Koya
"Learn today. Unlock what's next."
Learners tracking multiple courses and multi-course paths had no single home screen, and career or financial opportunities worth pursuing (jobs, loans) lived somewhere else entirely, disconnected from the learning.
What it looked like.
How to read this case study: what I owned, what shipped and the verified outcome (My Role, What Shipped and Impact below) are factual. The surrounding strategy, vision, alternatives and metrics framework are interview-ready framing built on those facts, how I'd talk through the product thinking, not a claim that every metric or GTM motion was formally run at the time.
Challenges & baseline.
Challenges
Course platforms usually stop at "here's your progress", they don't connect what someone is learning to what they could do next, a job, a loan, an opportunity worth acting on. Skills-development thinking increasingly frames education around connecting learning to workforce and employment outcomes, not learning progress in isolation.
Baseline
Course tracking and opportunity discovery before this: two separate, disconnected experiences with no shared home screen.
What the customer actually needed.
Insight
A learner rarely wakes up wanting "course completion", they want a job, a promotion, more income, funding, a qualification, career mobility. Learning progress is an intermediate outcome, not the outcome itself, which reframes the product from another LMS into an outcome layer wrapped around learning: learning leads to progress, progress leads to opportunity, opportunity leads to action, action leads to a real result.
Job to be done
When I'm learning toward a goal, help me see both how far I've progressed and what real opportunity, job or funding, that progress could unlock, in one place.
Vision, mission & the bets we made.
Every learning journey visibly leads somewhere, not just a completed-lessons counter.
Connect what people are learning with the opportunities that learning can unlock.
Make resuming a course one tap from the home screen; give paths (multi-course bundles) their own progress view distinct from single courses; surface saved job and loan opportunities without leaving the app.
Ship a home screen with continue-from-last-time and quick access to Courses, Paths, Q&A's, Webinars; ship separate In Progress/Completed tracking for both courses and paths; ship a saved-opportunities feed with a clear removal flow.
Strategic bets
- Put continue-from-last-time above everything else on the home screen, resuming is the highest-frequency action
- Treat Paths as a distinct entity from Courses, not just a folder, since a path bundles multiple courses toward one outcome
- Surface real opportunities (jobs, loans) inside the learning app instead of assuming learners will go find them elsewhere
Alternatives considered
The safer scope was to ship a better LMS, richer course tracking, nicer progress bars, no opportunity layer. That's a smaller, faster build, but it leaves the actual customer motivation unaddressed. The direction taken kept learning from the home screen but treated Paths as a distinct entity from Courses (a path bundles multiple courses toward one outcome) and surfaced real jobs and loans inside the app itself, rather than assuming learners would go find them somewhere else.
What I owned.
Product Manager, owned the learning home experience and the saved-opportunities feed connecting course progress to real jobs and loans.
What shipped.
Learners can resume a course in one tap, track a multi-course path separately from individual courses, and remove a saved path with a clear confirm step so nothing disappears by accident.
How it got built.
Audited what learners actually did most often, resuming a lesson, and put it first on the home screen
Separated course progress (lessons completed) from path progress (courses completed) since they're different units
Built the saved-opportunities feed and sourced real partner listings (jobs, loans)
Added a confirm-before-remove step for paths so progress isn't lost by a misclick
How this reaches customers.
The stronger distribution model is B2B2C rather than pure B2C paid acquisition: partner with training providers, universities, bootcamps, employers, job platforms, lenders and career organisations, and let the acquisition promise be "don't just finish a course, see what it can unlock" rather than competing purely on course content.
North star metric.
Supporting metrics
- Recommended North Star going forward: weekly learners who both progress in learning and take an opportunity action, not daily-active-users alone
- Course-resume rate and path completion rate
- Opportunity views, saves and applications
- D30 retention
Guardrails
- Accidental path removal rate (why the confirm-before-remove step exists)
- Opportunity listing relevance/quality
The verified bottom line.
Made "what's next" a visible part of learning, not a separate search, resuming a course, tracking a path, and seeing a real job or loan worth pursuing all live on the same home screen.
What I'd do differently.
Progress tracking on its own doesn't answer "so what". Learners didn't just want to see lessons completed, they wanted it to lead somewhere. Putting real job and loan listings next to course progress, in the same screen, is what turned a tracking app into something worth opening daily instead of only when a course was due.
More proof, more products.
See every product shipped and business built.