Growth Mindset Behavioral Initiative
Brainly — Product Manager
As part of the “Genius Lives in Everyone” strategic program, Brainly aimed to shift student behavior from passive homework help seekers to active, curious learners.
Students increasingly perceived asking questions as a sign of weakness, leading to lower engagement and reduced educational impact.
The opportunity was to redesign product experiences to reinforce question-asking as a positive, intelligence-driven behavior, ultimately boosting platform engagement and retention.
- Led the design of behavioral frameworks encouraging curiosity and learning progress.
- Collaborated with design, engineering, and data teams to integrate motivational feedback loops within the platform.
- Shaped product narratives and microcopy to reframe question-asking as a success indicator.
- Developed a roadmap for new engagement features aligned with growth mindset principles.
- Conducted user interviews and surveys to validate psychological framing effectiveness.
- Increased daily active engagement metrics post-implementation in targeted markets.
- Improved question-asking rates among first-time and returning users.
- Integrated growth mindset messaging into onboarding and key UX touchpoints, sustaining long-term user habit formation.
- Contributed to broader platform repositioning toward learning companionship, beyond homework support.
Gamification System Redesign for User Engagement
Brainly — Product Manager
Brainly’s original gamification system heavily rewarded only answering questions, encouraging quantity over learning depth and discouraging broader platform engagement.
The platform’s legacy gamification incentivized high-volume answerers but failed to reward genuine learning behaviors like asking questions, sustained studying, or topic mastery.
The opportunity was to fundamentally reframe gamification to support deeper user engagement, sustained retention, and meaningful learning progress, aligned with Brainly’s evolving educational mission.
- Audited the existing gamification system and identified key behavioral gaps undermining platform engagement and learning depth.
- Developed a strategic roadmap shifting focus from simple activity counting to learning journey reinforcement (personalized paths, progress streaks, topic-specific achievements).
- Proposed feature designs including dynamic daily engagement streaks, subject-based statistics, and adaptive rewards based on learning consistency, not volume alone.
- Worked with UX/UI teams to integrate motivational triggers and behavioral nudges into the core platform experience.
- Aligned stakeholders from product, education, and executive teams around the new vision for gamification evolution.
- Approved strategic shift of Brainly’s gamification system toward learning-oriented user rewards.
- Integrated new behavioral principles into future feature planning, refocusing product growth around active learners rather than passive traffic.
- Set the foundation for sustainable engagement strategies beyond transactional usage.
Braze Integration and Cross-Platform Engagement Strategy
Brainly — Product Owner
Brainly needed a robust engagement automation platform to support scalable user communication across push notifications, in-app messaging, and email — all localized and behavior-triggered across platforms.
The engagement stack was outdated, non-personalized, and inefficient to scale across Brainly’s 350M+ user base.
The opportunity was to integrate Braze and establish a modern, fully owned user engagement pipeline — covering push notifications, in-app messaging, and lifecycle automation with high segmentation precision.
- Led vendor research, evaluation, and contract negotiation, aligning stakeholders across Product, Marketing, and Legal.
- PMed the full integration across Android, iOS, and Web, managing cross-functional dependencies (backend, localization, frontend, analytics).
- Designed scalable user journeys for push and in-app, mapped to behavioral triggers across the user lifecycle (onboarding, activation, re-engagement, upsell).
- Post-integration, assumed full ownership of the Braze channel: campaign strategy, message design, testing, and performance optimization.
- Implemented A/B and multivariate testing for timing, messaging tone, and feature prompts.
- Trained internal teams on Braze usage, permissions, segmentation logic, and lifecycle program structure.
- Completed Braze integration across all platforms under time and scope constraints.
- Decreased campaign creation time by over 80%, from multi-week engineering cycles to self-service execution.
- Boosted push and in-app engagement metrics through highly targeted journeys tied to user behavior.
- Enabled market- and language-specific personalization at scale.
- Maintained full product-side ownership of the channel post-launch, aligning messaging strategy with product and monetization goals.
Strategic Vision for a Personalized, AI-Driven Learning Experience
Brainly — Marketing Strategist
Brainly needed to evolve from a high-traffic homework Q&A platform into a more engaging, indispensable learning companion.
This self-initiated vision work aimed to define what that transformation could look like through a structured, personalized, and AI-augmented study experience.
Despite its scale, Brainly’s user experience was transactional — users came for one-off answers rather than long-term study support.
The opportunity was to design a product direction that shifted from isolated queries to structured, session-based learning journeys, aligning with user behavior, retention, and educational value.
- Conducted research to map user pain points and emotional friction in the current experience.
- Analyzed competitor platforms and user motivations to uncover opportunities for differentiation.
