Erin Condren Teacher Lesson Planner

One of Erin Condren’s flagship planner products is a Teacher Lesson Planner, serving the vibrant teacher community that wants to stay on top of the many moving parts of managing lesson plans, their classload and school activities. 

For years, the Teacher Lesson Planner had one planning horizontal weekly layout that largely spoke to elementary school teachers. Erin Condren’s teacher community also includes upper grade teachers, administrators and other education professionals that loved Erin Condren’s quality, but they told us they were looking for a stronger layout that worked better for how they plan. In 2024, we brought this request to life.

• Introduce a new layout that met some of our educator community’s unmet needs
• Add a similar product experience to that layout with similar customizable accessories
• Introduce top-requested product add-ons to the planner itself
• Drive excitement and create a clear marketing story for a product that didn’t have any major innovation in several years

Erin Condren is fortunate to have a vocal customer base who tells us what they’re looking for. Every year, we send out a Teacher Lesson Planner specific survey and I scour through the results to see how we’re serving our educators and what else they’re craving.

After several deep dives into our community’s responses and needs, I found common ground to create a layout that spoke to as many needs as possible.

• Wanting a vertical layout layout with the days of the week along the top that would allow them to plan their lessons and day in a column (we had only been offering a layout where an educator planned their days horizontally across the two weekly planner pages)
• A request for weekends. Some educators lead extracurriculars that happen over the weekend, and some prefer to have extra space to write out weekend plans and to-dos. Our only Teacher layout at the time only had the work week, Monday through Friday.

In addition to those needs, I incorporated new layout features to better support our educators in staying organized and feeling on top of each week.

• Meeting Trackers: Write out all the weekly meetings with staff, parents and more.
• Top Priorities: Stay aligned with getting the most important things done or keeping important deadlines and events top of mind.
• Weekly To-dos: The things an educator needs to get done never ends, now it can be easily trackable with this to-do list.

In order to fully support this layout, I also made sure a key feature and upsell product could be available, just like was on the original layout. 

Each week, our (original) Horizontal layout has a large box at the top where our educators can write out the subject or planning period they’re planning for. It can feel daunting to keep writing the same subject or words at the top of each layout every week for the entire school year.

Years prior, I concepted and helped launch a customizable sticker sheet specifically for this planner layout. Teachers could save time by customizing stickers with the subjects, class period time and custom color and add those in their weekly planning layouts each week instead.

Educators buying this new vertical layout needed to have that ease as well. I designed the layout keeping an existing, underutilized custom sticker size in mind so our educators could have the option to create custom subject stickers with both layouts.