Future Formed Episode 4:
Efficiency Boosts Impact w/ Geoff Harcourt, CTO of CommonLit

Finding engineers who think about business problems and product issues is one of the most efficient things you can do.

The biggest source of waste in a software enterprise is often engineers building the wrong thing because they don't understand the requirements or communicate properly with stakeholders.

They either don't communicate back what they think the requirements are or don't ingest the requirements correctly from stakeholders.

There are many advantages to working with good communicators and product and business focused engineers who can function with less PM support and self-investigate problems.

Having versatile people who can do this kind of work can create hyperefficient teams, which has been a superpower for us.

This is Futureformed where we explore how nonprofits drive efficiency and innovation to make a greater impact.

I'm your host Eric Fischer, and this show is presented by Jotform Enterprise, the leading web form building platform for nonprofit organizations worldwide.

With response data securely stored online, you can create beautiful customized forms that meet your needs.

Stick around until the end of the episode to find out how your nonprofit can access an exclusive discount with Jotform Enterprise.

Let's dive in. Today we're thrilled to welcome Jeff Harkort, CTO at Common Lit, a nonprofit dedicated to improving literacy and writing skills for students worldwide.

Common Lit serves over 30 million users offering free instructional materials, comprehensive curriculum, and essential teacher support powered by practical tech-driven tools.

Jeff brings deep expertise in scaling tech solutions from his career in engineering, software development, and leadership roles at organizations like Thoughtbot.

As CTO, he's been instrumental in driving Common Lit's reliability, accessibility, and data-driven innovations.

Jeff, welcome to the show. We're excited to have you.

I'm really excited to be here, Eric.

I know I just listed off a big old bio, but I think what we really want to know is what's your journey been like? Fill us in on your background in engineering and technology and how that led you to your current role as CTO at Common Lit.

I had a very circuitous route to becoming a software engineer. I often advise students not to take my career path as a template.

I was a history major in college but always interested in software. I managed the student help desk in school and after college worked at a consulting firm doing business process improvement for state and local governments.

I worked as a product person and functional analyst on rules and requirements for payroll systems for large entities like the city of New York and the state of California.

After a few years, I moved on to product roles at a political tech place working for progressive nonprofits and Democratic campaigns, had a brief stint in healthcare, then decided I was tired of asking software engineers to do things without understanding what was hard or easy.

So I taught myself how to code, though I don't advise people to do this now; boot camps would have been easier.

I was lucky that some people I worked with needed software engineering help just as I decided to quit my job and become a software engineer.

I freelanced for a while, then went into business with a client to build Cortex, a startup managing environmental systems to increase efficiency in commercial real estate, which still exists today.

After Cortex, I worked at Thoughtbot, a product design studio, where I enjoyed helping clients scale their growing products, which was some of the most fun consulting work I did.

That experience drew me to Common Lit when I started advising Michelle Brown, our CEO, informally for about a year.

They had just closed a big grant from Google.org and were experiencing rapid user growth on a hockey stick curve, presenting an opportunity to make a big impact by helping them scale.

I've now been at Common Lit for seven years, which I didn't expect, but it's been rewarding to invest in something and see the impact over time.

Common Lit serves millions of students and teachers worldwide. From your perspective as CTO, what makes Common Lit's mission of spreading literacy so vital today?

There's a funding crisis in schools, so offering free or economically priced solutions is a big deal.

Not all schools choose us because we're affordable, but that is a driver for some districts.

I have two young kids at the learning to read age and have seen math scores start to catch up from pandemic learning loss, but reading scores remain frighteningly low.

The gap in reading is disproportionately closing for kids who are better off with access to resources, while others are falling further behind.

Having a literate population that can critically evaluate information is critical for a productive society, good jobs, and economic opportunity.

I came to Common Lit excited about the technical challenges but have come to deeply identify with the mission of improving literacy access and the overall literacy landscape.

When you joined, Common Lit relied entirely on grants, but now 65% of revenue comes from self-sustaining sources. What drove this financial transformation and how do sales to school districts balance affordability and sustainability?

I credit our partnerships team for pursuing the double bottom line, evaluating deals based on revenue and impact.

Moving toward earned revenue from school district sales is safer and links us to the value districts see, providing unrestricted dollars and stability amid a rocky philanthropic landscape.

School district sales motivate us to pursue strategies aligned with their needs and price ourselves affordably while maintaining a sustainable margin, trimming margins away from for-profit competitors.

Common Lit focuses on large donors rather than managing a broad donor base. How do you identify the right donors and maintain those relationships?

We don't want teachers or parents cutting us checks at scale; it's more efficient to focus on earned revenue and pursue philanthropic opportunities that move the needle with big grants.

Working with savvy donors provides financial support and valuable advice and guidance beyond funding.

What kind of technology does Common Lit use to serve over 30 million users and how has it driven efficiency and growth?

