Next Us

Next Us is an innovative educational platform designed to transform classroom learning through documentary film. By leveraging high-quality audiovisual content, the project aims to foster critical thinking and social awareness within the global educational community.

01 Challenge

How might we align product maturity, community ambition, and long-term vision to build a coherent educational ecosystem?

With a team boasting 40+ years of audiovisual expertise and an Alpha version in development, the challenge was to prevent "strategic fragility" and ensure their global ambitions were grounded in a realistic roadmap.

02 Core Problem

While the platform existed and a brand was emerging, there was a profound lack of strategic alignment. The roadmap was inconsistent: internationalization plans lacked structural grounding, and unresolved UX issues in the Alpha version threatened the project's credibility. The organization’s community ambitions far exceeded its current technical and operational maturity.

03 My Role

Head of Research & Strategic Facilitator

I led the end-to-end research and foresight process, coordinating a team of two researchers. As the primary strategic interface, I was responsible for:

• Designing and facilitating 6 collaborative foresight workshops.

• Leading stakeholder mapping, ecosystem analysis, and heuristic evaluations.

• Co-creating the 2021–2030 Strategic Roadmap, aligning leadership around a unified 10-year vision.

04 Impact

The engagement transformed a fragmented vision into a structured, actionable direction:

Organizational alignment: Established a shared language and strategic narrative across the leadership team, reducing internal contradictions.

Product clarity: Identified and prioritized critical UX blockers, shifting the focus from "adding features" to "building credibility."

Strategic roadmap: Delivered a phased expansion logic ("From Platform to Community") that synchronized international growth with technical readiness.

Competitive edge: Defined a unique value proposition centered on community-building, distinguishing Next Us from content-only competitors like BBC Teach or Docacademy.

05 Key Takeaways

Vision requires sequencing: Ambition only becomes actionable when it respects maturity and resources. Without proper sequencing, vision creates fragility.

Designing relationships, not just features: Long-term ecosystems are shaped by trust and participation. To design a platform is to design the relationships that live within it.

Foresight as alignment: The true value of foresight isn't predicting the future, but creating a shared mental model of the desired direction.

06 Research & Framing

We structured our investigation into four systemic layers:

Strategic Identity: Defining purpose, mission, and value proposition to ensure every future decision was strategically coherent.

Ecosystem Mapping: Analyzing the educational landscape (teachers, students, funders) and benchmarking global competitors to find the "blue ocean" of community-led content.

UX & Platform Diagnosis: Using Nielsen’s heuristics to bridge the gap between high-level ambition and low-level product maturity.

Strategic Sequencing: Redesigning the roadmap logic to reflect real-world dependencies rather than just aspirational milestones.

07 Key Insights

Community is a product feature: The brand promised "community," but the Alpha version was a solo experience. We identified that community needed to be operationalized from the very first iteration to remain credible.

Ambition vs. readiness: Internationalization was being planned while the core navigation was still broken. We pivoted the strategy: strengthen the foundation first to enable sustainable growth later.

Causality over aspiration: Strategy must follow a logical flow. We identified that several milestones were being attempted out of order, risking structural collapse.