Product Management & Product Design at Overgrad

Reporting & Data Visualization

The Problem

The Solution

District educators, school administrators and counselors want to ensure they are serving students and know where to target their resources to improve student outcomes.

A flexible data solution that allows districts to determine which metrics they want to track, define goals for each metrics and track progress towards those goals.

User Research & Discovery

I spoke to district administrators and counselors at several high performing charter networks to understand how they are currently tracking progress towards their goals.

Almost all have a dashboard outside of Overgrad. I saw examples in Tableau, PowerBI, Salesforce, Google Sheets and Airtable and some had a combination of tools.
Data visualization for goal tracking is important for district educators and school administrators but less helpful for counselors who need to see the metrics at the student level.
The most advanced data orgs are comparing metrics across subgroups (ie. race/ethnicity, gender, intersection of race/ethnicity & gender).
They are also using subgroups for accountability and to elevate best practices - looking across school and counselors.
Tracking data over time has proven difficult and usually requires manual input

I also spoke to district administrators and a counselor at two different districts with emerging data practices

Aren’t 100% sure about what metrics they should be tracking.
Want to avoid adding another URL for school administrators and counselors to visit to look at data.
Worry that comparisons across counselors will be received with hostility.

**Based on these conversations, I created a list of guiding questions for counselors that they should be able to answer in Overgrad using data.

MVP Mockup

A table of data at the student level

Column metrics & order are customizable

A summary table that compares metric goals across subgroup

Summary metrics can be an average, sum, count of students meeting a condition or % of students meeting a condition
Subgroups can be created for any data field attached to the student, including custom fields.

User Testing & Feedback

District administrator at high performing charter district

District administrator wanted to add a description of each header so we added a customizable tooltip.

School administrator at a district with an emerging data practice

Pre-built reports based on best practice. We added out of the box reports for onboarding, exploration, applications, financial aid and decisions. These out of the box can be customized

College counselor at high performing charter district

Take action on the data - give students a specific action item to move the needle on their metrics. We scoped, as a separate feature, the ability to add tasks in bulk.

In App Views

We designed a solution that streamlines the user journey for districts and counselors using data. Metrics can be defined and tracked in the same place where action is taken to move those metrics. Districts are able to communicate their goals and priorities to key adult stakeholders and drive those metrics down to the student level where counselors to the work to improve them and ultimately improve studnets outcomes across the district.

Takeaways and Post-MVP feature updates

Change management is hard. Many of our high performing charters are going to use the new dashboard tables alongside their current data system rather than a full replacement in the first year.

What’s Next?