If EdTech-district relationships had Yelp reviews, the top comments would all look the same: "Great demo. Barely saw them again. 2 stars."
Dylan Hoffman, our VP of Partner Success and Operations at Subject, read those metaphorical reviews and called them out… in the most constructive possible way.
Starting in fall 2023 with 387 accounts, no team and a retention rate below 60%, Dylan rebuilt Subject's customer success model around one uncomfortable idea: maybe the vendor isn't the smartest person in the room.
(Turns out, districts were sitting on a goldmine of feedback that nobody was bothering to mine. Dylan mined it.)
Here’s what’s on the dashboard this week:
Today’s Deep Dive: EdTech's favorite bad habit
Reading Rainbow: Jumping jacks and Costco
From Our Desk: New features, who dis?
Watch of the Week: Miranda Priestly would grade this A+
EdTech's favorite bad habit
Dylan walked into fall 2023 with a blank canvas. No team, 387 accounts and a genuine conviction that the best partnerships in education are built on actually listening (and not just when contracts are up).
He built our customer success model around three moves.
Move 1: Connect the feedback pipeline.
Customer support, CS and product all actively share data now, and what CSMs hear in the field has a direct path to product planning. When a teacher tells their CSM something isn’t working, that signal doesn’t die. It goes where it can actually do something.
Move 2: Make product leaders leave the building.
Ten in-person school site visits. Every quarter. No exceptions. There is no substitute for watching a real teacher use your product in a real classroom while students actively decide whether to pay attention or check their phones. Survey data doesn't capture that. You have to go. (And yes, those visits are why certain things schools asked for last year actually showed up in the product this year.)
Move 3: Start every partnership with a blank slate.
Our CSMs don't open new partnerships with a demo. They begin with a genuinely open question: ”Here's everything Subject does and can do. So what does your district actually need?” The programs that came out of those conversations weren't on anyone's roadmap until someone thought to ask.
Net retention went from below 60% to above 140% in under two years! Don’t worry, we got the full breakdown of how each move actually works right here for ya.
A growing number of district leaders are treating their EdTech stack less like a permanent fixture and more like something worth revisiting. Districts partnering with vendors who actually built for the classroom tend to like what they find when they do.
If you're the kind of person who needs to hear it from someone other than us—fair. Here's what schools are actually saying about Subject.
AI won't fix teacher burnout. But confidence might.: Researchers surveyed 400+ teachers and found that AI didn't directly reduce workload, but teachers who felt more confident using it also felt more capable of engaging students, which actually did chip away at stress. So the secret wasn't the robot. It was believing in yourself. Your middle school counselor was right all along!
Jumping jacks are the new lesson plan: 88% of teachers in an international survey of 3,000+ reported that their students' attention spans are getting shorter, so educators are out here fighting back with brain breaks, guided meditations, marshmallow genetics labs and kindergarteners doing jumping jacks on command like tiny, sneaker-clad soldiers. The classroom has become a wellness retreat crossed with a CrossFit gym and honestly? Whatever works.
Teacher ran into a student at Costco. They survived.: A new book called Tiny Pep Talks for Teachers just dropped, and it's exactly what it sounds like—bite-sized moments of reassurance designed to help teachers get through the highs, lows and in-betweens of classroom life, including the universal horror of seeing a student in the wild while your cart is full of things you'd rather not explain. Not a pedagogy guide. Deeply necessary anyway.
The school year is almost over and the kids can smell it: As the end of the year approaches, classroom energy tends to spike—taking down the routines teachers spent nine months carefully constructing like a Jenga tower pulled by a caffeinated third grader. Edutopia rounded up guided meditations, outdoor resets and reflection prompts to keep the final stretch from devolving into a full Lord of the Flies situation.
We’ve been busy at Subject. Like, "quietly shipping features while everyone else was still talking about Q1" busy.
Here's your cheat sheet on what's already live and what's dropping before back-to-school:
Already in your hands (since January): We’ve shipped bulk pacing updates, in-platform attendance tracking, course customization and an Integrity Tab that flags potential AI-generated student work directly to educators. (Yes, the robots are now watching the robots.)
Dropping in May: A student homepage redesign, flexible reading levels, two-way teacher-student communications, an SEL check-in tool and speech-to-text assignment responses. Plus new course suites for Georgia and North Carolina and Season 7 of English Language Development!
July 1st is when most districts flip the renewal calendar… which means right now is exactly the right time to talk about expanding what you're doing with Subject before the new school year hits.
Our pick of the week: The Devil Wears Prada
Why We’re Obsessed: With the sequel officially out, now is the perfect time to revisit the movie that made everyone terrified of their boss and secretly obsessed with Fashion Week simultaneously. It's basically a masterclass in workplace power dynamics, personal identity and surviving institutions that demand everything from you—which is basically also a school year!
Recommended lesson integration:
Dressing for the job you want vs. the person you are: A personal narrative writing prompt disguised as a fashion class. Andy's arc is basically every teacher who ever wore khakis on day one and Birkenstocks by spring.
Power, hierarchy and who gets to make the rules: A social studies deep-dive into how authority works in institutions, from fashion magazines to school boards. (Some Miranda Priestlys are elected. Others are appointed. A few just run the front office.)
Finding your voice under pressure: A character analysis of Andy's moral arc. At what point does ambition become a compromise? Great essay prompt, also great therapy, honestly.
The cost of "making it:” A personal finance and career exploration unit built around the very real question of whether the job is worth the job. Both CTE-friendly AND existentially useful.
Adaptation and fidelity (book vs. film): A comparative analysis unit using the original Lauren Weisberger novel alongside the film adaptation. Why did some things change? What did the film keep? What did it have to lose? Also a sneaky way to get reluctant readers to pick up a book because "the movie was good."
Thank you for joining us for another edition of On The Subject. We’ll see you again in a week, with more stories from the hallways.
The Subject Team
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