Kevin Morris is Chief Product Officer at Aceable, an edtech company focusing on driver’s education, real estate licensing, and more. He started his career as a software engineer and gravitated toward product management, serving in various product leadership roles at Ceon Corporation (acquired by Convergys), InQuira (acquired by Oracle), Bazaarvoice, and Khoros. Most recently, Kevin was VP, Product and Engineering (Enterprise) at Indeed before stepping into his role at Aceable.
In our conversation, Kevin shares Aceable’s work to make traditionally mundane learning processes — such as studying for permit tests or real estate licensing exams — fun through things like video content, animations, and audio lessons. He also talks about the importance of not overly focusing on the inward-facing components of product management, but instead prioritizing more time in areas that deliver true value.
Aceable started in the Texas teen driver’s education market. Before Aceable, there wasn’t a mobile-first learning experience to do driver’s ed. You were either doing it directly with the state, online, or through an in-person driving school. Our CEO, Blake, saw an opportunity to take a lot of the technology shifts with mobile-first and cloud to deliver a fun, engaging learning experience that not only made it easier for the student to get through, but was more efficient. You can learn on the go and Aceable offers different content beyond just video.
Aceable continued to expand across several major states and branched out from teen driver’s ed into adult driver’s ed and defensive driving. As we were thinking about how to grow the company, we developed a playbook for operating in the regulated learning space. We wanted to expand into another vertical that had more of an ongoing relationship with the student instead of stopping after they get their license or permit. And that’s where real estate ticks the box.
There’s a pre-license exam that you need to sit to go into real estate, as well as ongoing education to ensure that you maintain your license. We also do test prep offerings that help make sure you can knock it out of the park once you’ve passed the internal exam with us (which you need to do to sit the state real estate exam). We basically give you the equivalent of pass papers — typical questions that make sure that you’re as best prepared as possible. There’s a lot of growth we’re seeing here in real estate and beyond.
I take inspiration from where we need to go. If you look at a learning experience like Duolingo, it’s fun and engaging. We’ve leveraged a similar principle. If we’re trying to articulate how to do a three-point turn or reverse into a parking spot, these are opportunities to use video content to illustrate and highlight best practices. We use a number of different formats, like video and audio, and have different types of questions like multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, etc.
We also have a brand persona — a robot called Ace — that’s in the courses. That makes it fun and engaging, and personalizes learning around that. Ace is basically embedded in our core learning experience, and he’s featured in video clips to introduce topics that are better consumed visually, like how to park in a parking spot.
Beyond video, we have audio overlays as well. If people just want to listen to the equivalent of an audiobook, they can learn and listen as they go. We’ve got a very talented learning experience team, and, within that group, have motion designers, animators, etc., who really are looking to make the content as easy to consume and effective as possible. There’s no point in having nice content that doesn’t help students pass exams.
That was one hell of a soundbite: “We’re getting rid of product management.” There was a lot of debate. When I read it, I went back and watched the entire interview. And what was interesting was, if you look at it in its entirety, for me he clarified that he was distinguishing between the different sides of the coin with product management.
There’s inward-facing product management, which is working day-to-day with your engineers and running scrum ceremonies and whatnot, and outbound-facing product management, which is really knowing your business, market, competitors, and customers, and ensuring that you can articulate the value proposition to them. Because at the end of the day, customers are buying something that solves a problem.
The way I interpreted it, the over-indexing on product management is this individual who essentially tells others what to do internally. Chesky wants to minimize that aspect of the role and put more responsibilities on product managers to make sure the things that they were building were adding value to Airbnb’s hosts and/or Airbnb’s guests.
For me personally, I think it’s a red flag if you’re a product manager and, say, you use some time tracking software. If you find that the bulk of your time is in that inward-facing role, I would argue you’re doing it wrong. You should be thinking about if you’re spending time in an area where you alone can add value. I think this was what Chesky was reacting to — many product managers were focused on that inward game. And as a result, the things that were getting released were perhaps not delivering the value or outcomes that Airbnb needed as a company.
Product management is a very interesting discipline because it can sometimes suffer from not being very well-defined. If you take a step back, you see very different views on how product management is done at different companies.
One of the problems that we have collectively is the “I’m the CEO of the product” mentality. You’ll have designers and engineers who may feel they have a loss of agency around the problems that they’re trying to solve. They’re almost behaving like, “I’m doing it because the product manager said this is what I need to do, and I feel like I’m being reduced.” Especially for designers, who are incredibly creative people, they feel they’re being reduced to order-takers. Designers and engineers can bring so much more to the table and you engage them in a meaningful way.
