Ops is the product

I led product for Babbel's B2B live-learning business — group classes run for enterprise clients. The growth conversation when I arrived was about catalogue: more courses, more levels, more content.

The data pointed somewhere else. The ceiling wasn't what we taught, it was what it cost to run a class. Setting up a single course took around two engineer-weeks, with its own JIRA ticket and engineer-run scripts. Courses could only go live in a monthly batch, behind a one-month lead rule and a cutoff on the 14th. Placements were uploaded by hand as CSVs, and teachers were assigned through Airtable forms and chased in Slack.

So I reframed what we were optimising for: not content depth, but experience reliability. That made operations the product.

This is the full life of a course, from prep through to wrap-up. How it ran on the left, what replaced it on the right.

The rebuild had one organising idea: make a course a real object in the platform, with a central event system underneath it, instead of a row in a sheet. Once that existed, setup dropped from engineer-weeks to hours with no dedicated engineering, teacher–course matching could be pre-mapped rather than negotiated per course, and the monthly batch disappeared — a course could start whenever the client needed it. The same matching cut teacher replacement mid-course from days to hours.

Five foundations went into the rebuild. Three shipped and were fully adopted. Two shipped but were still ramping when the business decision landed.

This was a contract role, so the team relationship was a mentoring one rather than a reporting one — I mentored three PMs across product domains.

Growth prioritisation ran as a partnership with the C-level.