A self-initiated product management exercise: how would you grow daily-active users for a major consumer app in India, where roughly one-in-six of the platform's global users live but engagement lags significantly behind volume?
Mission Mode: short, career-relevant English missions (interview prep, workplace email, customer calls) targeted at the urban-intermediate-English career-motivated segment who want functional career fluency, not gamified streaks. A 60-day completion arc with three V1 missions and a clear V2 expansion path.
→ https://mission-mode-casestudy.vercel.app/mission_mode_prototype_embed.html
Six screens, keyboard-navigable, vanilla HTML/CSS/JS, iframe-safe.
Note: the prototype is built in the visual and mechanical idiom of a popular gamified language-learning app to demonstrate how the proposed feature would integrate with familiar mechanics (points, streaks, leagues). It's a self-directed PM exercise, not affiliated with or commissioned by any company.
- Segmentation: disaggregated "India" into ~5 user archetypes; identified urban-intermediate-English career-motivated users as the highest-leverage segment for a DAU-led intervention
- JTBD: the job is "feel competent in English at work," not "learn a language for fun," which implies missions, not lessons
- Mechanic design: short missions over long courses; bite-sized contextual practice over abstract grammar drills; deadline-paced rather than infinite
- Metrics: DAU/MAU lift, mission completion rate, day-7 / day-30 retention, willingness-to-pay signal as a V2 indicator
- V2 roadmap: mission library expansion (industry-specific, negotiation, conflict English), graduation flow to standard track, discovery surface
| File | What it is |
|---|---|
mission_mode_prototype.html |
Standalone 6-screen prototype with keyboard nav |
mission_mode_prototype_embed.html |
Iframe-safe variant for deck embeds |
extension_mockup.html |
Browser-extension entry-point mockup |
completion_*.html |
End-of-mission celebration screens |
prototype_screenshots/ |
Phone-frame Retina PNGs |
Vanilla HTML/CSS/JS. No build step, no framework. Renders in any browser and inside an iframe.
Akshey Walia · LinkedIn · aksheywalia.in
MIT