Corina Santoro is Vice President, Product and Customer Experience at Milady, a part of Cengage Group. She spent the first decade of her career as a senior PM and director of licensing at Hunter Douglas, a window manufacturing company. Corina then transitioned to Cengage and has worked on various products and teams, including Skills, Student Success and Employability, and Milady.
In our conversation, Corina talks about how her team made the prediction that customers in the beauty school industry are going to prefer digital learning and pivoted Milady’s educational resources accordingly. She discusses the process of releasing the second iteration of their learning platform, and how they capitalized on the right moment to get the right product in front of customers and keep them on it. Corina also shares her philosophies for reaching success, including failing fast and not becoming obsessed with outcomes.
When I joined Milady a little over a decade ago, the prevailing mindset was that beauty school students would never use digital products and would keep using print textbooks. My philosophy for a product is always grounded in customers, and as product leaders, we need to not be afraid of making bold decisions. We need to understand how the market is evolving, even if our customers are not yet evolving, and have clarity on the problems that we’re solving.
I went out into the market to visit beauty schools and talk to owners and educators. I came back and said, “I think they will use digital. That’s where this market is headed.” With that research, I built the business case to release the first iteration of our coursewhere by leveraging our Cengage MindTap platform to adapt for beauty students. We had had some digital products before, but this was the first comprehensive courseware, including tests, quizzes, videos, etc.
Sure enough, customers started to use it. We had to learn and understand the adoption cycle for our customer base and how to onboard customers to our product. In the first 3–5 years, we achieved about a 20 percent digital adoption rate from our overall customer base. When I talk about needing to know where the market is heading and the market is evolving, we made the bold decision to say that customers are going to use digital in this space. We also looked at the landscape and predicted that digital will embrace all parts of education at some point.
We put these pieces in place, and then COVID hit in 2020. The world shut down, including beauty schools, and that accelerated a tipping point for digital. If we had just stuck our head in the sand and said, “Customers aren’t going to use digital, they’re happy with what we have today,” we would not have been ready with the right product offering when COVID hit. As everything went remote, we granted all of our customers free access to our digital products for that period. Digital adoption of our product went from 20 percent to over 50 percent.
It was challenging. The good thing is that we’d been in the market for a while leading up to that period. We had robust and well-established training and onboarding tools. We knew the pain points and what customers would go through trying to learn to use these digital platforms. Because it was a pandemic and a crisis, it was all hands on deck. Everyone was helping customers make that transition. That was a bit of a unique scenario from the pandemic.
When we had this first iteration of our digital course in the market, we knew that it covered about 70 percent of customer needs, but there was about a 30 percent gap. Once we had enough customers using the product, we had enough data points to decide to release our second iteration. We also knew we had to release it quickly because we were at this moment in time when we had a lot of people using digital. We had to capitalize on that, get the right product in front of them, and keep them on it.
We made the bold decision to plan to release a new version of a digital platform. This is when I pulled all the teams together and I said, “We’re going to go from ‘we don’t even know what the platform is’ to being in the market in 7–8 months.” Their faces fell, but that’s where it comes back to having clarity on the problems that you’re solving. You can rally your teams around that and you can do it. We licensed this third-party technology, private-labeled it, built our courses, and released it.
We set a really aggressive timeframe to transition all of our customers from this old platform to this new platform: only two years. The only way that we could effectively do that was by knowing our customers and knowing what their needs are so that we could effectively position the platform.
We put together a comprehensive process from the point of interest to the point of adoption and usage and continually revisited and iterated on that process. And because we’re selling courseware to schools, the schools need to buy into the platform and know how to use it effectively. That’s when we established a team that was responsible for the training and onboarding and for setting them up on the platform.
The first version was MindTap and it was supported by all of our Cengage central resources. When we decided to move forward with a platform that was going to meet the specific needs of our customers, we had to stand up all of the teams associated with that. We hired and stood up our onboarding and training team, digital production team, technical product management team, support team, etc.
It was challenging because we were moving very quickly and building processes as we brought people on. A few things enabled our success. One was having clarity on what we were trying to do. We had really clear goals and deadlines. We had a clear mission that we consistently communicated and shared with the teams as we brought them on board. People rallied around that. Second, when things weren’t working, we failed fast. So if we tried an approach and it wasn’t working, we didn’t just stick with it for six months and hope to figure it out.
