How to Decide What Features to Build

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Features should be solutions to problems, and problems should be felt viscerally.

For instance, the guiding principle behind product development at Math Academy involved teaching courses manually and using our online system to automate pieces of work.

I personally spent 3 years, from 2020-23, running math classes in a school (our original in-person school program) using the Math Academy system. And before that, our founders Jason and Sandy were themselves teaching classes with an earlier version of the system.

This exposed us, viscerally, to the problems that our product must solve: not only optimizing student learning, but also keeping students engaged, preventing them from gaming the system, and keeping their guardians and teachers in the loop.

Any time the software couldn’t solve a problem, we would have to solve it manually. This made us acutely aware of what features would really move the needle for our product, and it kept us both incentivized and prepared to implement those features.

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