The post-COVID disruption to higher education created urgent pressure on McGraw-Hill to rethink the product roadmap for its Sharpen platform. Institutions and instructors were navigating a transformed learning environment — with new expectations around digital delivery, assessment flexibility, and cloud-native infrastructure. McGraw-Hill needed a clear innovation strategy that balanced short-term market needs with longer-horizon platform capabilities.
Vivaldi was engaged to define a structured innovation framework for the Sharpen platform — mapping near, mid, and long-term priorities based on user insight, market signals, and technology capabilities including cloud infrastructure. The approach included stakeholder workshops, competitive analysis, and a phased roadmap that gave McGraw-Hill clarity on where to invest and in what sequence.
McGraw-Hill received a comprehensive innovation roadmap for Sharpen with clearly defined near, mid, and long-term priorities — giving product, technology, and commercial teams alignment on investment decisions and development sequencing as the platform evolved in a post-COVID higher education market.
McGraw-Hill engaged Vivaldi to define the innovation roadmap for its Sharpen digital assessment and learning platform as higher education absorbed the structural shocks of the pandemic and institutions raised expectations around digital delivery, assessment flexibility, and cloud-native infrastructure. Vivaldi ran stakeholder workshops, competitive analysis, and user research to build a phased near, mid, and long-term innovation framework that gave product, technology, and commercial teams alignment on what to build, in what sequence, and why.
McGraw-Hill is a leading education content and technology company serving higher education, K-12, and professional learning markets globally. Headquartered in New York, the company provides digital learning platforms, courseware, and adaptive technologies to millions of students and educators. McGraw-Hill’s Sharpen platform represents its next-generation digital assessment and learning tool, developed to meet the needs of an increasingly digital and post-pandemic higher education environment.
Vivaldi delivered a phased innovation roadmap for Sharpen with explicit near, mid, and long-term priorities, grounded in user insight, market signals, and technology capability assessments including cloud infrastructure. The output gave McGraw-Hill’s product, technology, and commercial teams a shared sequencing decision rather than three competing internal views of what to build next.
The three-horizon framing separated what Sharpen needed to ship in the next twelve months to address immediate post-pandemic institutional demand from the mid-horizon platform investments needed to compete on flexibility, from the long-horizon bets on cloud-native architecture that would define the platform’s ceiling. Treating the three horizons as different decision types, urgent, structural, foundational, prevented the common failure mode of letting near-term pressure crowd out long-horizon investment.
The pandemic did not just accelerate digital adoption in higher education, it reset what instructors and institutions considered acceptable in a learning platform. Assessment flexibility, accessibility, and remote-ready infrastructure moved from differentiators to table stakes inside two years, which compressed the roadmap window for incumbents. Platforms that misread that compression as a temporary spike lost ground to entrants who treated it as a new baseline.
The lesson is that innovation roadmaps fail when they conflate urgency with importance. Separating the horizons explicitly, and forcing organizational decisions about which bucket each initiative belongs in, is how product organizations protect strategic capacity for the structural bets that matter most. Roadmaps written as flat backlogs end up dominated by whichever stakeholder is loudest in the current quarter.