Prodigy Education adds key players to executive team to propel the company's extraordinary growth in 2020

- Three new c-suite leaders are the cornerstones for Prodigy's ambitious 2021 expansion plans based on its five-year ambition to become the world's leading education platform -

TORONTO, Sept. 9, 2020 /PRNewswire/ - Prodigy Education, a market-leading educational technology company, recently appointed Kulsum Qasim as Chief Marketing Officer, John Stetic as Chief Product Officer, and Jean-Luc Dery as Chief Technology Officer. This strategic investment in leadership will allow Prodigy to accelerate its growth at this pivotal moment for educational technology.

"I'm thrilled at the opportunity to level-up our executive team and organization from a startup to a world-class software company," said Rohan Mahimker on behalf of himself and co-CEO Alex Peters. "We're looking to grow from 350 employees to thousands in the next five years and Kulsum, John and Jean-Luc all bring strong experience to help take us there. Their innovation and focus will help us inspire a lifelong love of learning in all students."

Kulsum Qasim brings a host of experience, achievement, and confidence to her role as Chief Marketing Officer. "I'm looking forward to scaling up our marketing efforts to bring our mission and vision to life – even as students and teachers around the world face unprecedented and challenging circumstances," said Qasim. "If this past year has taught us anything, it's that learning never stops. We are uniquely positioned to bring the love of learning to every student, parent and teacher, both inside and outside of the classroom."

Qasim comes to Prodigy Education after 15 years of building a career as a senior marketing leader, primarily in education technology. Before joining Prodigy Education, Qasim's most recent roles were Global Vice President of Brand Strategy & Marketing and Vice President Marketing, Online Learning at Pearson Education. Qasim spent most of her years at Pearson within the online learning growth sector where she successfully led an internal marketing agency of over 250 team members.

Chief Product Officer John Stetic leads Product Management and is excited to bring his 20 years of product and team building experience to help shape Prodigy's strategy, working with the organization to translate it into high-impact execution.

"Building products that create passionate users is so rewarding" said Stetic, "Even more so with a world-class team, and the mission of helping every student love learning. We have a great opportunity  to leverage technology that creates  fun and personalized learning experiences resulting in significant positive outcomes.."

Stetic has experience across a number of industries, holding leadership roles — from Co-Founder to Chief Product Officer — at companies including ServiceMax, PlateSpin and Oracle. While he was a key player on the founding leadership team at PlateSpin, the company's revenue grew to $25M before it was acquired by Novell.

Jean-Luc Dery, Chief Technology Officer, believes the company's unwavering dedication to making education engaging for all students is central to its ongoing success: "When you're able to bring people together who believe in a common goal, like our collective passion for Prodigy's mission," says Dery, "something magical happens."

Dery, a proven expert at maximizing the output for growing, high-performance teams, joined Prodigy in May 2019 as VP of Engineering and has recently been promoted to CTO. Before joining Prodigy, Jean-Luc held several leadership roles driving transformation through technology. His experience with world-class companies has taken him from the early days of the digital revolution that redefined the world of film and TV; to e-commerce innovations that continue to shape retail and POS markets. The engineering infrastructure he established was integral to guiding Lightspeed POS Inc. – a Montreal-based e-commerce startup – to its successful IPO in 2019.

Prodigy's rapid growth has earned a number of awards such as Deloitte's Technology Fast 50 and Fast 500 and a top-3 ranking in the Canadian Business Growth 500 list for 2019. As schools have closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and parents take a more active role in education, Prodigy continues to dramatically scale its user base. Their mission to help every student in the world love learning will continue to be a key driver for expected future growth.

About Prodigy Education

In the last nine years, Prodigy Education has grown from 3,000 local users to more than 100 million worldwide users who are voluntarily practicing math every single day — and enjoying it! Currently, the fastest-growing educational startup in North America — with recent expansions into the UK, Australia, and India — Prodigy Education connects students, parents, teachers and school districts with educational resources. Visit prodigygame.com to learn more.

Prodigy's mission is to help every student in the world love learning.

Prodigy understands that a love of learning should happen both in and out of the classroom. With the recent circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company's devotion to providing high-quality online resources for students, parents and educators is more important than ever.

About Kulsum Qasim

Kulsum joins Prodigy as Chief Marketing Officer and is passionate about driving digital change within an educational environment. She is an experienced marketer with over 15 years of experience in brand & marketing strategy, media strategy, communications, and operations. She specializes in building and leading high performance teams within the education, consumer packaged goods and digital marketing industries.

Before joining Prodigy Education, Kulsum held several senior leadership roles at Pearson Education. Her most recent role was Global Vice President of Brand Strategy & Marketing. Kulsum spent 7 years at Pearson, primarily in the online learning growth sector where she led an internal agency of marketers responsible for driving double digit online enrollment and revenue growth for Tier 1 Higher Education Institutions across North America.

Her passion for marketing started at a very early age and she followed it throughout her learning journey by attaining her B.B.A with a specialist in marketing from the University of Toronto, as well as an M.B.A. with a double concentration in marketing and innovation & entrepreneurship from Northeastern University in Boston with Beta Gamma Sigma distinction.

About John Stetic

John is Prodigy's Chief Product Officer and joined the company in June 2020. As a results-driven, analytical product expert, he puts a heavy emphasis on finding creative solutions to market problems. John has always had a passion for finding new ways to support users through innovative products. He fosters a similar attitude among team members, where measured risk-taking is encouraged and success is celebrated.

John has worked in a number of leadership roles in product management for more than 15 years, in which he led the creation of new products to help organizations connect strategy with execution. In his most recent role as SVP Innovation at ServiceMax, which he joined through the acquisition of Zinc where John was the CPO, John assumed ownership of the emerging product development and technology partnerships, to help drive innovation in field service execution. Prior to this, John led the Product, Engineering and Design group for the Oracle Marketing Cloud (which he joined through the Eloqua acquisition), growing the business five-fold through acquisition and organic growth. John co-founded PlateSpin, and helped grow the business to $25 million in revenue while leading product management, technical support, professional services and solutions engineering, and a successful exit to Novel.

John moved his career in Engineering and product management forward with a B.Sc. in Engineering from Queen's University, along with executive education from Smith School of Business and Harvard Business School. He looks forward to contributing to Toronto's technology industry and creating amazing products that delight all of Prodigy's users.

About Jean-Luc Dery

Jean-Luc is Prodigy's Chief Technology Officer. Since joining the team in 2019, he has leveraged his extensive experience in all facets of software development including: business development; product management; and the introduction of new products. He has a proven ability to form high-performance teams and create new processes that transform businesses in continuously changing and competitive markets. Jean-Luc is an expert in Agile methodologies, which has been proven in his many leadership roles, where he has effectively implemented and scaled product development cycles to maximize business value.

His experience with world-class companies has taken him from the early days of the digital revolution that redefined the world of film and TV; to e-commerce innovations that continue to shape retail and POS markets; to the evolution of the finance industry through advances in fintech. In his most recent role, Jean-Luc worked as Chief Technology Officer at Thinking Capital, where he built and implemented an IT Strategy that paved the way for achieving growth in Canada's leading small-to-medium business lending solutions. He holds a B.Sc. in Physics from the Université de Montréal, a Bachelor of Engineering from École Polytechnique de Montréal, and a mini-MBA in Executive Development in Human Skills, Business Strategy, Marketing and Finance from McGill Executive Institute.

Jean-Luc specializes in scaling high-performance teams and strategic plans. He plans to bring his knowledge to the educational industry and work to transform the way students learn through technology. 

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SOURCE Prodigy Education