I’ve seen product managers in the past fail because they’ve effectively lost the trust of their team. The designers and engineers were saying, “I’m working on this thing, but I really don’t think it’s going to move the needle” or, “I don’t think this problem is that compelling. I’m worried that we’re going through a one-way door.” This is bad because a PM’s ability to get stuff done is completely dependent on being able to excite and motivate their team and peers.
I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that product managers really need to make sure they’re building that empathy, understanding, and trust with their team. I think you should be spending roughly 20–25 percent of your time making sure that your team is engaged and they know, crucially, why what they’re doing is important. Beyond that, I think 40–50 percent of your time should be toward meeting with your customers, understanding their pain points, understanding the market that your company plays in, how you make money in that, and those outward-facing components.
Depending on what level you’re at in product management, — if you’re a group product manager, director, or VP, etc. — you need to make sure you’re spending time thinking about your people as well. Are they growing? At the end of the year, at these levels, you’re scaling through your people, not necessarily on yourself.
For other stakeholders in the organization, a roadmap with a list of features and a list of dates is comforting in the sense they can just point to it and say, “Here’s everything we’re going to do.” It can feel like a security blanket. It’s almost like there’s a very simple guarantee that by this date, we’ll do this feature.
There are certain circumstances where that level of commitment makes sense — aligning with internal or external partners on a major launch that requires cross company coordination. But my point is that where we want to get to is a world where the majority of the things that we’re doing are really oriented around getting excited about solving this problem that will result in these measurable outcomes. And getting people comfortable with that.
For many people, that’s a challenging way to think about it, especially if you’re not in product. If you’re in sales or marketing, that’s why it is kind of scary. What do you mean you’re going to expand into this new market? What does that look like? What are the things that I can sell? If people see a feature roadmap divided up by quarter of these things, they can go to prospects and say, “The thing that you’re talking about is coming this quarter.'”
Whereas, if it’s really about, “I’m going to solve these problems,” the way in which I solve them is my responsibility. You should be focused on the outcomes because those are the things that actually matter. Did solving this problem create revenue opportunities? Did it improve retention? Did it open up a new market with this amount of new customers? That’s a more meaningful way to think about it.
Yes, and it’s a journey. Some of the best ways to do that is not necessarily a big bang approach, but taking one team and having them operate that way and then using that as a real-world example for the rest of the organization.
At Aceable, we used a similar approach. I joined in September, but we took one team and had them operate that way. We gave them problems to solve, and one of the things was introducing the concept of a virtual instructor or an always-on personalized learning during courses. We had key results that measured outcomes around engagement and answer accuracy.
What was fascinating about it was just at a people level, the team felt way more energized operating because they felt they had a sense of agency around solving the problem. They all felt they could really ideate and say, “Well, what are the different things we could do this?”
The other thing that I observed was that the number of solutions that we iterated on went up. So it wasn’t this waterfall where we’ve got one solution, we’re going to take eight weeks to build it, and then hopefully, at the end of the quarter, it’ll do what we think it’s going to do. There was a far more creative mentality that was like, “Well, we can build this one thing. We can also interact with our marketing email team to see if we can send out email campaigns that encourage students to take the next step.”
It was and still is a really holistic approach to problem-solving. The team was happier. People felt they had more agency around what they were doing, and I think we personally get better outcomes in terms of driving key results.
We did a beta launch last year where we integrated the elements of our learning experience into ChatGPT. The use case we’re looking to solve is that our content’s great, but students sometimes prefer the ability to interact with an instructor as they go through the course and answer questions. And the questions are personal. They’re each person’s understanding of the content.
So what we did was integrate ChatGPT into our internal learning experience in real estate. That allowed students to ask questions that would help them break down concepts into ways that were more digestible and based on their own lives and learning styles. We rolled that out in six states in Q4 and saw some nice adoption metrics. The hilarious part was how people interacted with it. There were obvious questions like, “Can you give me an example of what an escrow is?” and some responses from students deep into the conversations were like, “You and I should make friendship bracelets.” People were having a lot of fun interacting with it.
This is going to be an area where we continue to iterate. We want Aceable to become a trusted guide for our students. We hope to leverage AI to deliver a more personalized learning experience and recognize that every student is unique in the pace at which they learn, how they go through the course, interpret content, etc. We have an opportunity to apply AI on top of that to give people more flexibility to master topics. We believe AI is going to serve as a really compelling focal point to deliver those capabilities to our students.
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