Teachers were spending too much time finding information and not enough time acting on it. Spark TA was built to change that. Investment in AI products led to a massive increase in new business: 74% of new business dollars from Q3 of 2025 to present are attributable to Spark TA and other AI initiatives that myself and my team built.
Subject.AI
AI Products • 0->1
3 months
About Subject
Subject provides curriculum and learning platforms for grades 6–12 — serving credit recovery, core instruction, and elective expansion for school districts across virtual and in-person settings. In many cases, Subject becomes the engine for a virtual school, giving teachers and admins visibility into how thousands of students are performing, where they're struggling, and what they need next.
Defining the Problem: Attention Orchestration
Before Spark TA and a new educator homepage, teachers who needed to understand how their students were doing had to navigate three layers deep. The information they needed existed. It just wasn't where they needed it to be.
We weren't making it easy for them to get to the information that actually mattered. They were doing manual triage in a product that should have been doing it for them. The insight: teachers have the data, but they need the product to direct their attention.
Testing: Lofi Concepts
Gauge reactions to different 'modules' that could appear on their homepage and in the app in general. It became clear that while the homepage should be for immediate action, there was a dire need for more custom reporting.
The Bridge: Why Spark TA
Alongside the attention problem, customer success kept fielding the same requests over and over — "Can you give me the scope and sequence for this course?" "How do I lock a quiz for a student?" "Can you give me a report of all the students that spent time on the platform today?" We didn't have the engineering capacity to build every one of these features. So the hope was that Spark TA would be that bridge.
There was also a harder truth: teachers managing credit recovery students often couldn't easily see the actual curriculum their students were learning. If a student was struggling with a concept, the teacher couldn't quickly pull up what the course was teaching — making it nearly impossible to step in and help. Subject's whole mission is to free teachers up to be tutors. We're the experts in curriculum — but teachers are the people in the room. We needed to empower both.
Teacher
I need Subject to tell me which students need me, and give me the tools to actually help them — without switching tabs or digging through menus.
Product
Save teachers time at scale — handling the long tail of support requests that engineering couldn't build fast enough.
Business
Demonstrate forward-thinking AI investment ahead of fundraising — while genuinely moving our core pitch: high-quality instruction that saves teachers time.
Spark TA V1: Building the Foundation
V1 launched with two core capabilities: product analytics and curriculum. When it worked, it worked really well — it could identify your most struggling students, write a personalized email to a parent, and create a supplemental worksheet matched to the material they were stuck on. Some teachers had genuine "wow" moments. But adoption struggled at the edges.
When teachers asked something outside V1's capabilities — platform how-tos, system controls, things outside the hard-coded paths — it fell short. The experience didn't feel like a tool that knew them. It felt like a tool with a ceiling. The visual design was also not a strength of this first iteration.
What V1 Taught Us
Teachers came to Spark TA with a mixed bag of needs — some about their students, some about the platform itself, some about the curriculum. V1 only handled a small subset of requests reliably, it was an engineering failure that also gave me the opportunity to up the guidance we gave to educators and the UX to gear towards their most common queries.
Spark TA V2: Designing to Feel Known
V2 was about making the experience feel like it actually understood our teacher's worlds. I structured prompts around real teacher jobs-to-be-done — Understand, Create, Support — so the entry points matched how teachers actually think about their day.
Prompts for Key Jobs-To-Be-Done
After gathering data from the field and the existing prompts teachers were already asking to Spark TA, we collated a robust prompt list into 3 important categories: Understand, Create, Do, and Support
The importance of Multi-Tiered Systems of Support became very important here. Schools gain funding by offering tiers of intervention to support equitable access to instruction. Spark TA can do that by creating personalized materials.
Invest in Artifacts
Teaching and school systems are still very tactile and physical. Exported reports, paper worksheets, I wanted to mimic and support that reality within our AI product by using richer visuals in tables, email formatting, and worksheets.
Increase Visual Delight
Subject is a premium product in the curriculum space - with time for iteration, I brought Lottie animation and higher craft finishes into this version. Joy and delight are for all of our users, not just our students (and it doesn't hurt that it brings a 'WOW' moment to a sales demo).
Outcomes
Teachers are so hungry to help their students, and they're so creative. Our job with AI is to give them moments of delight they don't often get in these high-friction experiences — that moment when their face lights up seeing Spark TA do exactly what they asked. Spark TA gives kids the most personalized, supportive experiences possible. The time savings and new business impact are undeniable.
> 1 day per week
Time Saved by Teachers using Subject's AI Tooling
74%
Of New Business Dollars tied to AI Products
What's Next? Deeper and more robust technical implementation, integration more natively within the product.