Reinhold Lange, a seasoned product leader with a background in software engineering, shared insights from his journey through the EdTech landscape in this compelling EdTech Mentor conversation, hosted by Laureano Díaz, CSO of 27zero. With three acquisitions under his belt, including the recent merger of DreamBox Learning with Discovery Education, his former employer, Reinhold offers a unique perspective on the challenges of merging company cultures and aligning product portfolios. He highlights the importance of adapting over efficiency and shares a powerful story of a student who, through the right digital tools, went from being four and a half years behind to closing the gap to just a year and a half within a single academic year.
Read on to learn about Reinhold’s thoughts on product development, leadership, and the future of K-12 EdTech.
Absolutely, Laureano. My background is in software engineering, but I quickly realized I wasn't a great software engineer—or, rather, I saw that delivering a product to market involved many more dimensions. I learned that business intelligence, understanding user data, product marketing, and how we present and communicate about the product are all critical. It’s about creating a continuum from user experience research (UXR) to user experience (UX), adapting the product based on feedback, and aiming to delight users. These layers brought me into product development in EdTech.
Mainly by talking to customers and colleagues in various roles—not just those in software engineering or front-end development. Conversations with product marketers, go-to-market teams, and others helped me see that all these elements must align to deliver a complete product to the market, not just a software solution. Learning this quickly was crucial for launching successful products.
My first experience in EdTech was in higher education at my alma mater, where I worked on a custom learning management system (LMS) called “Segue.” I was a junior software engineer right out of college. After that, I moved into e-commerce, ad tech, and publishing before returning to K12 at Middlebury Interactive Languages, which was led by Jane Swift, the former governor of Massachusetts. That role was a turning point for me, as she highlighted the challenges in K12 education and aimed to make a significant impact. It became our mission to address the needs of this underserved market.
Middlebury Interactive Languages was a joint venture between Middlebury College and Stride (formerly K12 Inc.). It aimed to combine K12 Inc.'s reach in the K12 space with Middlebury College's expertise in world language acquisition. Middlebury has a renowned world language program that even U.S. intelligence agencies use to train their staff/employees. Our goal was to make this expertise accessible through an online platform, effectively democratizing world language acquisition for a broader audience.
The biggest takeaway was the importance of building connections—not just with peers and executives but also with the communities we served, like large and rural school districts. Constantly learning from customers is crucial. Another key lesson was observing how Governor Swift leveraged her connections to advance the business. I realized that delivering a successful product involves much more than just technical solutions—it’s about understanding the market landscape and forming the right relationships.
A good example is the role of legislation in driving agendas at the state level, which then affects school districts. Take the "science of reading" curriculum—it’s a broad body of research that outlines the key pillars of reading instruction. Legislation has begun to specify that literacy products should align with this research, impacting how these products are evaluated and purchased by schools. This is where understanding legislative requirements becomes crucial for product marketing and success in the market.
Certainly. After leaving Middlebury Interactive Languages, I joined Reading Plus, a Vermont-based literacy company rooted in eye movement research. The goal was to deliver a digital product that helped students improve not just reading speed but accuracy, in other words: comprehension-based silent reading fluency. When I joined in 2017, the company was already successful, and my role was to align the product development with market needs. This meant delivering features tied to real user needs and ensuring the platform's reliability, especially since we served large districts such as Miami Dade.
Of course. The biggest entities in the United States are LA Unified and New York Public Schools, with around 850,000 to 1.1 million students. That’s a substantial number. Obviously, not all of them use any single product because there are many SaaS options available for students and teachers. But when back-to-school time arrives, you have to be ready to handle that traffic.
Right.
Absolutely. It happens. Often, the issue isn’t even on our end but with our providers. We use one of the three major cloud infrastructure providers, and if one of their services has a glitch, it can affect us too. We hear about it quickly because we’re closely connected to the districts, though we don’t necessarily advertise that we’re on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
Sure. Around 2021, Reading Plus was acquired by DreamBox, which turned out to be a great match. Reading Plus was a strong reading product with evidence of effectiveness from the Center for Research and Reform in Education at Johns Hopkins University, while DreamBox Math had similar credibility for math. Reading Plus focused on grades three through twelve, while DreamBox catered to pre-K through eight. Together, we offered a dual-discipline solution that could effectively serve the market.
You’re right to focus on culture as a challenge. Whenever you merge two distinct entities, you’re dealing with different ways of operating. DreamBox was a larger company, while Reading Plus had about 125 people and a different work style. Integrating those cultures was crucial to our success. In today’s environment of frequent mergers and acquisitions, this remains a key challenge—finding a way to bring in the best of the acquired team while maintaining your own company culture. It’s like quilting: you need to carefully stitch together different pieces to create something stronger without damaging the original elements.
We tackled that challenge along two axes. First, grade-level parity: Reading Plus covered grades three through twelve, while DreamBox Math focused on pre-K through eight. We developed a strategic plan to align those ranges. The second axis was RTI, or Response to Intervention. RTI involves three tiers—Tier 1 for general practice, Tier 2 for more targeted intervention, and Tier 3 for intensive support. We aimed to align our products with these tiers, creating a coherent value proposition and identifying our ideal customer profiles. This helped us present a unified message to the market.
