Intendent

Intendent is an AI planning platform for K-12 superintendents. Its promise, from intendent.com, is "Lead your district with intention." When we met its founder, Dr. Nathan Neely Parker, it was still an idea called EntryAI. Color/Math worked as Intendent's fractional product, design and engineering team.

What superintendents told us

Before we designed anything, we talked to seven people who do (or support) this job: sitting and former superintendents, a county superintendent at a state education department, a former principal who writes a research newsletter, and an executive assistant who has worked for superintendents. Once we had designs, we talked to three more.

Planning a district's future is change management, and it's political. Leaders told us they need tight control over who sees what.

And the AI should summarize what people said, never "put words in the superintendent's mouth." One superintendent was already double-checking AI-generated themes by running them through other AI tools, so we knew trust would make or break the product.

Where Intendent fits

Our competitive review found tools that each cover one piece of the job. Analytics tools visualize data, survey tools collect sentiment, and strategy platforms track plans, "but no one connects listening + public data → superintendent planning → stakeholder communication and execution."

We positioned Intendent as an opinionated workflow built on the Jentz & Wofford Entry Plan approach (learn, plan, communicate, then manage the work), backed by the research Intendent publishes. Public district data like NCES data, ESSA reports, board packets and budgets comes preloaded, with no student records and no system integrations to set up. We also recommended selling it as leadership development, so a superintendent can sign up on their own and bring the district along later.

Themes with receipts

The hardest problem was turning hundreds of survey responses and hours of visit recordings into themes a superintendent could trust. Standard retrieval (RAG) over the documents wasn't good enough at that volume, so we built our own theme extraction.

Every survey response and every visit is analyzed on its own, and each theme keeps the verbatim quote it came from. Themes roll up to any level (one survey, every visit, or the whole plan), and they're saved, so they don't shift every time someone logs in. When a leader writes a goal, Intendent shows the feedback that supports it. As our spec puts it, those quotes are "attached directly from the matched themes rather than re-generated by the AI, so they cannot be fabricated."

Privacy rules are built into the product. Survey takers choose their role first and students never give personal information, live recording is blocked where state law forbids it or minors are present, and sensitive features stay locked until the district signs a data privacy agreement.

Naming it Intendent

"EntryAI, while lovely, pigeonholes us into Entry Planning," we wrote in our brand recommendations. Nathan's vision was bigger than one plan: broader strategic planning, closing the achievement gap, and leadership development beyond the superintendent. We proposed Intendent. It's the core of the word superintendent, Intendent's buyer, and its root, "intend", suggests purpose and direction.

The brief for the design was "academic, trustworthy, and elegant." The wordmark borrows from dictionary typography, swapping the syllable dot for an AI sparkle, placed right after "intend" to draw the eye to the root word. The short mark, [i·e], is Latin for "that is", used to add clarity, which makes it a good icon for a sensemaking tool. Deep purple borrows from banks, whose deep blues, greens and purples read as stable and trustworthy, and magenta is saved for "AI magic".

The illustrations

We made a custom illustration suite by tracing 1800s engravings: an eye and an ear for visits, a hand and quill for surveys, books for documents, a brain for sensemaking, a target for goals, and a key, an ear and a globe for entry, learning and strategic plans. Each one is collaged over a purple wash and marked with the AI sparkle.

We chose engravings to say something about the brand: the more things change, the more they stay the same. Intendent uses new technology, but what matters in leadership is what has always mattered. Build connections with people. Listen. State goals clearly, so the community sees its own needs in them. Follow through, and keep the community posted on progress. Bringing an old art form into a digital product is a lot like bringing the best practices of leadership forward with new technology. The medium and the tools may change, but the intention doesn't.

Every feature has an illustration and a matching empty state, so a new account never opens to a blank screen. The same illustrations run through the app, intendent.com, and Intendent's LinkedIn and YouTube.

Getting to market

Around the product, we designed and wrote the marketing site (on Squarespace, so Nathan could edit it himself), built a price book, and designed proposals, contracts and invoicing inside the app. We ran 18 onboarding calls across three rounds of beta invites. For the first 15 or so beta users, we found and loaded their districts' public documents by hand (one to two hours per district), so nobody logged in to an empty account.

We also ran the CEO search: roughly 300 resumes, first-round interviews, and an interview process with a case study. It ended with Intendent hiring Dr. Ann Marie Chavez as its founding CEO.

Beta feedback changed the product directly: a Candidate plan type for people preparing for a superintendent role, role and district set per plan, public progress pages each district can brand as its own, uploads by URL, and rich text goals.

By the time our engagement wrapped up, Intendent was incorporated and led by a founding CEO. It had a name, a brand and a website, a price book and a plan for going to market, and a platform built on what superintendents told us. Or, as we put it in our wrap-up to the team: "Intendent is a real company now."