PROCESS CONSTRAINTS ON THE GROWTH OF EDTECH COMPANIES: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION THROUGH THE LENS OF BUSINESS PROCESS MATURITY

Polonikov Ilya Valerievich

In the context of expanding digital markets, online education has become one of the most dynamically growing sectors of the economy. However, the accelerated scaling of edtech companies is accompanied by increasing operational complexity and growing challenges in manageability. The purpose of this study is to identify process-related constraints on the growth of edtech companies based on the analysis of employee reviews and to interpret them within the framework of business process maturity. The empirical basis of the research consists of 3,406 critical employee reviews from the three largest edtech companies in the Russian market, ranked among the top three by revenue. The reviews were manually coded according to their dominant problem area and subsequently subjected to quantitative analysis. The results show that issues related to business processes account for 45.6% of all critical comments and significantly outweigh concerns regarding compensation and social benefits. These findings are interpreted as indicators of insufficient maturity of end-to-end business processes that limit the scalability of sales and the sustainability of company growth.

Keywords:edtech; organizational management systems; business processes; business process maturity; process scalability; management system resilience; business process management (BPM); BPMN