The Cost of Keeping Up in Education Technology

March 28, 2026

“We’ve been so busy keepin’ up with the Jones Four car garage and we’re still building on. Maybe it’s time we got back to the basics of love” ~ Waylon Jennings, Luckenbach, Texas

There was a line in the last issue about building for competition that stuck with me. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized how often it quietly pulls companies off course.

Out on the ranch, you learn pretty quickly that you cannot build everything at once.

It is easy to drive across Texas or scroll social media and see places that look finished. Strong fences, full barns, arenas, equipment, everything in place. It is even easier to start thinking you are behind. What you do not see is how long it took to get there.

Take the 6666 Ranch. It started in the early 1870s when Samuel “Burk” Burnett bought a small herd and began building what would become one of the most respected ranches in Texas. Over time, it grew into more than 260,000 acres, producing world class cattle and quarter horses and becoming a symbol of ranching excellence. But none of that happened quickly. It was built over decades through droughts, market swings, blizzards that wiped out herds, and multiple generations of leadership making decisions year after year.

That is the part people miss. You are not seeing the beginning. You are seeing the result of a long series of decisions stacking on top of each other.

The 6666 Ranch was not built in a day, and neither will Halcyon Ranch. Now, to be clear, you do not have a hundred years to build an Education Technology company. But the discipline is the same. There is a vision, but there is also a pace. There is an order to things. And if you want something that actually lasts, you have to be willing to build it that way.

Where companies get into trouble is when they lose that discipline and start reacting to what everyone else has already built or what is being built around them.

You see it all the time in Education Technology. A competitor launches something new, shows up differently in the market, or gains momentum in a certain segment. The instinct is to respond. Sometimes that response is subtle, sometimes it is immediate, but over time it begins to shift how a company thinks about itself.

That shift is where things start to break.

From the outside, it shows up in small ways. Messaging starts to feel familiar. Product direction becomes less clear. Strategy begins to look more reactive than intentional. Instead of building from a clear point of view, companies start adjusting based on what others are doing.

Customers notice this faster than most teams expect. Whether in education or anywhere else, people can tell when you are playing catch up. And once that perception sets in, it is hard to reverse.

Part of the challenge is that what you see from competitors is rarely the full story.

I have seen this play out in go to market strategy, especially around conferences. One company shows up everywhere, so others feel like they need to do the same. What is not visible is how long those relationships have been built, how much investment has gone into that presence, and what is actually driving results beneath the surface.

It is the iceberg problem. You are reacting to what is above the water without understanding what is underneath it.

In many cases, the better move is not to follow but to find space where you can operate on your own terms. Places where you can tell your story clearly, engage with customers directly, and build something that reflects who you actually are as a company.

The same dynamic shows up even more clearly in the product.

A competitor releases a feature and the immediate reaction is to build something similar. What often gets missed is how long that feature has been evolving, how many iterations it has gone through, and what it actually costs to deliver well. By the time most companies respond, they are trying to recreate something that has been refined over years.

That is how roadmaps start to drift.

Instead of being grounded in customer need and long term direction, they become a series of reactions. Teams shift priorities, projects get half finished, and over time you end up with a collection of features that do not fully connect.

I have seen teams fall into what feels like a constant cycle of adjustment, always responding to the latest signal in the market. The energy is high, but the output is fragmented, and eventually, that shows up in the product.

When that happens, everything else gets harder. It becomes more difficult to explain what you do and why it matters. Sales conversations get more complicated. Internally, teams lose clarity because the direction keeps changing. And ultimately, customers feel it.

If people are not using what you build, nothing else matters.

One of the most important shifts a company can make is how it defines competition in the first place.

Most organizations think of competition as another company or product. In Education Technology, the real competition is often something entirely different. It is time. It is staffing. It is competing priorities inside a district. It is the limited capacity schools have to implement something new. It is the reality of past experiences that may not have gone well.

If you are not focused on those things, you are not focused on what actually drives decisions.

When you look at markets over time, the pattern becomes pretty clear. The companies that last are not the ones that react the fastest. They are the ones that stay closest to their customers and build with consistency.

There was a Blockbuster and there was a Netflix. If Netflix had simply tried to do what Blockbuster did, just a little better, the outcome would have been very different. Instead, they focused on a different problem and built in a different way.

That is what creates separation.

There will always be companies that move first. There will always be competitors that gain momentum. But over time, the companies that stay grounded in who they are, listen carefully, and execute with discipline tend to gain ground.

Not because they chased, but because they stayed focused.

That is the balance.

You need to understand the market, but you cannot let it dictate your direction. You need to be aware of competitors, but you cannot let them define your roadmap. The best teams build with their customers, not in reaction to someone else’s feature release.

That requires patience. It requires clarity. And it requires a level of conviction in how you operate.

The teams that get this right are not ignoring the competition. They just are not consumed by it. They know what they are trying to build and why it matters. And that consistency shows up in the product, in the culture, and in the way customers experience the company over time.

At the end of the day, the path is simpler than it feels.

You obsess over your customers.

You do not obsess over your competitors.