That’s a great question, and I’ll have to speculate a bit based on experience. One common factor among students who fall behind is often socioeconomic background. Our system has traditionally marginalized certain communities, particularly Black and Brown students, as our former CEO Jesse Woolley Wilson often emphasized. While things are improving, events like COVID had a disproportionate impact on these communities, further widening the gaps. Socioeconomic background and systemic challenges play a significant role in students’ placement in RTI tiers.
I won’t go with the easy answer of wishing for a magic wand to fix everything. There are a couple of things I’d suggest, though they aren’t deeply thought out. One is the idea of outcome-based contracts. Vendors have a significant responsibility, especially in this post-COVID era where learning loss is a critical issue. I see many products with good intentions but lacking evidence of impact. Outcome-based contracts could ensure that products deliver measurable results, and districts should be equally responsible for implementing these products effectively. The real change happens at the intersection of purchasing and implementing these tools.
In 2023, Discovery Education acquired DreamBox Learning, which included DreamBox Reading Plus. This was my third acquisition experience. The idea behind it was that DreamBox’s strong digital supplemental offering in the U.S. K-12 EdTech market would align well with Discovery Education’s existing portfolio, which included core science products and educator-enabling digital tools. The aim was to merge the educator and science focus with math and reading, creating a more comprehensive offering. I should mention that my time at Discovery Education ended recently—August 31st was my last day. I’m currently on a sabbatical, thinking about my next venture in the digital product space.
Not at this point. It’s only been two weeks, so we’re still in the early stages. It’s too soon to say what shape it will take.
I might be a bit of an outlier in my approach to building product organizations and how I view the necessary functions for product thinking. I’ll share a few key aspects that I believe are crucial for building a successful product organization. The first is that adaptability is more important than efficiency. This insight comes from a book called Team of Teams by Stanley McChrystal, which draws lessons from the Special Forces. It emphasizes the need for teams to act independently and adapt to changes quickly without always waiting for instructions from above.
Another key point is the value of shared consciousness over information silos. Everyone on the team, from software engineers to UX designers and marketers, should understand the context in which they’re working—what users are doing with the product and what problems need to be solved. Expertise is everywhere, and the more you can foster open exchanges of knowledge, the better your team will perform.
Similarly, having effective networks for information exchange, both formal and informal, is more important than rigid hierarchies. And another concept I value is thinking like a gardener rather than a chess player. A gardener adapts to the needs of each plant, adjusting water, soil, and care based on what’s needed. In product development, that means being attuned to the individual needs of users while maintaining the overall health of the product. A chess player, by contrast, operates with a fixed set of moves—it's less adaptable.
Empowering people to make decisions is also vital. They know their domains best, and decision-making should be as close to the work as possible. This doesn’t mean making major changes without consultation, but rather allowing team members to act within their expertise.
Lastly, trust is the foundation of any effective team. Building trust means being a leader who models the behavior you expect from others, allowing your team members to make decisions and then debriefing afterward to see what worked and what didn’t. It’s about continuous improvement rather than rigid structures.
It’s a fantastic question that touches on a common challenge in product management. The key is to focus on the “jobs to be done”—understanding the needs and challenges of your users and connecting your product to those needs. When you focus on the demand side rather than the supply side, you’re closer to the truth. It’s about solution thinking rather than problem thinking, which means understanding the challenges users face and addressing them in a way that’s meaningful.
For example, we often talk about the different “currencies” that matter to our stakeholders. For administrators, it’s about return on investment—what results they get for their investment. For teachers, it’s time—they don’t have time to navigate complex systems. And for students, it’s enjoyment as a gateway to learning. If you can align your product with these currencies and meet the needs of these personas, you’re on the right track.
It all ties back to the unique value proposition (UVP) of your product and identifying your ideal customer profile (ICP). Understanding the needs and priorities of your audience allows you to balance innovation with maintaining the core value of your product.
That’s a great point, and it aligns closely with marketing principles. In marketing, we can sometimes get caught up in the creative side—making an ad funny or visually striking—without grounding it in the actual needs or pain points of the audience. Your concept of “currency” really resonates with me, and I’ll definitely be applying that idea in our marketing discussions with clients. It’s a great way to stay focused on what truly matters to the audience.
Haha, yes, I am. Simply put, I’d tell myself to worry less about what others think. We all bring our personal histories to our daily experiences. At that age, I was bringing my, forgive me, my German-ness to everything—everything had to be exact and precise. It took me many battle scars to realize that those constraints can offer artificial comfort. The truth is, everything is ambiguous, so it's better to let go of that concern over others’ opinions.
That’s right. Exactly.
I’ve been lucky to work with some fantastic product marketers and marketing teams. To me, product inherently includes product marketing, and this ties back to the concept of empowered teams. One memorable experience is when we included the voice of the market in early ideation conversations around a prototype. Having that market insight—along with the knowledge of competitors and previous experiences—early on was crucial in guiding us toward product-market fit.
Another example comes from working in enterprise sales, where a marketing person helped craft the narrative of the product so well that it resonated both with the market and with our internal teams. It made even the people who worked on the product say, “Wow, I didn’t know it could be seen that way.” Those two examples—one inside-out and one outside-in—show the power of working as an integrated team, using diverse skills and perspectives to achieve smarter outcomes.
