15% Solutions With People Who Don't Work for You

Our instructor community call had developed a ritual. Someone would raise mobile — “my students take courses on their phones and your player is unusable there” — everyone would agree, I would say something honest about the roadmap, and the remaining forty minutes went to a topic nobody had energy for. Four calls in a row ended that way. The instructors were right about mobile and I was right that a native app wasn’t happening that year, and being simultaneously right is not a productive place to run a community from.

For the fifth call I gave up on the agenda and ran 15% Solutions with thirty instructors, none of whom work for us. That last part turned out to matter more than the format.

The structure, and what changes over video

15% Solutions asks each person for the actions inside their own discretion — no permission, no budget, no waiting on anyone. Five minutes of silent writing, then small groups where one person presents their list for two or three minutes and the others spend four or five asking clarifying questions and offering advice, rotating until everyone’s gone.

Remote, it needs three adjustments. The silent five minutes has to be genuinely silent and announced as such, or half the room does email. Breakout rooms of three, not four — video has more overhead per person than a table does, and four in a breakout usually means one person listening. And the rotation needs a visible timer pushed into the rooms, because no facilitator is walking past to notice a group that’s spent eleven minutes on its first presenter.

The prompt: what could you change in your own course, this week, without any new feature from us, that might get more students past module three? Module three was where completion fell off a cliff across the whole catalogue.

What thirty instructors could do that we couldn’t

The lists were better than ours would have been, written by people who actually watch students struggle.

A photography instructor: split module three — his was fifty-one minutes of exposure theory — into four sub-lessons, and move the first hands-on assignment ahead of it. An evening’s work in the editor we already shipped.

A bookkeeping instructor: record the module three lecture as audio-only as well as video, so students could take it on a commute. She’d assumed she needed a feature from us; another instructor in her breakout pointed out she could upload it as a downloadable resource on the lesson. A two-minute discovery that had sat behind an assumption for months.

A woodworking instructor: a manual day-five nudge email, from her own address, to anyone who hadn’t started module three — built off the CSV export we’d shipped a year earlier and she’d never opened.

Two instructors independently arrived at posting a thirty-second “what you’ll be able to do after this module” video at the head of the heavy modules — phone camera, no editing.

Nine tried something within a fortnight. The nudge email moved its own course most — module three starts up by a third — so we shipped a scheduled version the next quarter. We would never have specced that. It didn’t look like a feature until an instructor built it by hand out of a CSV and proved it worked.

Why running it outside your own org changes things

Three things happen when the room isn’t your team.

The discretion is real and large. An instructor’s fifteen percent is their entire course — structure, sequencing, media, communications. An enormous surface, completely outside your roadmap. You cannot direct any of it, so the only way to move it is to make it worth their while to move it themselves.

It converts a demand into a negotiation with reality. “Build the mobile app” is aimed at me. “What can I do about phone-first students this week” is aimed at them, and answering it honestly surfaced that much of the mobile pain was really fifty-minute-video pain, which no app would have fixed.

And the peer consult round is where a vendor has no business being. The audio-only discovery came from another instructor, not from us. Thirty people who teach on the platform hold more practical knowledge of it than the team that built it, and the rotation is a cheap way to circulate that without us mediating every exchange.

One caution about tone. Done badly, this is a vendor telling customers to solve the problem themselves — and if you run it while ducking a legitimate product gap, that’s exactly what it is, and they’ll know. I opened by saying plainly that the mobile player was bad, that it was on the list for next year, and that this hour was about the students enrolled right now. Say the true thing first or don’t run it.

When to skip it

Skip it when the ask genuinely has no workaround. If module three had been failing on a bug in our video player, asking instructors what they could do about it would be an insult with a facilitation technique attached.

Skip it too when you can’t or won’t follow through. The nudge email only mattered because we later shipped it. Harvest what the room produces and say publicly which ones you took — otherwise the fifth call is just a more elaborate ritual.