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Every startup wants product market fit.
Every scaleup wants growth.
And every EdTech company wants a product that schools don't just buy, but actually use, renew and recommend.
Those three things are not always the same.
At RecruitHer, we work with EdTech organisations at different stages of growth, which gives us an interesting view into what is happening inside their teams.
We see companies hiring for growth.
We see businesses building sales teams.
We see product teams adding features.
We see customer success teams trying to improve adoption and retention.
But underneath all of this sits a much bigger question:
Does the product genuinely fit the people and organisations it was built for?
Because if it doesn't, adding more salespeople won't fix it.
Neither will another feature.
And neither will a better marketing campaign.
Most consumer businesses have a relatively simple relationship with their customer.
The person buying the product is often also the person using it.
Education is different.
The person choosing an EdTech product might be a school leader.
The person paying for it might be a trust, district or institution.
The person implementing it might be a teacher.
And the person whose outcomes we ultimately care about is the learner.
Each one has different needs.
A school leader might care about cost, evidence, safeguarding, integration and reporting.
A teacher might care about whether the product saves time and actually works with 30 pupils on a Tuesday morning.
A learner might care about whether it makes sense, feels relevant and helps them learn.
A product can therefore satisfy the buyer while frustrating the user.
Or teachers can love it while leadership cannot justify renewing it.
Or everyone can like using it while there is little evidence it improves outcomes.
Research on scaling education products makes this distinction explicitly. Product user fit means meeting the needs of teachers and learners, while product market fit also requires meeting the needs of the people selecting and purchasing the product.
EdTech needs both.
And that is exactly why co creation matters.
There is a temptation, particularly in startups, to move fast.
Build.
Launch.
Sell.
Collect feedback.
Iterate.
There is nothing wrong with speed.
The problem starts when speed replaces understanding.
You can build something technically impressive very quickly and still solve the wrong problem.
You can have a strong founder vision and still misunderstand what happens inside a school.
You can receive positive feedback during a demo and still discover six months later that teachers hardly use the product.
That is not necessarily a sales problem.
It may be a product market fit problem.
And sometimes it is a problem that could have been identified much earlier by bringing educators and learners closer to the product.
This distinction matters.
Sending customers a survey is feedback.
Running a focus group is research.
Asking ten teachers whether they like a new feature is testing.
All of those things are useful.
But they are not necessarily co creation.
Co creation means giving the people who understand the problem meaningful influence over how the problem is defined and how the solution develops.
That means involving educators earlier.
Before the roadmap is fixed.
Before months of development have happened.
Before sales has already promised the feature to the market.
And importantly, it means continuing that relationship as the product changes.
The NHS takes a similar approach to service design. Its definition of co production involves people who use services working in equal partnership from the earliest stages of design, development and evaluation. Its guidance recommends involving the right people early so their real experiences shape the work.
Healthcare has good reason to do this.
You wouldn't want to redesign a patient pathway without understanding the patient experience.
So why do we still think we can redesign teaching and learning without teachers and learners at the table?
One of the clearest examples comes from LEGO.
LEGO Ideas allows fans to propose new products. Ideas that gain enough community support can then be considered for production as official LEGO sets.
The customer is not simply asked whether they like something after it has been created. The community becomes part of generating and validating the idea itself.
There is an important commercial lesson here.
LEGO is not handing its entire product strategy over to its customers.
It still makes decisions about feasibility, brand, manufacturing and commercial potential.
But it has created a system where customer interest becomes part of product discovery.
That is very different from building behind closed doors and asking afterwards:
Would you buy this?
Digital health has had to confront many of the same issues EdTech faces.
A solution can be technically sound and still fail because it does not fit people's real behaviour, workflows or environment.
NHS England guidance on implementing digital tools makes a particularly useful point: identify the need and its wider impact on the system, rather than starting with the technology. It also describes co design with end users as important when introducing digital health tools.
That sentence could sit on the wall of almost every EdTech product team.
Start with the need.
Not the technology.
Not AI because everyone is talking about AI.
Not gamification because engagement is down.