I favor horizontally scalable systems that can add or reduce capacity as needed due to our ultimate seasonal use pattern, with usage peaking during school hours and dropping off nights and weekends.

A mentor taught me about innovation tokens, spending them only on technology that makes a difference for competitive advantage and using stable technology otherwise.

We use Northflank, a platform as a service on top of AWS, which reduces DevOps needs, along with Postgres and Redshift for data, and Ruby on Rails for our main application.

Our Rails monolith has been overhauled and evolved since 2018, avoiding exotic technology and using React and Tailwind on the front end.

Reliability is critical for Common Lit, especially when used live in classrooms. What strategies ensure consistent platform performance?

Reliability is a stronger concern than typical SaaS products because downtime during a teacher's class period disrupts the entire lesson and student attention.

We emphasize reliability with an excellent test suite running tens of thousands of tests in parallel, teaching good automated testing to all engineers.

We run smoke or canary tests in production multiple times a day, simulating teacher and student interactions to ensure critical functionality works before deploying frequently.

We deploy 2 to 8 times daily, quickly releasing changes and rolling back if needed to improve reliability.

Previously, offshore teams deployed at night, which delayed discovering issues until morning; now we have on-call setups and monitoring to avoid this.

We have very few notable production incidents, thanks to our engineering approach and a savvy user support team that alerts us to issues early.

As Common Lit grows, how do you tap into specialized expertise or introduce new initiatives to improve operations, measure success, or refine offerings?

We've become more savvy about metrics, acting more like a commercial SaaS product by analyzing acquisition funnels and usage patterns with analytics tools like PostHog.

This sophistication helps us run the product effectively and decide offerings for students and teachers.

With limited resources, we've narrowed our ideal customer profile to foundation schools that represent a large slice of the ELA curriculum market, trimming unused features and focusing on ideal teaching patterns.

Technology has transformed how Common Lit delivers instructional materials and data-driven insights. What's an example of a technological innovation that made a big difference?

We invested effort to allow our exam and quiz answer capture system to function in network hostile environments, retaining data locally and notifying students if uploads fail.

Using local storage, web workers, and other technologies ensures we don't lose student data and process answers quickly and reliably.

Growing from 1 million to over 30 million users is a big feat. What have been the biggest challenges and rewards of scaling so significantly?

The hardest part of scaling is not knowing what will break until the breaking point is hit, so we plan ahead but remain flexible to respond to real issues.

We monitor infrastructure metrics and discuss contingency plans, trimming performance bottlenecks constantly to avoid problems.

Though not working with traditional volunteers, Common Lit's relationships with schools and teachers are critical. How do you engage with them to ensure they have the tools and resources to succeed?

We used to have a coaching team visiting schools and still set up opportunities to observe product use.

Our user research and design teams conduct real user interviews, and early on leveraged the memory of recent teachers to build what they wanted to see.

Regulations and user demands have pushed us to evolve to meet teachers where they are, including aligning curriculum to state standards and instructional requirements.

Teachers use Common Lit online and on paper; while we prefer online for tracking progress, screen fatigue post-pandemic means some use paper in class and enter data later.

What advice would you give nonprofit leaders looking to adopt technology and innovation to achieve their missions?

Nonprofit tech leaders should look at where their tech spend is going and ensure it's channeled productively.

Engineering represents a significant share of our annual outlay, including infrastructure and experienced software engineers running a product for hundreds of thousands of students daily.

We must be aggressive about spending money on the right things, hunt for nonprofit discounts, and pick scalable technology like AWS that can adjust capacity as needs evolve.

Our usage varies greatly seasonally, so we get creative negotiating agreements to handle spikes.

Finding engineers who think about business and product issues is one of the most efficient things you can do.

A board member recently asked what we do differently, and I said we aggressively overindex on writing skill because engineers often build the wrong thing due to poor communication.

Good communicators and product-focused engineers can function with less PM support and self-investigate problems, creating hyperefficient teams.

We have product managers at Common Lit who do an awesome job, but having engineers who think about product issues has really been a superpower.

Looking ahead, we've just launched a redesign with a fresher feel and are starting to explore AI cautiously.

We've reorganized engineering and product teams into product domain pods focused on specific areas like the teacher experience.

We're excited about putting more actionable data in teachers' hands to help them take targeted actions based on student performance.

Thank you for sharing your expertise and giving us an inside look at the impactful work you and Common Lit are doing to improve literacy and empower teachers and students.

Listeners can find out more at commonlit.org, which has our website, active blog, and updates on our work.

You can also find us on X.

As mentioned at the beginning, nonprofits can apply for a 30% discount with Jotform Enterprise at jotform.com/enterprise/nonprofit.

Thank you for tuning in today. Don't forget to subscribe, share, and stay connected for more stories of innovation and impact in the nonprofit world.

Until next time, I'm Eric Fischer and this has been Futureformed.