Case study: Kahoot!'s mission-led team
How Kahoot! built a mission-led team and made learning awesome!
In the first of two parts, Jamie Brooker, co-founder of Kahoot! and We Are Human explains how they ‘led from behind’ and built an empowered team focused on bringing emotion back into learning through the startup and scale-up years.
Next week, we’ll explore what Jamie is doing now to support mission-led founders struggling to align their team, investors and other stakeholders.
“Leading from behind is a philosophy we've always believed in as a leadership principle,” says Jamie Brooker, co-founder of Kahoot! “It was a really important part of the way we grew the organisation.”
He reflects on why empowering a team is important particularly when trying to innovate.
“You want people to believe in what you're trying to achieve,” he says. “Then adopt a principle of exploration and curiosity, rather than assumption. If you've hired smart and creative thinkers who have experienced different cultures and perspectives, that combination will lead to the most impactful solutions.”
Kahoot! is one of EdTech’s most notable success stories. Since it was launched in 2013, the social quiz platform has clocked up over 1.6 billion people playing in schools, higher education and corporate learning and development, in over 200 countries.
“Our goal was to bring the learner from the back of the class to the front, for the right reasons,” says Jamie. “Make learning more social.”
The platform was born as smartphones took off. “We were asking how can you take this technology and use it to facilitate more human experiences,” he remembers, laughing that they were attempting to create the antithesis to what was known back then as ‘the Blackberry prayer’ where people looked down, not up.
“In the early days, with just five of us, we intuitively knew what we were trying to achieve and how that manifested through the product,” he remembers. “But as the team grew rapidly we didn't have the language that could cut through all the time. It wasn't fully understood by all employees.”
The founders decided to set about finding ways to scale their purpose and mission. “You have to treat the organisation a bit like how you design a product,” he says. “You're iterating and evolving it until you land upon the thing that works.”
Creating a ‘brand platform’
Jamie reckons that one of the most important things they did was to create what he describes as a ‘brand platform’. This articulated the backstory of why Kahoot! exists, the role it plays in the world, and informs the core beliefs and principles of the organisation.
“Ultimately it was a slide deck. But it created a shared language,” he explains.
“It’s a way of framing what you're trying to achieve and how that might manifest itself in the wider world. It can be used as a lens to make decisions. It essentially helped people understand how to behave. How you prioritise. How you communicate to the wider world through your brand and product experience. What really matters to you and what success looks like.”
The process to develop it was facilitated by Paul Alexandrou, Kahoot!’s then Chief Brand Officer, We Are Human’s long-term collaborator and Founder of Modern Equivalent, through his BrandOS methodology.
“Paul helped us capture our individual and collective stories as founders, tapping into the DNA of who we are and how we believed we would create impact at scale, and put it into a format our team could also take ownership of.” He says the important elements are the philosophical stuff. The reason why you exist, the “fire in our bellies”.
“For us, it was how ‘play’ had disappeared in more structured learning environments. Can we get back to the idea of play being our primary way of learning, and use that to create a more inclusive and balanced classroom.”
They called the brand platform Unlock Awesome. And their strap line became Make Learning Awesome.
“It really manifested itself in the wider world,” he reflects, “but it wouldn't have done if it wasn't experienced, consumed and lived by those people that work in the team and how they behave. It helped create a decision making framework for employees. It’s about empowering the team and scaling your values and vision.”
I ask him for a specific example of how this helped a team make a decision or trade off.
“Some of the feedback we were getting from teachers was ‘my students are just guessing fast, because they know that if they guess fast, they're gonna get more points’,” he remembers. “We needed to have a way of preventing that. If you gave that challenge to a different company, they would probably solve it, in a very education-focused way.”
This is where the Kahoot! principles came in. “But for us, ‘play’ was a fundamental pillar of the brand. So we needed to solve this in a way that was still working with the intrinsic motivations of the end learners. They're emotionally engaged and involved in this. So it became about harnessing some of those mischievous behaviours, in a way that encouraged them to focus on positive learning outcomes.”
He beams with pride as he remembers how the team embraced the challenge. “Our product team developed different ideas like elastic scoring and streaks, which meant that you weren't rewarded so much for speed but more around accuracy.”
“I wouldn't necessarily have come up with these ideas. But the teams were empowered to find potential better solutions by understanding what we're trying to achieve and joining the dots for how to solve it in the Kahoot! Way.”
Onboarding
New recruits would get a copy of the deck and a meeting invite from one of the founders.
“I would spend a few hours with them on their first day. Just talking through it,” he says. “It's not about biging ourselves up as founders, it's about trying to create the context and culture of learning. You want people to say, ‘I want to go and achieve this thing!’”
He says you could be the best developer in the world. But if it’s your first day, you're not yet the best developer in Kahoot!. That's because you have to understand the context of what the business is trying to achieve, what's happened so far and why it’s the way it is.
“We always said to new recruits: ‘Take a few months to learn. Don’t come in with too many opinions right now. We’re not saying we don't value your opinion but you've got to understand the context and what has taken place before you joined.’”