Not another dashboard because a competitor has one.
Start with what is actually happening.
Open source software provides another model.
Developers do not simply release software to passive customers. Communities can identify problems, suggest improvements, contribute code and shape what develops next.
Research continues to find business value in this kind of relationship between companies and user communities.
Again, this does not mean every user gets to decide the roadmap.
It means useful knowledge does not only live inside the organisation.
EdTech should take that idea much more seriously.
Because some of the most useful product knowledge is currently standing in a classroom.
There is another reason companies should involve educators.
Teachers are already doing product adaptation themselves.
Research looking at teachers using EdTech has found that educators actively adapt technology to fit their teaching goals and pupils' needs rather than simply using products exactly as designed.
That tells us something important.
Teachers are not passive users.
They are constantly making decisions about what works, what does not work, what needs changing and what needs abandoning.
That knowledge is product intelligence.
The question is whether EdTech companies are capturing it.
For startups and scaleups, this matters commercially.
Winning the customer is only the start.
A school can buy a licence and still have low adoption.
A trust can run a pilot and decide not to expand it.
Teachers can log in during training and never build the product into their normal workflow.
That is why I think we need to talk about product market fit in EdTech less as a moment and more as an ongoing relationship.
The product needs to fit the market.
But it also needs to fit the classroom.
It needs to fit teacher workflows.
It needs to fit existing technology.
It needs to fit budgets.
It needs to fit learner needs.
And it needs to continue fitting them as those things change.
Research into the English EdTech market reflects this complexity. Schools consider factors including cost, learner outcomes, engagement, teacher workload and compatibility with other technology when selecting products. Trials and feedback from staff and learners also play a role in decision making.
There are a lot of places for that fit to break.
Co creation helps companies spot them earlier.
Co creation does not mean asking customers what features they want and building every request.
That is not product strategy.
Educators are experts in their problems, experiences and environments.
They do not need to become your product managers.
The job of the company is to listen for patterns.
What keeps happening?
Where is the friction?
What workaround have teachers created?
Why are they not using a particular feature?
What problem do they think they have?
Is there another problem underneath it?
And crucially:
Is this one person's preference, or evidence of a wider market need?
Good co creation combines lived experience with product expertise, evidence, commercial judgement and a clear strategy.
That is how it contributes to product market fit rather than creating an endless feature list.
This brings us to something we think about a lot at RecruitHer.
Who is actually inside the company making these decisions?
You can run teacher panels.
You can create advisory groups.
You can organise customer interviews.
You should probably do all of those things.
But there is also value in having people with education experience inside the business.
People who can challenge an assumption during a product meeting.
People who understand why a school might say yes to something but struggle to implement it.
People who can translate between the commercial reality of an EdTech business and the operational reality of education.
That might be within product.
It might be customer success.
Implementation.
Sales.
Marketing.
Partnerships.
Or leadership.
Education experience should not sit outside the company as something you occasionally consult.
It can be part of the company's competitive advantage.
Instead of asking:
How do we get more schools to use our product?
Ask:
What would make this product genuinely hard for schools, teachers and learners to give up?
That question leads somewhere different.
It takes you away from features and towards problems.
Away from adoption numbers and towards behaviour.
Away from assumptions and towards evidence.
And away from building for educators towards building with them.
For EdTech startups and scaleups chasing sustainable growth, co creation is not a nice extra.
It is one of the ways you make sure you are solving a problem the market actually cares about.
And that is where product market fit begins.
Co creation means involving educators and learners early enough to influence how a problem is defined and how the solution develops. It goes further than asking for feedback once the main product decisions are already made.
It can reveal real workflows, adoption barriers and differences between buyers, users and learners before they become expensive problems. That helps teams build products that fit education settings as well as commercial buying needs.
No. Educators and learners bring expertise about their problems and environments, while the company still needs to combine that insight with product strategy, evidence and commercial judgement.
Emilia Kruszewska is an EdTech recruiter and headhunter at RecruitHer, working with EdTech companies on commercial and leadership hiring.
Learn to Scale, product user fit and product market fit
