CxO of the Week: Mr Ranjit Radhakrishnan, Chief Product Officer, BYJU'S

CxO of the Week: Mr Ranjit Radhakrishnan, Chief Product Officer, BYJU'S

A cross-functional organisational leader, Radhakrishanan is a product visionary. He has directed and scaled product strategy and development at BYJU'S since 2015. He set up and scaled the product, tech, design, analytics, a game studio and user research teams at BYJU'S. Not only does he lead the product org at BYJU’S, but he also brings prowess in consumer internet, digital, e-commerce, analytics, social, and gamification to the table. Radhakrishanan has led the product evolution roadmap at BYJU’S, right from the concept stage and has more than 18 years of experience in the industry. He believes that building products, especially learning experiences for children is truly a fascinating experience.

With CiOL, on CxO of the Week, Ranjit Radhakrishnan, Chief Product Officer, BYJU'S talks on the edtech Decacorn has combined technology to build out some of its best asynchronous learning tools and content to enable the child to engage with the content.

What is your top priority while making decisions to improve tech infrastructure at BYJU'S?

At BYJU'S, we are constantly striving to make students fall in love with learning and enable them to become active learners. Our top priority while making any decision related to tech infrastructure is to leverage it to benefit our students. As a student-centric organisation, we look at how technology can empower students to become lifelong learners. Our student’s feedback is very important to us as it helps to co-create our product offerings with them. Another crucial aspect we take into consideration while improving tech infrastructure is the resources our designers and developers need to create better learning experiences.

What are some of the challenges you face in driving product transformation?

The fact that we are creating product offerings for children. It remains to be the most fascinating as well as challenging aspect of BYJU’S’ journey. Children are a transformative age group, who are not only articulate but are also very polar in their feedback. Additionally, we cater to a wide age range, from four-year-olds to 18-year-olds. This makes the process of product designing even more challenging.

We focus on 4 main pillars of product design. Through the scalability of tech-enabled learning solutions, we try to connect the best teachers with students in every nook and corner of the country. We ensure that the knowledge and pedagogy we give our students access to remain relevant. It should also be in sync with the different syllabus and curriculum students are exposed to. We also understand that every learner is different and has a different style, pace and size of learning. Through our products, we can customise the guidance we give to students. Lastly, we believe that learning needs to be a joyful exercise. It must invoke curiosity and critical thought within a child. Engagement is at the core of our product design. It drives better cognition, understanding and learning outcomes in students.

How do you make these products to cater to the different needs of children?

The right blend of technology into our systems enables us to create personalised learning paths for our students, offer highly relevant recommendations and predict & solve their actual learning challenges. Our recommendation mechanism is highly evolved and takes into account several signals such as subject affinity, chapter recency, knowledge profile, proficiency, topic trending in the region and much more to surface the most relevant pieces of content for each student.

How do BYJU'S products fit into the ever-evolving edtech?

A large part of our evolution in the first three to four years consisted of building some of the best asynchronous learning tools and content. We wanted students to learn at their own pace and scale and understood that a child could use our learning app for multiple purposes. From learning a concept for the first time to revising a subject before an exam; we have focused on catering to these different needs ever since our inception.

However, the landscape of learning has evolved before our eyes. Now, owing to the pandemic, we have worked along a completely new dimension of learning. Synchronous learning formats became the need of the hour during the pandemic. Students are now learning from the safety of their homes. So, we aided this need by launching free LIVE classes for students and ensuring that they have a sense of a school-like schedule at home. We also launched “BYJU'S Classes” - a complete after-school tutoring solution that helps complement a student’s academic learning at school. To connect deeper across the country, we even launched learning programs in key languages like Hindi, Bengali, Malayalam, Kannada, Gujarati etc.

With the edtech sector nowhere near saturation, we foresee many more changes in the learning landscape. We are also looking at the possibility of the rise of a blended learning format.

Does advertisement strategy affect the product mapping at BYJU'S?

At BYJU'S, our products are designed keeping the best interests of students in mind. We focus on what would empower students to learn and grow better. For us, it’s always been about the real value-creation in the lives of our students. Students and parents have the option to try our offerings for free. They have to purchase them only when they see real value in them.

What is the pre-product planning in the company?

Before any product goes into production, it first undergoes rigorous conceptualisation and pre-production stages at BYJU'S. We believe that conceptualization is key to creating disruptive innovations in a field like edtech and we, therefore, take this stage of development very seriously. Every new idea is encouraged and discussed at length. If we see merit in an idea, we proceed to staff a concept team with technology, product and media professionals. They, then, work together to create a proof of concept. The concept stage is very visual and detailed. The teams are rigorously testing and building with visual aids such as models and paper prototypes, allowing us to picturise what the product will look like at the concept stage alone.

The pre-production stage is where we collectively look at a concept and aim to understand the different problems it solves and the different levels at which it solves these problems. It’s crucial to keep questioning these aspects and giving all teams a reality check from time to time. At this stage, we further staff the existing team to address concerns around the scalability of products. The pre-production stage is also where we work closely with our students to co-create innovative solutions. Their insights help immensely in shaping our product offering.

How do you handle consumer feedback?

Having worked in different sectors, I can say with certainty that there has not been a more humbling experience than building for kids. I think the only way to successfully create viable learning solutions for them is by listening to them. As early as the pre-production stage, we start involving students and parents to share their insights regarding an upcoming product offering or feature. Through early beta versions of the product, we collect feedback from them in a systematic manner.

We have ensured that there are multiple touchpoints for the feedback we collect. For instance, we conduct user research and cognitive focus testing well within our concept stage to the pre-production stage. Additionally, a team of in-house mentors are constantly in touch with parents and students.

From a platform perspective, the learning app enables us to collect feedback from students effectively. With the help of knowledge graphs, we can track what every child is doing from a learning perspective. The way we have designed our product philosophy itself focuses on listening to the end-user from a qualitative as well as a quantitative perspective.

A lot of companies are struggling because their products fail to go digital. How do they re-engineer themselves?

For organisations that have shied away from embracing technology, it may be a challenge to undergo a digital transformation in a short period of time. The key to a successful transformation is to have leadership and a mission-driven team. Remembering and reinstating why you need to make a product digitally fit, is crucial to enable the change. Secondly, an organisation must understand its audience and the challenges it faces and how technology can be used to scale the product to the masses.

At BYJU'S, for instance, we started as an offline test-prep organisation but we soon realised that it’s only through technology we can scale it up to make quality learning content accessible. Today, we have over 80 million students learning on our platform and that in itself is a testament to the value we bring to their lives.

What is the future of learning in the next couple of years?

The on-going pandemic has proved to be an inflexion point for education all across the world. It has helped shine a light on the effectiveness and credibility of online learning. Thus, making it an integral part of mainstream learning. While students have always been excited and open to learning digitally, we have surprisingly witnessed a massive mindset shift amongst parents and teachers in favour of online learning. On the other side of the pandemic, I think we will witness the rise of a new normal. It will consist of a blended format of learning. This blended form of learning would combine the best of both -  online and offline learning. An ideal format that lies in the middle will emerge. Synchronous and asynchronous learning formats will coexist and will help students learn more effectively.

The future will see us leap from the traditional one-to-many approach to the blended one-on-one learning experiences, providing students with the best of both physical and digital worlds.