Company

McGraw Hill is the world's most trusted educational publisher, reaching over 20 million students globally. The 130-year-old company generates over $1 billion in annual revenue from textbooks, digital resources, and learning materials.

The Challenge

McGraw Hill's Chief Transformation and Strategy Officer Justin Singh identified a critical problem: students were bypassing the company's textbooks and official study guides to search for materials on TikTok and YouTube, often finding inaccurate information. Singh and his team recognized they needed to create a digital learning experience that matched the apps students already loved—a feed of videos and swipeable study tools that felt native to mobile. Their vision for the Sharpen app was to create something that, as one future student would describe it, felt "like TikTok and Duolingo had a baby." But to secure board approval and funding, they first needed a working prototype. McGraw Hill had previously engaged traditional management consultants on this challenge with little progress, and Singh knew repeating that approach wouldn't deliver the innovation they needed.

The Solution

Singh turned to A.Team to onboard a team of elite product and engineering talent with experience building iconic mobile apps—from iOS to Tinder. A.Team started with a three-person team to build an initial prototype, which McGraw Hill tested with over 30 students to overwhelmingly positive responses that shifted internal culture and team belief. Rather than presenting a PowerPoint to the board, Singh demonstrated the prototype directly, showing board members what it would have been like to have Sharpen during their own college years and sharing student reactions. With board approval secured and less than a year to launch, the A.Team scaled rapidly: growing to eight builders for the MVP phase, then expanding to 27 builders spanning product managers, engineering leaders, software architects, designers, and growth marketing specialists. The team built video-streaming embeds, integrated social learning tools, progress-tracking analytics, and adaptive learning algorithms, ultimately launching with a catalog of 95 gamified courses.