One of the best ways to improve your product, is to use it yourself. Since Eduflow is a very flexible product, we are using it for a bunch of different things ourselves. Peter Suhm at Reform shared a post about how they use Reform to run Reform. Here is a blog post describing some of the ways we use Eduflow to run Eduflow.
#1 We have an onboarding course for new team members
Like many of our customers, we use Eduflow to run an onboarding experience for new team members. When new people join the team they are invited to a course on Eduflow that takes them through everything they need to know to get started.
Beyond getting information about tools we use, processes and our product, we have a few social components in the course. Everyone is asked to introduce themselves in a discussion activity and schedule calls with everyone else. The onboarding courses is personalized based on your role in the company, such that only engineers will learn about our Github setup. Finally we ask new team members to solve a few tasks and record their screen while they take a tour through our own product. You can read more about our onboarding course here.
#2 We run monthly performance reviews and 1-on-1s in Eduflow
Since Eduflow has a lot of functionality for giving and receiving feedback, we decided to use it for our monthly 1on1s and performance reviews. Everyone is asked to submit a summary of what they have worked on recently, how they are feeling and what feedback they have for us. Then they do a self-review, and we give them some feedback.
For 1on1s, the feedback is high level and mostly about how we can help them. In performance reviews, we spend more time going through a detailed rubric. After the asynchronous written feedback, we schedule calls to talk about everything written. Having things in done in writing ahead of the call, ensures that we always have a useful agenda. Check out our public template for performance reviews here.
#3 We have an Eduflow course about using Eduflow for our users
Of course we had to have a course in Eduflow, about using Eduflow. Most things are intuitive enough on their own, but if you want to understand everything about Eduflow, then our users can go through our self-paced course about Eduflow. The course will tell them about all features and functionality, but it will also allow them to try things like peer reviews and discussions themselves.
Some people just go to the course for a few things, but many people go through the entire course, submit things and participate actively. If you want to take the course, check it out here.
#4 We run courses for our target customers on Eduflow Academy as marketing
One of our main marketing channels is Eduflow Academy. Here we teach courses (using Eduflow) about topics that are relevant to our target customers. For example we run the cohort-based course Instructional Design Principles for Course Creation. This course gets 1000+ applications per cohort.
Through these courses, people learn something relevant - learn about Eduflow and even get to experience Eduflow as a learner. And then we get a chance to reach out to them later. We also build smaller courses that function as CTAs on our blog posts. In 2022, nobody is going to read your e-book. But if you make a free course instead, people are more likely to enroll with their email.
#5 When we hire, we give people hiring challenges in Eduflow
Hiring is hard - for both the applicants and the company hiring them. One of the most annoying things for applicants is when they are asked to do a lot of work up front, even when they are clearly not a fit for the role. We try to get around this by running our hiring process like a funnel.
Initially, we basically just ask people for their LinkedIn profile. Then if you look relevant, we invite you to the next step which takes place in an Eduflow course. In each part of the course, we give you a task (which get bigger as your progress). Based on that, we filter out most applicants and pass the best on to the next round. Eduflow allows us to keep track of applicants and collect submissions in video, files and text. It also enables multiple people from our team to give feedback using a shared rubric. You can copy one of our hiring challenge templates here.
#6 We run async tech meetings in Eduflow
Since we are mostly remote, we try to run as many things async as possible. One of the meetings we have moved to a mostly-async format is our regular tech meeting. Everyone on the development team can post topics for discussion. Then everyone else can reply in a threaded format, and vote on topics that they think we should prioritize.
After the async part, we have a one-hour sync meeting based on the suggestions and discussions we had in the async meeting. This allows everyone to do research ahead of time, and makes the meeting super informed and effective.
These are some of the ways we use Eduflow at Eduflow. There are probably more that I forgot about, and there will definitely be more in the future. If you have an ever-expanding and flexible product, and you know how to use it - then it will become a tool of choice for many challenges.
