#57 - Research Amid Sudden Change: Working on Google Classroom During COVID with Amanda Rosenburg

Awkward Silences

In March 2020, Google Classroom’s user base grew from 30 million to hundreds of millions almost overnight.

As schools closed, teachers needed new ways to conduct lessons and manage their work. This meant that Amanda Rosenburg, a Staff UX Researcher & Team Lead working on Google Classroom, had a lot of work to do. Research requests were suddenly piling up, and her team needed to execute quickly to help the product team adapt to new and unexpected challenges.

Amanda talked about…

• How she adjusted her research strategy to cover more ground, faster.
• Her biggest challenges, and the changes she’s sticking with.
• How students and teachers are coping with all this change.

Highlights

• [2:23] Google Classroom went from 30 million users to hundreds of millions overnight
• [6:32] Amanda is grateful to have a team that values research—and each other's opinions. At the beginning of the pandemic, her biggest challenge was turnaround time.
• [10:26] The hardest thing for the Google Classroom team to tackle was the sudden change in primary use case.
• [25:44] At the beginning of the pandemic, Amanda started getting way more requests from PMs for research—so she had to change her strategy for taking on projects.
• [28:17] How are the kids coping with all this change?
• [33:10] Amanda is excited about the conversations people are having around equity in education as we move into the new year.

About our guest

Amanda Rosenburg is Team Lead & Head of Google Classroom, where she leads a team whose work impacts close to 200 million students and educators on a daily basis globally.She comes from a background in education and research.