- Designed a modular product framework centered on guided “study sessions” combining AI-generated support, user goals, and progress tracking.
- Proposed features such as dynamic content personalization, dual-model answer comparison, citation generation, paraphrasing tools, and learning analytics dashboards.
- Integrated AI into user workflows not as a gimmick, but as a tool for confidence-building, clarity, and reduced cognitive load.
- Created a phased rollout roadmap, including MVP scoping, adoption strategies, and UX principles for long-term engagement.
- Delivered a complete strategic blueprint for platform evolution, presented to internal stakeholders.
- Elevated internal discussion around long-term product direction, AI integration, and session-based learning value.
- Positioned the platform to explore deeper engagement models beyond reactive Q&A loops.
Student Experience Research and Pain Point Mapping
Brainly — Product Manager
As Brainly matured, it needed a deeper understanding of its student users’ emotional journey — beyond surface-level metrics — to inform more engaging, trust-building, and learning-focused product strategies.
Product teams lacked a clear map of how students experienced the platform emotionally and cognitively.
This created misalignment between feature delivery and actual user needs — especially in moments of frustration, uncertainty, or disengagement.
The opportunity was to synthesize a comprehensive student experience map to guide strategic priorities and product narratives.
- Designed and executed a mixed-method research initiative combining in-depth interviews, guided user testing, behavioral surveys, Hotjar recordings, and session replays.
- Analyzed user behavior across different journey stages — first contact, repeated use, disengagement, frustration, churn — to identify key inflection points.
- Led synthesis workshops with Product, Design, and Growth teams to align findings to platform decisions.
- Produced a visualized journey map connecting emotional states, behavioral patterns, and product interactions.
- Framed opportunity areas for feature ideation, UX adjustments, and AI augmentation grounded in real user struggles.
- Delivered actionable research assets used in multiple product and marketing team roadmaps.
- Revealed blind spots in product assumptions, shifting roadmap priorities toward learning support and frustration mitigation.
- Informed the development of multiple new features aimed at increasing trust, reducing confusion, and reinforcing engagement.
- Reframed internal product language around student motivation, cognitive load, and emotional states.
- Became the foundation for broader initiatives exploring learning sessions, motivational design, and AI-based support.
Redesign of the User Ban Experience for Fairness and Trust
Brainly — Product Manager
Brainly’s automated moderation and ban systems were functionally effective but often perceived by users as opaque, arbitrary, or unfair — undermining platform trust and increasing support ticket volume.
Users who were banned (often for violating content or behavior policies) received minimal context or guidance, resulting in confusion, frustration, and unnecessary churn.
The opportunity was to redesign the entire ban experience — from messaging to appeals — to increase clarity, reduce repeat violations, and preserve user trust even during enforcement.
- Audited the existing ban triggers, messaging flow, and user-facing touchpoints across platforms.
- Proposed and implemented a tiered penalty system with escalating consequences tied to user behavior history.
- Designed new UX patterns including clear messaging on cause, ban duration, and user recourse options.
- Integrated the system with Zendesk to generate automatic tickets for review, reducing response latency and support overhead.
- Added educational content and community guideline links to all ban-related communications.
- Aligned enforcement flows with user sentiment data and legal/privacy guidelines.
- Reduced repeat ban rates through clearer warnings and educational interventions.
- Improved user perception of fairness in platform enforcement — confirmed via support feedback and user interviews.
- Lowered support team workload by automating ban-related ticketing and triage.
- Strengthened Brainly’s moderation framework without alienating borderline users.
Personalized Year-End Learning Summaries for Engagement and Retention
Brainly — Product Owner
To boost engagement and reinforce Brainly’s value as a learning companion, the team developed a year-end feature that celebrated user progress and encouraged reflection and return use.
Many users viewed Brainly as a transactional tool, unaware of their cumulative learning activity.
This created an opportunity to showcase individual progress through a personalized, data-driven experience — increasing platform affinity and reactivating lapsed users.
- Designed the end-to-end experience: tracked user learning behavior, surfaced key milestones, and delivered visually engaging summaries.
- Aligned product, design, data, and engineering teams to implement logic, backend aggregation, and frontend display across Web, Android, and iOS.
- Defined event mapping and data translation from raw user activity into meaningful, emotionally resonant metrics.
- Integrated lifecycle messaging through Braze to trigger delivery via push and in-app messages.
- Managed localization and delivery timing to ensure maximum visibility during strategic year-end engagement periods.
- Launched personalized learning summaries across platforms on time for the end-of-year cycle.
- Increased engagement metrics, including session duration and reactivation among dormant users.
- Strengthened user perception of Brainly as a long-term learning tool, not just a homework utility.
- Created a reusable framework for future lifecycle campaigns and user milestone messaging.