🚀 Product Management Case Study: Enlighten

Role: Product Manager | Timeline: Aug 2024 - Dec 2024
Outcome: Secured Seed Funding 🏆

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📖 Executive Summary

Enlighten is an AI-driven educational platform designed to help international graduate students bridge academic knowledge gaps.

As the Product Manager, I identified that international students (specifically in Finance) struggle with "assumed competencies" in the U.S. education system. I led the product strategy from user research to a successful pitch, securing seed funding to build "a Professor in your pocket."

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1. Understanding the User

We moved beyond assumptions by interviewing 50+ students, leading to our primary persona: "Mayur," a Finance Masters Student.

Customer Journey Map

We mapped Mayur's emotional journey as he transitioned from his undergraduate studies in India to a U.S. university. The map below highlights the "Gap of Anxiety" where existing solutions failed him.

Key Insights from Research:

• The Trigger: Mayur realizes he lacks foundational concepts that U.S. professors expect him to know ("Assumed Competencies").
• The Struggle (Phase 3): He wastes time juggling scattered resources (YouTube, Coursera, Textbooks), leading to frustration and burnout.
• The Opportunity: We identified the need for a Personalized Onboarding system that assesses gaps immediately and generates a tailored learning path.

2. Strategic Scope: The Ecosystem Bullseye

To define our MVP scope, we used a "Bullseye" mapping exercise. We placed the International Master's Student at the center and mapped their relationships to stakeholders and potential solutions.

Strategic Mapping:

• Center (Primary User): International Master's Student.
• Direct Stakeholders: Mentors & Professors (who create the "Accent Barrier" and "Assumed Competencies" problems).
• Outer Ring (Solutions): We brainstormed solutions for each friction point, selecting AI Tutoring and One-Stop Platform as our high-impact features to bridge the gap between students and professors.

3. The Pitch & Business Case

We synthesized our findings into a pitch deck, requesting $3,000 for customer validation and early prototyping.

📄 View the Full Pitch Deck (PDF)

(Click the link above to view the full strategy)

The Solution Proposed:

• AI-Generated Adaptive Syllabus: Instantly fills knowledge gaps based on the user's background.
• Real-Time Transcription: Solves the "Professor's Accent" pain point.
• Smart Progress Tracking: Moves the student from "Anxious" to "Confident."

🏆 4. The Result: Seed Funding Secured

The validation phase concluded with "Pitch Day," where we presented our business case to the Investment Committee.

The Winning Moment

We successfully secured the funding cheque to move Enlighten into the next phase of development.

The Victory	The Investment
The moment we won	Securing the capital

Presenting to the Investment Committee

🤝 5. Team & Culture

Building a product is a team sport. From late-night strategy sessions to celebratory lunches, our team cohesion was our biggest asset.

The Grind	The Celebration
Pre-pitch strategy dinner	Post-win team lunch

Team building activities during the discovery phase

6. Project Highlights & Methodology

Achievement	Key Metrics
Market Strategy	Targeted a 680K student market, capturing the 22% Finance niche with a B2C Freemium model vs. Chegg/Coursera.
User Validation	Conducted 50+ interviews, validating critical pain points for 94% of users to drive data-backed prioritization.
Product Leadership	Led the 0-1 lifecycle from ideation to MVP, managing cross-functional teams toward a Q1 2026 launch.
Tech Stack	GPT-3 (Flashcards/Quizzes) & GPT-Neo (Reinforcement Learning) for adaptive syllabus generation.
Funding Status	Secured 1st Position & Seed Funding from the Social Innovation Startup Lab (Sponsored by Intel).

7. Key Learnings & Retrospective

"A Product Manager defines the 'Why' and 'What' so the team can build the 'How'."

1. The Power of Niche Strategy

Initially, we considered targeting all international students. However, market analysis revealed that Engineering (66% of the market) was saturated with competitors like Chegg.

• The Pivot: We narrowed our focus to Finance & Management students (22% of the market).
• The Result: We identified a "Blue Ocean" with fewer competitors and higher "pain" regarding specific U.S. financial concepts (e.g., GAAP vs. IFRS).

2. Solving for "Anxiety," Not Just "Grades"

Our Customer Journey Map revealed that the user's primary emotion was anxiety and culture shock, not just academic confusion.

• Product Impact: We shifted the value proposition from "Better Grades" to "Academic Confidence."
• Feature Choice: This led us to prioritize the "Real-time Transcription" feature to solve the immediate stress of understanding accents in lectures, rather than just generating static quizzes.

3. Balancing AI Costs in a Freemium Model

Building with GPT-3 and GPT-Neo offers power, but also high inference costs.

• The Challenge: How to offer a "Freemium" model without bankrupting the startup on API costs?
• The Solution: We scoped the MVP to cache common syllabus structures (Static Generation) and reserve expensive Real-Time AI queries (Dynamic Generation) for the Premium tier.