Building Product for Growth
Circuit Stream • 2023
Context
When I stepped into the Director of Product role, Circuit Stream was at a growth ceiling. We had built credibility in XR and gaming education, but the market was narrow, and our offerings didn’t scale beyond a niche audience looking to upskill in this domain. We needed to rethink where growth would come from along some of the existing partnerships we've had, and how to align product decisions with both learner demand and long-term market opportunity.
My role encompassed challenges around: strategic growth and positioning (how we expand, where we expand, how we position ourselves in the market) while creating cohesive touchpoints across our digital and physical experiences for our learners. However, this growth problem was the seed that trickled into other spaces.
The Framework
To grow intentionally, we needed a way to evaluate new academic product opportunities in the markets we were operating in. We needed a data-backed approach that gave us clarity and confidence.
I created a framework to guide our expansion strategy and help us prioritize where to invest.
Job Market Demand
We analyzed indexed job postings and industry projections across North America, segmented by field and geography. This helped us understand where the greatest career opportunities existed and where the skills gap was most urgent.
Search Interest
We reviewed both organic and paid search trends to measure learner and parent intent. We looked at national data as well as local and regional trends.
Academic Alignment and Competition
Whether the offerings aligned with our institutional partners (whereby it cannot compete with any internal products with our partners) and the direction we wanted to grow.
While we grounded some of the initial direction in competitor analysis, partner feedback, and early qualitative signals, the framework helped us narrow down decisions and add rigor to our process. It created a shared language for evaluating new ideas.
A messy behind the scenes snapshot of our labor market analysis, competitor audits, and Looker Dashboard that aggregates our regular scrapes of the job market and industry.
How we used it
We combined these inputs into a single Impact Score: a weighted metric that helped us compare opportunities across subjects and markets.
This gave us a consistent way to stack-rank subject areas based on relevance, interest, and growth opportunity. It helped us cut through assumptions and build a roadmap grounded in real opportunity, not just what felt exciting in the moment.
For example, in Quebec, software and data science clearly outperformed gaming — helping us inform our strategy locally with our partners.
This framework supported our expansion strategy in expanding our offerings from real-time 3D (gaming and XR) to expanding our offerings into Software and Product. While Data had promising market indicators, it was heavily saturated in our local markets, and was not a strategic direction we prioritized.
While the framework gave us clarity on emerging trends in adult education, as we started to expand our thinking beyond adult learners, our approach didn't quite fit inside that model. The demand was less about immediate job outcomes, and more about long-term pathways, parent decision-making, and gaps in traditional education.
Pre-University became our first real test of how this framework could adapt—and where we’d need to supplement it with new methods of validation.
Applying it further to curriculum
Once we identified which verticals to build in, we applied the same level of rigor to designing what went inside the programs themselves. We mapped our job market research directly into the curriculum—aligning the learning experience with the actual language and expectations of employers.
For example:
We used job descriptions to surface the most common tools, frameworks, and terminology in high-growth roles
We aligned capstone projects with real-world deliverables seen in hiring pipelines
We prioritized skill development that matched entry-level requirements, not just abstract concepts
This approach helped ensure our learners weren’t just learning—they were preparing. It also made it easier for us to collaborate with partners who wanted their programs to feel differentiated and deeply tied to industry.