He says the people who adopted this explorative mentality could then harness their own expertise and experience successfully. Tension crept in with those that were only interested in their own dominant logic.
Recruiting
Buying into the mission wasn’t the only factor, however.
“One thing we learned in the early days was that we got our recruitment a bit off in the beginning,” he admits. “We were too blinded by people who showed that they were connected to the mission and purpose.”
“But some of them lacked the skills to thrive in a startup environment. This requires self initiative and personal leadership. The ability to kind of develop your own strategies and ways of thinking because you're not coming into a fully formed operating system.”
He remembers as they started to grow, they refined and invested a lot into the recruitment process. Kahoot!’s then General Manager (and current We Are Human Managing Partner) Tim Moore developed their operating playbook, and landed on Daniel Pink’s framework of autonomy, mastery and purpose as a way of framing for how to assess candidates.
“They have to be in tune with the mission. The purpose bit,” he says. “But they need to have the right approach to autonomy and an appreciation that you're evolving as a company.”
And finally, “Mastery is that they have to be very good at what they do and willing to learn. You can only start to hire less experienced people once you've got people who can then support them.”
Strategy and Team Challenges
They revisited the strategy every three months. “It would normally involve us as founders and leaders going away and re-articulating it in context of what we’ve learnt and what external demands we’re facing.”
“We’d present the written or visual document to the company,” he says. “This would lead to challenges for product teams. For this period of time, we want to make progress here or here. You as a team are going to focus on this element of it.”
He says leaders often come in with a predetermined view of how to solve things. “They're determined to get that thing made. And they're not asking themselves ‘is this the best solution?’ Sometimes it is, but not always.”
Instead, the leader’s role is to set teams a challenge and be there when they need nudging.
“I probably didn't know what the best solution was. My role was to understand the framing of the problem and the evidence we had gathered. So if the team is going a bit too far off you can support them. By explaining why that's not right or whatever. I'd say a big part of empowering the team is also just to be very present as a founder, so they learn and understand you more over time.”
However, in order to do this effectively he says you need to have spent time on the hard work of becoming aligned as a leadership team. “You can only do that if you've done a lot of the other stuff to make sure you're aligned with those other people leading the company. So you're in a position to reflect and represent.”
Setting challenges and constraints
So how did they set their team challenges?
“The idea is that you say: ‘this is what we want to achieve. These are some of the insights that we've got. We want you to get more insights. And then we want you to tell us within this period of time, what you believe you can achieve within these constraints.’”
He believes that a large part of empowering teams is by providing the right constraints. And creativity thrives when the right constraints exist.
“I've seen it go wrong so many times,” he says ruefully. “We learnt if you don't put the constraints in, things go off on tangents and it becomes very hard to pull it back. We made mistakes, some projects went on too long or weren’t moving the right metrics. We didn’t nudge the team to think commercially enough. We wasted time and money.”
So what kind of constraints did they provide?
“Some of them are very practical. You've only got this amount of time, because we're gonna have to look at other stuff,” he says. “Others were things like you're not looking at this part of the product, just ignore that. We just want you to focus here.”
What did this look like in practice?
“We had a document that would be presented at the beginning: This is the strategy. We want you to work on this. This is what we wanna try and achieve. This is our time frame,” he outlines. “But then it had loads of empty bits, which we wanted them to fill in. Where they would say, this is what we think we can do. This is how we could go about doing it, and this is how we will measure our success.”
This became the start of a negotiation. “There was a little bit of back and forth where they had to present it back and we had a conversation. I think that's kinda healthy.”
He says spending time on this stage is super important because it creates a shared understanding and psychological safety.
“If you say, this is what we think you can achieve, then they’re taking ownership of the outcomes. But also because everyone agreed to it, as leaders we’re also saying it’s ok if it doesn’t work out. Because that is also just the nature of building stuff like this. Not everything works, but you learn and become more informed.”
Summary
To build a mission-led team, Jamie suggests there are a number of key elements:
Lead from behind. Your role as founder or leader is to empower teams and be present to coach and nudge.
Communicate an inspiring vision that people want to deliver.
Articulate principles that can help teams make decisions and solve problems in a distinctive and coherent way.
Hire for Mastery, Autonomy and Purpose and spend time onboarding new recruits to help them understand the context.
Set teams challenges and provide clear constraints, rather than asking for predefined solutions. Involve them in the process of articulating what they think they can achieve to create understanding and psychological safety.
I ask him for some final thoughts. “You’ve got to figure out what your philosophy is and be genuine to it, which is usually just part of your DNA as a founder. If you live it yourself, it becomes infectious and will be adopted by the team and the people around you. Then you need the hard tools and ways to empower your team to make aligned decisions.”
“Work out what will help your team take ownership. The success of the company is going to be greater if they’re empowered and figuring out even better solutions than if you just tell them what to do.”
Next week, we’ll explore what Jamie is doing now to help purpose-led founders find alignment.
This case study features in my new programme on Building Mission-Led Teams. Next cohort September.