Most entrepreneurs believe that a startup organizational structure is not vital for their business. However, it’s not the case. A poor EdTech startup organizational structure leads to a lack of communication among functions, slower decision-making, stress, and complexity. Therefore, it is one of the significant reasons for a startup’s failure.
The business won’t run smoothly without a proper administrative structure, especially when it’s a startup. Yet, many EdTech startups do not determine the organizational structure and are unsure which positions are critical for their success.
In this blog, we’ll explore the importance, structure, and features of an edtech startup organization to build an ideal system that is bound to be successful.
What is EdTech Startup Team Structure?
An organizational structure is the hierarchical breakdown of human resources within an organization who perform specific tasks to achieve common goals. A well-defined organizational structure demonstrates the responsibilities and duties of every employee in the startup and ensures seamless functioning.
It aids in smooth coordination among different departments. Moreover, they can exchange data and gel together as a team to achieve common business objectives. Also, the team structure ensures how information flows between different departments. So, a transparent edtech startup organizational structure is paramount for the flawless functioning of a business.
Now that you know what an organizational structure is, let’s dive into why it is essential for any business, especially a startup.
Advantages Of EdTech Startup Organizational Structure
The benefits of an edtech startup organizational structure are as follows;
Optimize Business Operations
Businesses won’t work if employees do not have defined roles. Organizational structure assists companies in streamlining operations and ensuring everyone is doing their job.
Startup owners, managers, and other stakeholders must create a startup business structure and divide different roles, responsibilities, and jobs into departments to complete various tasks and processes.
Smart Decision-Making
The success of any startup depends on its ability to make swift decisions. A slight delay can cost you millions and sabotage your chances of being an early bird. Therefore, an organizational structure is crucial for improving business decision-making. Although the executives and top management make the decisions, all employees play a significant role.
Often, chief executives and other core management team members get feedback from employees involved in the execution of business operations. When you have a clearly defined organizational structure of an edtech startup, you’ll have a designated decision-making body that takes input from all stakeholders and makes timely decisions.
Enhance Employee Performance
Employees are critical to the success of any business. So, managing employees is crucial for timely delivery. An organizational structure defines the job responsibilities of employees and designates managers to oversee them while performing their duties with integrity.
A structure ensures that employees know where to go for help if they need it. For example, in an edtech startup organizational structure, managers are the first point of contact for the frontline workers and are responsible for their overall performance.
A Customer-Centric Approach
Customer service makes or breaks a business. As users become more aware of their prominent standing, they want startups to deliver on their terms and promises. Hence, providing outstanding customer service benefits business growth, as happy users will talk about their experience with other potential customers. Moreover, companies that offer efficient after-sale services stay ahead of the curve.
Any new ed-tech business must have a dedicated team to address users’ queries and resolve their problems. An organizational structure ensures you have a customer service team that will resolve clients’ issues immediately.
Assessing the Team’s Performance
Every ed-tech startup has several departments that must coordinate closely to achieve common goals. Sometimes, startups fail, which can be attributed to the failure of one or more teams.
Therefore, evaluating the teams’ performance is vital to understanding which departments are lacking and need improvement. In addition, a startup team structure ensures that each team has specific tasks they have to perform, which helps in the overall assessment of the team’s performance.
Better Communication Channels
For smooth business operations, communication between employees and teams is essential.
An organizational structure builds communication channels necessary among top management, clients, and employees. When everyone knows whom to communicate with for specific tasks and requirements, it promotes a seamless information flow.
Best Team Structure for EdTech Startup
Initially, a startup often has limited resources and team members, but you need to scale up your team as the business grows.
Let’s explore the team structure at the start and when you hire more employees at later stages.
Management Team
As you launch your ed-tech startup, you need at least five members of your core management team.
Chief Executive Officer (CEO)
The CEO is a crucial member of your ed-tech startup and is responsible for the company’s overall vision, culture, and functioning. Often, CEOs are among the founding members of the company, but some startups may hire them from outside.
Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
A CTO must be a member of the core ed-tech startup team structure. This member is a tech expert who makes critical decisions regarding the company’s technological development.
If the founding member doesn’t have a sound technical background, the startup should hire someone who knows software development, hardware, programming languages, and other technologies.
Chief Sales Officer (CSO)
A sales officer is an individual who is responsible for ensuring that sales growth targets are met and generates revenue for the company.
Additionally, they oversee sales and create new strategies to generate more revenue. Therefore, hire a professional with excellent negotiation and communication skills to close deals leads successfully.
Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)
A startup ed-tech company also requires someone to supervise their marketing efforts. They will focus on devising marketing strategies to promote your products or services to your potential users.
Hiring someone with exceptional marketing skills is significant for the company’s growth. The concerned person creates sales copy and landing pages, executes ad campaigns, and manages social media marketing, to name a few.
Operations Team
Building a core team is vital for every business. Yet, the operational team also remains crucial to the company’s success. Thus, you need to pay attention when you begin hiring. You require an ed-tech team to manage core business operations.
Back-end Team
Every software development business needs a back-end team. So, you must include them in your edtech startup organizational structure. They are experts in coding, building applications, and developing core logic for interacting with front-end users. The organizational structure for the back-end team involves; back-end developers, middle-stack developers, and a team lead.
Back-end developers are responsible for writing code, improving algorithms, and creating server-side logic. Middle-stack developers are the engineers for integrating front-end code with the application’s back-end logic. The team lead is responsible for assigning developers tasks and coordinating the team’s work efforts.
UX Team
User experience is a vital part of any ed-tech startup. They create the best user experience via easy-to-use design and front-end development. The UX team has the following members; a UX researcher, front-end developers, a UX designer, and a team lead.
