PM at a Language EdTech

Summary

My experience at Learnship, a language learning training company for businesses, as a Product Manager managing the main platform that handled teachers, students, classes and schedules.

Work

I left Learnship as it was sold to GoFluent amid serious financial hardship in late 2025.

While there, I increased class attendance overall by about 15% — my main achievement. Students were taking their language learning courses 15% faster — for us, more attendance was the same as faster completion. However, this could not reverse the lack of vision for the company, the poor investments over the past 10 years, and the continuously declining revenue.

The environment was very difficult — it was run mostly by operational people, huge technical debt. Past product managers had accepted every suggestion, with no data to support them, no evidence, and no vision for what the several products and platforms could look like. Of course, as I stepped in, I had to do the hard job of pushing back on people's silly ideas — one VP wanted to send 10 emails in sequence every week until the student returned, when students were already complaining we sent too many emails. At the expense, maybe, of my own sanity and likability amongst peers — they weren't very used to PMs challenging their requests.

Gero Keller, the CTPO, was my manager at the time. He was absolutely dedicated to building great product, reliable systems, and helping the company turn around. It was great working with him — long hours discussing our vision on how we could make language learning for company employees more enjoyable and actually successful.