Teachers were spending too much time finding information and not enough time acting on it. Spark TA changes 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.
The Problem: Orchestrating a Teacher's Attention
When I joined Subject, there was an overwhelming feeling that our educator portal was hard to use. 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.
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 resonating with our core pitch to teachers and admins: high-quality instruction that saves time.
Research Process
I talked with 15+ educators across our multiple personas, using Zoom and classroom observations to see how they get what they need out of Subject. While it varied by educator's roles, there was a clear theme.
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
After initial observation, I wanted to bring something visual to the table. This meant gathering the most common themes, like performance and progress monitoring, time on platform, and communication with parents and students.
I wanted to aim for something tactile, visual, but information dense. Educators are used to consuming a lot at once, so they appreciate density with colorful visual indications.
Conceptualizing Spark TA
Alongside the attention problem, we were seeing frequent repeat requests from customer success:
"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?"
"How should I communicate these grades back to the parent?"
Spark TA empowers the teachers in the room with all of the rich data that Subject holds using natural language. It should be able to handle those data-rich requests to understand performance, but it should also make our teachers better teachers.
Spark TA V1: Building the Foundation
V1 launched with two core capabilities: product analytics and curriculum. When it worked, it was magical. It could identify your 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 like 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. We were on a time crunch for this first iteration, and I knew I could achieve more with the visual design of the feature.
What V1 Taught Us
Teachers come to Spark TA with a mixed set 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 so the entry points matched how teachers actually think about their day. I realized also that those 4 starter prompts were too limiting, teachers needed more.
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. 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.