Update 27: Don’t build the answer before you’ve asked the question

When we started 42 Questions, we already had a technology that we knew could do some really exciting things. What we did not know was where it would be most useful or what problem we should actually be trying to solve with it.

One of the things we are trying to avoid is solutioneering, where you build a feature or a tool before you really know whether users need it and then try to find a problem for it to solve. I think this is particularly easy to fall into with AI because there are so many things you can make it do. You can build something impressive very quickly but that does not necessarily mean it is something people actually need.

When we started our research, we surveyed lots of people working in schools in different roles. After that, we carried out face-to-face user interviews with members of senior leadership teams, teachers and teachers working with pupils with special educational needs. We deliberately kept those early conversations quite broad because we did not want to decide what the problem was before we had listened properly.

As the research developed, we kept coming back to special educational needs and the amount of time staff were spending on paperwork and admin. We began to understand more about the work involved and where some of the frustrations were, which gave us a much clearer area to focus on.

We have built two tools during that process. The first helped us learn but we could see that the bigger EdTech companies were beginning to make similar functionality available within their own products. It was also not really solving the problems that were coming through most strongly in our research, so we decided not to keep pushing ahead with it simply because we had already built it.

The second tool has come much more directly from what we have learned since but we still do not want to assume that means we have got it right. We have built a list of around 3,000 schools to work through as we widen our research and speak to more people and find out whether the problem we think we are solving really is a problem across different schools and settings.

There is a quote often attributed to Bertrand Russell that I really like: “The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.” It sums up quite well what we are trying to do at the moment. We need to keep questioning what we are building, why we are building it and who we are building it for, rather than getting too attached to a particular solution.

We would rather spend more time understanding the problem properly now than rush into building something that does not fit the reality of school life.

Author: Cat Thorogood