GitHub Education
A New Stakeholder: Persona Research
Scroll ↓
Context
How can we get GitHub in the hands of more students across the world? GitHub Education offers free access to our industry standard toolkit. We know a lot about the why students and teachers choose GitHub, but it was unclear what inspires the decision-makers to bring GitHub to their institution.
Goal
Find out about these administrators- how they make budgetary decisions, evaluate tooling and roll out the GitHub Education offerings to students, teachers and IT engineers.
Problem
There was no research or data exploring why decision-makers bring GitHub to their institution. Without understanding this persona and their ecosystem of decision-making, GitHub Education couldn’t determine key points of intervention or friction for the Campus program.
Research Tools
Recruiting
Points of contact who signed up for the GitHub Campus product
Research Operations
MURAL (one day diary study question)
Analysis
MURAL (qualitative data analysis)
Deliverables
Full report with product recommendations and methodology
Presentation to the head of GitHub Education
Atomic insights and impactful quotes submitted to the research repository
Example diary study entry
we asked administrators to detail a recent administrative decision they made and who were the major stakeholders. We also asked them to estimate time spent daily on administrative versus other tasks.
Process
We recruited two sets of GitHub Campus Program points of contact: education administrators (like university deans of Computer Science departments, instruction leads for bootcamps) and IT administrations. I sent out a pre-work MURAL assignment to explore the last major tooling decision they made and indicate the major stakeholders involved.
I conducted remote interviews with the points-of-contact and we synthesized the information to create administrator and decision-maker personas. Finally, I suggested a follow-up study to further research the customer journey of the GitHub Campus Program purchasing process.
MURAL synthesis work
members of our cross-functional team attend multiple interviews and all participated in the synthesis. We connected them to the hypotheses and assumptions we wrote before the study
Findings
Not a decision-maker in sight
While the IT administrator was responsible for bringing in tooling for the development side and the Education administrator was responsible for generating new learning content, neither was responsible for the final decision on tooling acquisition.
However, GitHub Education is free for all students and educational entities…
As a result, the tool acquisition process is haphazard. It’s a question of contract and terms rather than actual budgetary allocation. Does this make sense for both the IT administrator and the Education administrator to have access to free product offerings? Or just the Education admin?
Product Implications
This research defined the product vision, pricing and value proposition of the GitHub Campus Program roadmap.
In turn, this research gave programs managers and support teams the data to shift product offerings and language to target either administrator group or financial decision-makers.