What Strong EdTech Leadership Looks Like When the Easy Answers Are Gone

When people talk about executive leadership, they usually focus on the visible outcomes: strategy, revenue growth, product launches, and public wins. What gets less attention is the harder part of the job: making decisions before the data is complete and moving forward when every option comes with trade-offs.

I recently led a Magic EdTech Executive Roundtable with Kemi Akinsanya-Rose, Chief Operating Officer at Cambium Learning Group, and Sabine Mullin, Chief Marketing Officer at Curriculum Associates. The conversation took place during Women’s History Month, which added another layer of significance to a discussion grounded in operational leadership, long-term thinking, and honest conversations about what leadership actually looks like right now.

One theme that kept surfacing throughout the discussion was that the real test of leadership in EdTech is not how you operate when conditions are stable. It is how you lead when the trade-offs are messy, the pressure is constant, and the “right” answer is not always obvious.

Schools are navigating tighter budgets. Districts are still untangling years of tool overload and uneven implementation. AI is moving faster than most institutional planning cycles. The environment is not slowing down anytime soon. Leaders like Kemi and Sabine offer great insights to navigate these challenging times.

The Biggest Test of Leadership: Deciding What Not to Do

Saying no to bad ideas is easy. The harder challenge is deciding which good opportunities deserve attention when everything feels urgent.

Sabine talked about how leadership teams are constantly balancing competing priorities, often without perfect information. And that is the reality most leaders do not love admitting publicly: many decisions have to be made before the full picture exists. Waiting for certainty is often just a delay, but with better branding.

Strong leaders learn how to operate inside that discomfort. They make decisions anyway. They adapt when needed. They do not confuse hesitation with strategy.

Kemi described the same challenge through the lens of what many organizations now call the VUCA environment: volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. But she framed it less as a temporary disruption and more as the ongoing condition of the sector.

Her response was not to pretend that instability can be controlled away. It was to stay anchored to the mission. At Cambium, that means continuously returning to whether students, teachers, families, and communities are genuinely being served.

That matters because your mission becomes the filter. It helps organizations decide what deserves investment, attention, and energy, and what does not.

Kemi also shared a practical example of how that thinking shows up operationally. Cambium’s Better Together initiative was designed to connect teams across business units so organizations are not solving the same problem multiple times in parallel. In large organizations, duplication of efforts becomes expensive quickly, both financially and strategically.

Budget Season Exposes the Real Value Story

The conversation then shifted to one of the hardest balancing acts in education right now: how organizations meet near-term business goals without damaging the thing customers actually value.

Kemi was direct about the reality that leadership teams have to manage both growth and profitability. But she was equally clear that there is a difference between right-sizing and cutting so deeply that the organization weakens its own long-term effectiveness. Cost discipline matters, but not at the expense of the people, systems, and support structures that make sustainable growth possible.

Sabine brought the conversation back to the customer experience. Sustainable growth does not come only from landing new business. It comes from supporting current customers well, implementing effectively, and delivering value that educators can actually feel in practice. When student outcomes improve, and teachers feel supported, the relationship gets stronger. From there, better feedback, better products, and future growth become possible.

That conversation feels especially relevant now because districts are no longer evaluating edtech purchases in the same way they did during the peak pandemic years. They are scrutinizing every line item. Many schools are managing tighter budgets while also dealing with too many overlapping tools and too little measurable impact.

In that environment, strong messaging alone is not enough.

Both Kemi and Sabine returned to the same core point repeatedly: narrative matters, but proof matters more. Implementation matters more. Credibility matters more.

Kemi made that especially tangible. Districts are not looking for product theater. They want to understand what students will experience, what teachers will actually have to manage, and whether the solution works in a real classroom. She also raised a point that more edtech companies should take seriously: strong partnerships are multi-year relationships. Sometimes customers have to make budget decisions that temporarily limit implementation or support. Good partners do not disappear the moment budgets tighten. They stay engaged, maintain trust, and help customers adjust as conditions evolve.

AI Needs a Real Job

When the conversation turned to AI, what stood out most was how grounded both leaders were in their approach. There is very little appetite for AI theater.

Kemi described AI at Cambium as an accelerator. Internally, that includes brand protection, productivity support, and helping teams build baseline AI fluency. Externally, it includes classroom-facing applications like writing support, homework assistance, and stronger connections between assessment data and instruction. The goal was not to automate everything in sight. The goal was to reduce friction and make human effort more effective.

Sabine described a similarly practical approach at Curriculum Associates. Teachers remain central to the classroom experience. AI should act as a partner, not a replacement. Internally, that means training teams, establishing guardrails, and using AI to process huge volumes of customer research and feedback that would be impossible for most teams to analyze manually. The next phase, as she described it, is not simply applying AI to isolated tasks. It is rethinking full workflows where AI can meaningfully improve the work itself. That distinction matters.

Neither leader framed AI as something that should exist because the market expects it. The standard was much simpler and more useful: Does it solve the real problem? Does it reduce unnecessary burden? Does it improve outcomes or create a noticeably better experience for teachers and students?

If the answer is no, the feature probably does not need to exist.

Power Does Not Move on Its Own

Because this conversation took place during Women’s History Month, I appreciated that it moved beyond generic encouragement and into a more honest discussion about leadership pipelines and advancement.

Kemi made one of the sharpest points in the conversation: mentorship is valuable, but sponsorship changes careers. Real advancement happens when someone with influence opens a door, advocates for a leader, or places meaningful responsibility in front of someone before they feel fully ready for it.

She talked about this both structurally and personally. Organizations need to create visible opportunities intentionally. But individuals also have to learn how to quiet the internal voice that says they should wait until they are overqualified before stepping forward.

Sabine added another important layer. Leadership teams have a responsibility to identify talent, create development pathways, and remain visible enough for emerging leaders to actually learn from them. That includes cohort programs, stretch assignments, and giving rising leaders opportunities to see executive leadership up close. She also made a point worth saying directly: women do not always support one another as they should, and that culture has to change.

Her advice to early-career professionals was refreshingly simple: raise your hand before you feel perfectly ready. Leadership often starts when someone sees a problem, gathers people together, and moves the work forward.

That directly connects back to something she mentioned early on: leaders must often make decisions without all of the information. So, raising your hand before you feel perfectly ready? That sounds like great practice to advance your leadership skills!

Kemi added another practical dimension to that conversation: build a community around a shared purpose. Not networking for the sake of networking, but bringing people together around meaningful work and shared goals. That is how visibility, trust, and momentum develop over time.

Culture is not something organizations inherit passively. It is something people actively build.

The Quiet Work Is the Real Work

What stayed with me after this conversation is how unglamorous strong leadership actually is.

It is not a constant motion. It is not polished certainty. It is not product theater.

It is a focus. It is clarity. It is staying grounded in customer reality. It is using technology responsibly instead of performatively. It is building other leaders intentionally instead of protecting power.

Kemi and Sabine came to these conversations from different leadership functions, but they landed in remarkably similar places: stay anchored in mission, do not confuse activity with progress, make AI earn its place, support customers in ways that survive budget season, and build leadership pipelines on purpose.

Watch the full episode for the complete conversation behind these ideas.

EdTech does not need more noise. It needs more leaders who can do the quiet work well.