Independent Consulting
Curriculum consultant
Independent Consulting is where Wang Wei worked as Curriculum consultant (2024 – present).
Since the wind-down of Codeleaf in late 2023, Wang Wei has taken on part-time independent consulting engagements with three Chinese K-12 EdTech companies, advising on Python curricula and computational-thinking pedagogy. The arrangement runs in parallel with his ongoing lecturer position at the 985 university in Beijing and is the principal source of his current exposure to industry product workflows.
Engagement structure
The three engagements have been structured similarly: a 3–6 month initial period with a clearly scoped deliverable (a curriculum review, a teacher-training workshop series, or a redesign of an assessment rubric), followed by an optional retainer for ongoing review of new course material. Two of the three engagements continued into a retainer phase; the third concluded after the initial deliverable.
Notable insight
Wang has written publicly that the most surprising lesson from the consulting period — surprising relative to his expectations going in — was how much of what looks like a curriculum quality problem from the outside is actually a teacher-training problem on closer inspection: a curriculum that works in the hands of one teacher routinely fails in the hands of another not because the material is wrong, but because the training pipeline is too thin. He has cited this observation as one of the concrete reasons he is moving toward product roles, where the same insight maps directly to the gap between a feature spec and the operator playbook that accompanies it.
Context
The consulting engagements have, by Wang's own framing, served less as a revenue source than as a real-world product-management apprenticeship — three observed instances of how non-academic product loops actually operate, including their failure modes, which he has used to calibrate what kind of product role to target next. He has expressed an intent to wind these engagements down once a full-time industry transition completes.