There are multiple approaches that we take. We attend a lot of industry conferences to hear different perspectives, and there are a few layers within the industry itself. There are government regulations, like the state boards of cosmetology and what they require, as well as general trends. What do people want and what services are they going for? What are people allowed to do by law?
We also do focus groups and surveys with students and with educators to see what’s working, what’s missing, and where we think things are going. What do we need to take out or add to our curriculum? It’s nothing revolutionary from a market research standpoint, but having those constant regular touchpoints with all parts of the industry is important so we know what needs to be included in our next iteration.
We refresh each one of what we call our “core curriculum” — like our cosmetology or esthetician program — every four to five years. In between that, we are monitoring what’s going on in the market. Sometimes we’ll release brand-new products or do mini updates.
An example of that is eyelash extensions. In the last 10 years, they’ve become very popular. We saw this rise in popularity and that some states were starting to add a standalone eyelash extension license, so one could just be a lash technician outside of an esthetics or cosmetology license. We released an eyelash extension curriculum about a year and a half ago. We just did the same for electrolysis.
We also pay close attention to how the industry and culture evolves and what is needed to meet that demand. For instance, in recent years, public advocacy around racial justice issues led to an outcry for the beauty industry to better address textured hair in education. We’ve always had a lot of content to teach students how to serve clients with textured hair, but in response to that, we did several updates to our digital product. We added additional video content and additional client consultation content. That’s one of the benefits of digital — you can just push updates out to your curriculum in real-time.
As a product leader, when I think about how we are continuing to raise the bar, for me it always starts with asking what’s next, what’s different, and what’s missing. I think about all of the different types of customers and my decisions. Data is just the start of the story. When you look at the data in the context of your customers, that story really comes to life. Having that holistic view of data and the story of who you’re serving is what helps you develop innovative products.
Some of the feedback that we’ve received over recent years is a request for more languages. We’ve had our core print products in Spanish for quite a while, but we released the digital versions fully translated into Spanish as well. In terms of platform features, in the industry we serve, education is tracked in what’s called clock hours, where part of obtaining your license is attending an education program for the number of hours specified by your state. When students are learning online, their time has to be tracked. We got feedback from customers about the types of time-tracking features, capabilities, and reports that were needed for this, and we developed those.
We’ve also received feedback on different types of activities that students would want to do. We released courses with more critical-thinking-type questions, and the feedback we got was, “We don’t want these, we just want more questions to help us prepare for our state board exam.” So, we applied that feedback to the next set of content that we developed.
All of those things are near and dear to my heart. These are things I try to instill in every team that I work with. Just because we don’t do it doesn’t mean we can’t do it — it means we haven’t done it yet. There’s so much power in the word “yet.” We haven’t gotten there yet, we haven’t had success yet, we haven’t seen customers do it yet. That doesn’t mean that we can’t or won’t. How we get to that success is by failing fast.
One of the things that I focus on is not getting obsessed with the outcome. Instead, obsess over the process — it’s the steps that you took that led to the outcome you got. Spend your time thinking about the process you used and what you can change to drive a different outcome. I encourage that if something’s not working, speak up. Let’s fail fast and try something else. The worst thing that we can do for the collective success of our business is to keep doing something that isn’t working.
Mostly just communication and over-communication. People need to hear something several times before it sinks in. One message of “Here’s what we’re doing” is not enough. Working across multiple teams, setting clear objectives, and communicating those over and over again is crucial. Same with getting buy-in — you can set objectives, but doing that alone isn’t going to motivate people to do anything. Communicate not only the objectives but the “why.” Why are we doing this and what is it that we’re trying to accomplish? Why does it impact you and why does it impact the business?
Further, empower people to feel like they’re part of the process. Give everyone a voice to be part of the conversation and look for the people you can build up as leaders. The communication and accountability pieces are important here because people will have to come together to report what they did to drive the entire cross-collaboration team forward.
Ultimately, I get the most results out of teams if it’s not me dictating everything that needs to be done, but instead looking for those people that are ready to step up. I like to ask these folks, ”How might you approach this? What do you think that you’d want to do? Would you be willing to take that and run with it?” Give them those opportunities and circle back with them — they still might need some additional coaching and support to be able to run with it.
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