CASE STUDY

Beetroot Academy uses GoRetro for Continuous Improvement

Beetroot Academy demonstrates that agility and retrospectives can be applied to any type of business in any sector, and that engineering and business teams can learn from one another.

TL;DR

The challenge:

Running education programs, Beetroot Academy needed to find a systematic method to improve students satisfaction and course quality.

The solution:

Using GoRetro, Beetroot Academy is able to customize retrospective meetings, collect anonymous feedback, and generate a sustainable cycle of continuous improvement.

The challenge:

Beetroot Academy has built an education platform that works in cycles. They have thousands of students from all over the world and hundreds of teachers that teach pre-defined courses. Interestingly, the challenges of an education team/platform are very similar to the challenges of an engineering team, as we will try to reflect below:

As the platform grew, Beetroot Academy experienced two main challenges:

Student-level challenge: Not all people are created equal. Some have more experience than others, some can move fast, and some need to spend more time to really get it right. It is nearly impossible to build a customized plan for thousands of students, and the result is that the students don’t get the optimal program for them. A similar situation can be found in engineering teams, where there are junior and senior developers with different levels of skills and knowledge and they need to optimize their process in order to make this work.
Product level challenge: Data is gold, but only if you can get it organized and actionable. With hundreds of teachers and dozens of education programs and courses, it is very difficult to understand what works and what requires improvement. Heck, it's like managing dozens of products simultaneously. Beetroot Academy needed a way to collect and analyze this feedback in a structured and continuous way in order to improve its products and content.

The solution:

Beetroot Academy chose to use GoRetro, which would enable them to facilitate retrospective meetings on both the teacher-student level and the course level. GoRetro creates a safe, judgment-free environment for students to provide their feedback as part of the education program, as well as a centralized place for teachers and students to provide feedback about the programs and courses.

Course starts
Mid-program retrospective
The teacher adjusts the course according to the students' feedback
End of course retrospective
Course adaptations according to the feedback

Student level retrospective

The first challenge for Beetroot Academy was to improve the course quality and tailor it to each specific group of students as it happens. They use GoRetro to run a retrospective meeting in the middle of each course, in this retrospective students are provided with a safe and judgment-free environment where they can share their feedback anonymously, without fearing how the teacher may perceive them or how it will impact the rest of the program from a personal point of view.

“After one or two months, depending on the person and the teacher... They have their own retrospective where they review all parts of the learning process.”