they transformed an industry can serve as inspiration. Duolingo could have simply built a gamified Rosetta Stone competitor. It would have been fun and engaging, and they could have sold the end product for hundreds of dollars. After all, Rosetta Stone was a successful company and they were doing well in a decent-sized market. But instead, Duolingo looked beyond what others were already doing. They considered real problems in language education, and who would be most affected by these problems. This led them to find a group of people who weren’t being served by the options already available — and led them to an even bigger market than their competitors’ market.

BitDegree is data-informed and data-driven, continually evolving through fact-based changes. Our goal is to become the best through customer obsession.

One of the first tools that we applied to increase our productivity was the KPI (Key Performance Indicator), set for each team member. We structured departments based on their function (developers, system engineers, communication, marketing) and fostered an open and transparent culture to ensure a clear vision of how daily line of work contributes to the overall company goal. Utilizing the power of KPIs is a great way to understand how your work affects the whole company.

“We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details….” ― Jeff Bezos

Together, these are the 3 processes that have changed the game for BitDegree:

OKRs

Cross-functional agile team structure based on product

Bi-weekly sprints

1. OKRs

The single most important tool that the BitDegree team is using is OKRs — a very simple, but extremely powerful organizational goal setting tool.

The team has been rapidly expanding, and just as we were about to embark on yet another growth phase, we educate every new team member about OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). Every member gets instantly hooked, and they clearly see that it is the way for us to go.

The team experienced how powerful of a tool OKRs were when we were making Hostinger, our previous venture, into the world-leading business it is today. Now, as we are about to finish our first set of quarterly OKRs, we see and can state the results and positive outcome it has brought to BitDegree as a company.

OKRs have helped us to stay focused on our company goals and reflect on progress each quarter. Some of the biggest tech companies in the world use OKR method, such as Google, Linkedin, Netflix, and Zynga together with many others. The important part here is that at least 70% of objectives and key results come from employees.

Breaking down OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)

Objectives — are highly important, strategically measurable goals. When recognized and set apart, objectives become easily trackable units for which we are accountable.

Key Results — are the values of how we measure if the objective goal was successful or not. Key Results have to be numerically trackable and easy to measure.

Below you can see a snapshot from our OKRs during the 1st quarter of 2018. The objective is to position BitDegree into the MOOC (Massive open online course). Key results are measured by tracking how many students sign up for the courses. Choosing the right key result indicators requires a great deal of clear thinking and team cooperation. Every single team has their own OKRs as a goal and key results to measure if the goal was achieved.

Each team has to make their own OKRs, but everyone works towards the bigger picture, the company OKRs. Each team creates their own OKRs, and instead of involving management into the process, only team members working on the objective are responsible for the result.

As shown above, there are no tasks or to-do lists here, the only objective record of what a positive result looks like. Use of such technique, allows us to experiment and assess all possible scenarios when in the process of achieving targeted results. The use of OKRs allows us to have a goal, but experiment on how we’ll achieve this goal.

The OKRs of every team are shared in a single document. The tool brings transparency to the entire team, everyone has different tasks, but are working inline with the company goals. Therefore everyone is aware of each other’s goals and expectations.

Reinforcing flat structure in our organization

OKRs solve any challenges created by the complexity of a large team in two ways:

1. It focuses on every team member in the organization individually. Therefore one’s contribution to the team is clear and concise.

2. By taking responsibility to achieve personal and company’s goals, one can identify when and where he is needed the most and contribute accordingly.

Validating company’s direction

The more objective is understood, the easier it is to define measurable results. The simple, easy and clear process provides the desired result.

We have discovered that hard to draft OKRs are a symptom of a bigger problem.

2. Cross-functional Agile team structure based on product

Our solution was to introduce an Agile team structure. An Agile team (with a capital ‘A’) is a cross-functional group of people that have everything, and everyone, necessary to produce a working, augmentative product.

We borrowed ideas from the Agile methodology and created our cross-functional teams based on the product, therefore, now we no longer have a team of developers or system engineers. Instead, we have teams with all the necessary people to complete the job internally. For instance, our marketing team has a team leader, designer, content writers and a developer. Teams are independent and have their own OKRs. They are fast and efficient. Each team can complete tasks internally. No need to ask for help from the “team of developers” or “team of designers”.

3. Bi-weekly sprints

As Leonardo da Vinci once said:

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough. We must apply. Being willing is not enough. We must do.

To propel our OKRs, we needed to divide them into smaller chunks of time within set deadlines.

Deadlines can be energizing. They can sharpen our focus, set priorities, and make collaboration between teams more effective. After all, when there is no time pressure, the mind wanders, and the brain looks for external stimulation.

However, we’ve noticed over and over how a sense of urgency created by a deadline can backfire. Creating a sense of urgency takes a lot of effort, yet provides with very little results. Deadlines tend to exhaust team leaders, waste their focus. Micromanagement also reduces trust between the leaders and the team. Deadlines start to overtake the communication stream.

With too many deadlines we stop thinking clearly and effectively and start to stress and overthink.

Fear of underachievement and failed results led us to the third process we are using at BitDegree: self-implemented bi-weekly sprints. The principle here is that deadlines work far better when they are personally motivated.

Every two weeks the teams come together, examine their quarterly OKRs and plan their next sprint. Delivering results set by themselves drive teams to hold each other up. Therefore they are happier and more engaged at work.

Conclusion

BitDegree is still aggressively navigating the online education market. We’re searching for tools, solutions and what works best for us. We don’t want to commit to a single direction. The BitDegree team has a clear vision of what we want to do, but we’re still shifting and changing the way we’re going to do it. We want to find out what is it that people want and give it to them. In the end, all it took to grow and improve our complex beast was a vision, OKRs, and talented agile team structure with work in bi-weekly sprints. The responsibility is now clear and shared, and we have a sharp, motivated team who are nailing it every day. Simple, but very powerful.

You can have a realistic life without setting realistic goals for it

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