How Tes is bringing customer evidence into everyday product decisions with Askable

For product teams, moving fast only matters if you’re moving in the right direction.

At Tes, customer understanding had always been important. But getting timely, reliable insight from busy education professionals was not easy. Teachers and school staff were hard to reach, feedback often came through indirect channels, and research sometimes arrived after product decisions had already moved on.

With Askable, Tes built a faster, more evidence-led way of working. Research became something teams could use before decisions were made, not after. Product and design teams could validate assumptions, shape roadmaps, and move with more confidence because the evidence was already there.

What used to take us weeks to deliver insights, we are now getting in under 24 hours, sometimes the exact same day. It has sped up our time to insight by at least 100%.

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Challenge: Product teams were moving faster than research could keep up

Tes builds products across the education sector, supporting schools with recruitment, safeguarding, HR, timetabling, jobs, and wider school operations. To make good product decisions, the team needed to stay close to the people using those products every day.

But before Askable, reaching real users was difficult. Teachers and school staff are time-poor, which made research hard to schedule. Feedback often came through sales, operations, or support, meaning the team was sometimes hearing from users at moments of frustration, or from the customers with the strongest existing relationships.

That made it harder to know whether the feedback reflected the broader user base. Research could influence the process, but often only after work had already started. By the time the team spoke to users, engineering had moved ahead, priorities had shifted, or the product had already gone through several sprints.

Instead of helping teams understand what users needed before decisions were made, research was often used to validate what was already in motion.

“Before we had Askable, we really struggled to get hold of real users. Since Askable we've been able to get product decisions that day or the next. We're able to conduct research super fast.”

Solution: A continuous stream of evidence, ready before teams needed it

Tes started using Askable to build a more continuous approach to research.

With Askable’s participant recruitment and Insight Streams, the team could gather evidence around the areas that mattered most to the business before product teams needed answers. In the first six months, Tes conducted more than 100 studies, building a strong foundation of insight for upcoming roadmap decisions.

That changed the role of research inside the business. Instead of starting from scratch every time a product team had a question, the research team could work ahead of the roadmap and bring evidence into the conversation earlier.

Tes used Askable in two layers. The first was broad, continuous discovery through Insight Streams, helping the team understand the wider education landscape, emerging pain points, market shifts, and opportunities across recruitment and school operations. The second was focused internal research, where the team could deep dive into specific product questions, usability issues, or roadmap areas.

Together, those two layers gave Tes both breadth and depth. The team could understand what was happening across the market, then zoom in where the evidence showed it mattered most.

“Because of Askable's participant recruitment, we’ve been able to conduct over 100 studies in six months. When someone in Product asks us a question we can say, 'We've already got the insight ready for you.'”

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Impact: Faster decisions, backed by real user evidence

With Askable, research moved closer to the moments where decisions were being made.

Product managers could test whether an idea had evidence behind it. Designers could explore user pain points before shaping a flow. Researchers could run knowns-and-unknowns exercises against PRDs, helping teams see what was already supported and what still needed to be learned.

That meant teams could keep moving without skipping customer understanding.

If the evidence was strong, teams could move forward. If there were gaps, the research team could focus on the riskiest unknowns before too much time or development effort was spent. Research became a way to accelerate decisions, not slow them down.

Askable also changed how research was shared inside Tes. Instead of relying on long reports that busy teams might not have time to read, Tes could share sharper, more direct insights. Teams could see what users said, how often themes appeared, where the evidence came from, and which study supported it.

That made research easier to trust and easier to act on.

“We can literally have an idea and test stuff within a day now. Our internal team can now go and deep dive on research. We're able to target which insights we need to look at alongside the business priorities we've got.”

Looking ahead: Better decisions, grounded in real users

Tes is continuing to build on the research foundations it has created with Askable.

For Tes, the future is about making strategic decisions with less assumption and more evidence from real users. That starts with strong research foundations, clear briefs, thoughtful questions, and ethical practice. Once that evidence is in place, Askable helps make it useful across the business.

Before Askable, research at Tes was harder to coordinate, slower to reach the right users, and often too late to shape decisions. Today, Tes has a stronger flow of evidence into the business, helping teams move faster while staying close to the people they are designing for.

The result is a more confident product culture. One where teams can ask better questions, challenge assumptions earlier, and make decisions based on what users actually need.

“Once you’ve got that in there, you can start making real strategic decisions based on real users, really quickly. We're generating ideas the product team may not have surfaced or even thought about, we can get that real granular detail.”

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