Each specialist is charged with particular duties. The role of a UX researcher may not be widely known. This team member does UX research, examines user behavior, and offers helpful insights to assist the UX designer in developing designs and layouts that consider the user’s needs. The team leader oversees the work of the designers as they work with the front-end developers to create the user interface. Depending on your needs, you can use more than one person for each role.
DevOps Team
This team’s main objective is to cut down on marketing time. DevOps engineers are involved in managing cloud infrastructure and are responsible for delivering a seamless user experience. They are in charge of maintaining and deploying the application infrastructure. They also build up support, cloud migration, automation processes & tools, and CI/CD pipelines. A DevOps team typically comprises the following individuals: a team leader, an SRE specialist, a cloud architect, and a system administrator.
The cloud architect creates and maintains cloud technology, whereas the team leader controls workflow, manages the DevOps team, and assigns responsibilities. The system administrator is responsible for keeping the cloud up and running, while the SRE specialist ensures the systems and applications function properly.
QA Team
In the business of software development, managing quality is essential. Therefore, having a quality assurance team in your edtech startup organizational structure is crucial. The group is in charge of thoroughly testing the app to ensure there are no glitches or mistakes. Typical members of a QA team are QA analyst, testers, and QA lead.
The QA lead establishes the metrics for upholding quality standards and ensures the team members follow them. These experts select the primary tactics, delegate duties, and oversee the QA team.
To test an application, the QA analyst is responsible for creating and carrying out test plans. During the testing phase, they develop documents and unit tests. The testers carry out and execute tests per the quality metrics. The system requirements for running the code are also examined, performance is reviewed, and findings are reported to the quality assurance lead and quality analyst.
When your business is ready to expand, you will need to hire a business development manager who will collaborate closely with the marketing team to establish a marketing plan and a human resources team to handle the hiring of qualified employees. Additionally, you will require a legal team to investigate the legal issues.
Finding the Right People for Your Team
Since people make a company successful, hiring the right individuals is critical for your startup. However, finding the ideal staff for your firm is complex, and there are a few factors to consider.
Recognize Your Company’s Core Values
The core values of your business represent your vision and mission. It ensures that your potential employees adhere to those values while working in your company. Clearly define the work environment and culture you want in your workspace, and then hire individuals who reflect those values and are thrilled to work for you.
Identify Positions You Need to Fill
Before starting the hiring process for your ed-tech startup, you must immediately identify positions you need to fill. Then, contemplate the roles and duties the employees must perform before making them a part of your organization.
The Number of People in a Team
When you start your ed-tech company, you intend to limit the expenses and hire people necessary for the business. Therefore, you need to fill the CEO, CMO, CTO, CFO, and CSO positions. Also, as you need to build and develop the software of your ed-tech platform, you need developers, project managers, and QA.
Skills and Expertise Required by Each Team Member
Hiring people for technical positions is more challenging as you just want to hire a limited number of individuals and want them to do their job efficiently. Hence, you must consider the skillset and experience diligently before hiring them. The best practice would be to detail the role and day-to-day responsibilities. Thus, it will ensure that you hire an individual that perfectly fits your project requirements. In addition, give due consideration to the tech stack. They play a crucial role at every step of the development process.
Select the Right Recruitment Platforms
There are many job portals, but finding a trustworthy talent-sourcing platform is the utmost. Usually, these portals register candidates from IT and other backgrounds. However, you should approach developers directly via platforms like LinkedIn.
Interview the Candidates
Interviewing candidates before hiring them is crucial. It ensures that they are the best fit for your startup. For example, to recruit developers, you should conduct a technical test to evaluate their skills.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Every ed-tech startup entrepreneur wants to establish themselves in the educational market. But many of them make mistakes that harm their chances of being successful.
Here are five common mistakes that startup owners must avoid.
Pleasing Everyone
Most business owners want everyone to utilize their products and services. However, they create something that doesn’t solve anyone’s problem. So, the key here is to concentrate on a specific segment and be particular about what products and services you want to offer your target audience.
Ignoring Competition
When you enter any market, there is meant to be competition. If you think your product is unique and there will be no one to challenge you, think again! You will have a competitor as soon as you start marketing your product. Therefore, keep an eye out for competitors. Yet, do not become too obsessed with competition and concentrate on making your product unique and valuable to your target market.
Bad Hiring Decisions
Every entrepreneur wants to minimize hiring costs. Apparently, it’s beneficial, but you can’t go on with insufficient staff in the long run. So, avoid hiring individuals who lack experience and expertise.
Poor Management of Finances
Every business entrepreneur should understand how to manage their finances. Before making money, you must spend a lot on rent, electricity, salaries, and other costs. Most first-time business owners have little money to spend, which can impact how their companies operate. However, some startup firm entrepreneurs overspend and run out of money. Therefore, budgeting and financial management are crucial for every ed-tech startup.
Getting Emotional
Startup entrepreneurs put their sweat and blood into their companies and frequently become passionate about the concept. The idea could, however, not always be practical. Always maintain objectivity, and refrain from bringing emotion into your work. Refrain from wasting your effort on any ideas that will not work.
Final Thoughts
Creating an ed-tech startup team structure and assigning duties and roles is essential for the business to run smoothly. It hugely impacts how the startup works. When team members have defined responsibilities, they can concentrate on their work and complete their projects effectively and efficiently. The startup organizational structures may vary as you expand your business. For example, you need a dedicated project team, sales team, and HR team. But a core management team is critical for a startup company to look into various business operations.
