Growth Hacking Online Education

This case explores the work of a Darden faculty member, Alex Cowan, to assess the demand for a public version of the software development course he taught at Darden. It was no secret that with the technology sector surging, general management jobs in tech were both a growing category and exciting career trajectory. However, managers in the sector tended to work in small, interdisciplinary agile teams. Creative confidence in going from idea to design to code was now a hot topic, and Cowan, who had three years of experience helping students go from zero coding knowledge to building functioning applications in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in a single week, believed he could extend the offering to the general public. The market had plenty of learn-to-code offerings, but Cowan wanted to reach generalists whose primary goal was collaboration within a team of tech specialists.

After creating a minimum viable product (MVP), Cowan set out to test his idea using qualitative interviews, learner personas, jobs-to-be-done descriptions, emails, social media posts, and a landing page for the prospective course. If he offered this course to the public, would people enroll?