Day In The Life: Meet Panorama Education Outreach Director Byron Adams

Byron Adams
Outreach Director, Panorama Education
Chicago, IL
Twitter: @panoramaed

6:15am: My alarm goes off, and I snooze for 10 minutes before getting out of bed. My girlfriend, Steph, is already awake and out for her morning run. I’m still sluggish after returning home late last night from our vacation. This is my first day back at work, and I’m in a brand new city – Chicago! My move to Chicago from Boston (where Panorama is headquartered) has been five months in the making. I’m used to commuting to work from my old apartment in Somerville (about 35 minutes), and the commute to my new office is now … five seconds to my laptop. Given the extra time and convenience of working at home, I’m trying to follow Steph’s example and hit my building’s gym in the mornings.

7:30am: Whew – it turns out I’m not the only person with fitness goals in my apartment building! After an hour of weight training and cardio, I eat eggs and oatmeal and review my inbox before heading to meet a director in a local school district for coffee. He and I were introduced through a mutual friend, and he’s interested in learning more about Panorama for his district. We chat about how the platform would help his schools collect and analyze feedback data from students, parents, and staff. As outreach director, I share Panorama's platform to help introduce best practices for collecting and analyzing community feedback to schools and districts around the country.

8:30am: I set goals for my meetings with educators and district leaders. I’m actually new to the sales side of Panorama. Before joining the outreach team, I was a project lead with our client success team, which helps our clients implement our product. The combination of my career interests and my geographic preferences luckily coincided with Panorama’s growing need for field sales, and so here I am :). I’m hoping to learn more about my contact’s top priorities for the district. He’s interested in surveying families in his district about school climate as part of his superintendent’s family engagement push, so I walk him through how we could help implement feedback surveys in his schools. We set up time to talk again next week after he’s had a chance to discuss what he learned about Panorama with his district’s leadership team (at which point we’ll also schedule a product demo for his team).

9:45am: Back at my home office, I type up my notes from the meeting into Salesforce, which our outreach team uses to organize info about leads and potential opportunities. I also shoot a quick thank-you email to my contact with a formatted “Introduction to Panorama” template that he can forward to his colleagues. I know how busy things can get for district leaders, so I want to make it as easy as possible for my contact to spread the word about Panorama. I also set a calendar reminder to check in with him next week if I don’t hear back. The number of meetings and conversations with districts can really pile up, so using specific calendar reminders helps me stay on top of any communications and next steps.

10:30am: I message our "outreach" channel on Slack to check in with my teammates. I’m all about Slack – it keeps the team connected no matter where we are, and I love when someone messages the team to share highlights from an awesome conversation they had. The successes that we talk about every day are a reminder of how far we’ve come since I started at Panorama back in 2014 – and also a reminder of how much work there is left to do. I’m motivated by my team’s passion. We share a commitment to improving school experiences and education outcomes for kids all over the country.

11:00am: Research time. I’m reading three school districts’ strategic plans, along with some recent news articles about each. This helps me figure out who to reach out to for meetings and what issues are most important to them. Right now, our team is focusing on the largest school districts in the country to reach as many students, families, and teachers as possible. There are quite a few districts in Illinois that fit the bill, so I want to understand as much as possible about issues affecting the communities we’re hoping to serve. I make a couple cold calls based on my reading and get a meeting on the calendar to talk with one district leader about how Panorama could help her schools track social-emotional learning goals.

12:00pm: I make lunch and eat outside because the weather is incredible today. Back in Boston, daily lunches in the office were a great opportunity to discuss work, catch up on someone’s life after a recent engagement or move, and uncover mutual common interests in The Bachelor. I jot down a few ideas for remote lunch activities to keep up with everyone now that I’m remote, and then I read The Chicago Tribune on my phone and search for voices in the Chicago education community to follow on Twitter. I’m a phantom Twitter user – I browse the app every day to laugh and keep up with news, but I never actually tweet (unless my flights are delayed and I need a place to vent).

12:30pm: Back at my desk, I hop onto a video call for a “NORA date” with a colleague on the engineering team. NORA is a system that allows each person at Panorama to have 30 minutes of scheduled downtime every week (or work time, if you want!) to build relationships with another randomly selected teammate. It matches you with a teammate by identifying free time on everyone’s Google calendars and then pairing people with each other based on their availability. When I lived in Boston, I’d use NORA dates to grab coffee, get a snack, or just to get some fresh air with a teammate. Now that I’m in Chicago, I plan to use the time to catch up with folks and give digital tours of whatever my workspace is for the day. The entire NORA system was developed during a company hackathon a few months ago, and it really helps people on various teams outside of the usual craziness of the workday. Our hackathons are awesome opportunities for the entire company to work together, and it’s especially exciting to see projects that come out of hackathons become mainstays of our organizational culture.

1:00pm: I review notes for my next meeting and look over a demo report I generated in our platform last night. Armed with all the essentials for my meeting – laptop, charger, mini displayport, and hardcopy marketing materials – I drive about an hour outside of Chicago to visit a district leader for a product demo. I’m going to see Chance the Rapper and Kanye West perform in a couple of weeks, so I queue up my favorite songs from both of their new albums for the drive. I’m excited for this demo and for the concert.

2:20pm: I arrive at the school district office, located on a high school campus. Since I’m a few minutes early and my contact is still in another meeting, I check out some student art displayed in the hall. It makes me nostalgic for the time I spent in high school, both as a student and as a teacher.

2:45pm: My contact and I have already had a phone conversation and exchanged a few emails, but today is my first chance to meet him in person and deliver a live demo. He lets me know that the district is actually sponsoring a competitor’s product in two of their schools, but he brought me in to learn more about Panorama and decide whether two other district schools would want to run a pilot this year. He is impressed by the demo, so we set a meeting date to follow up.

5:45pm: It takes me a little longer to drive back home because of rush-hour traffic, but I finally make it and return my rental car. Back home, I enter notes about my meeting into Salesforce and send a follow-up email with additional resources out to my contact.

6:30pm: I check my email and find one of the best presents: A signed renewal form from a client. This particular client is a small charter school that I worked with as a project lead and shepherded through renewal for two years. I’m thrilled that we get to work with them for another year.

7:45pm: Realizing that Steph and my fridge isn’t stocked, I run to the grocery store down the street. Back home, I toss a few ears of corn and chicken breasts on our grill and make a salad. It’s one of my favorite quick meals because I can respond to emails and catch up on Salesforce activity while I wait for everything to cook.

8:15pm: Steph gets home from work and is thrilled that I’ve already made dinner. It’s the little things :).

9:15pm: After making a to-do list for tomorrow, I close my computer for the day and give my mom a call to say hello. We finalize our plans to travel to my cousin’s wedding next month.

10:45pm: I hop in bed and fall asleep listening to Keepin’ It 1600, a great elections podcast I discovered this morning on the treadmill at the gym.