Khan Academy · Product sense · Mid · 45 to 60 minutes

How should Khan Academy improve student motivation?

Khan Academy is a nonprofit online learning platform that offers free lessons and practice for students, teachers, and families. Answer this product management case and get it graded line by line against a weighted rubric.

Problem framing
Product sense
Prioritization
Experiment design
Stakeholder awareness

The situation

You are a PM on Khan Academy's learning experience team. The chief learning officer and a product leader have asked you for a recommendation on where the product should focus next to help students stay motivated while learning. This has become urgent because motivation affects whether students start, persist, and return, but schools and families are also wary of products that rely on shallow rewards or add another disconnected tool to an already crowded environment. Khan Academy wants to improve motivation in a way that supports real learning, not just short term activity spikes. At the same time, the team cannot take on every hard problem in education, and some causes of low motivation sit outside what a product can realistically influence. Assume the team can fund only one major motivation initiative in the next two quarters. You need to decide which motivation problem within the learning experience is most worth solving now, what kind of product direction to pursue, and how you would know if it is working for both students and educators.

What to produce

Write a 1 to 2 page product strategy memo.

Your answer must

Identify the primary user and the specific point in the learning journey where motivation breaks down.
Explain why this problem is important, tractable, partly within the product's control, and grounded in evidence or established learning science.
Present 2 to 3 product directions, compare their tradeoffs, and recommend one.
Describe how your recommendation would improve the learning experience itself, for example through clearer goals, better feedback, or more visible progress, or explain a different motivation mechanism.
Define success metrics, guardrails, and a first validation plan, including how you would watch for teacher burden or tool sprawl risks.

Constraints

The solution must fit into Khan Academy's core learning experience, not require a separate product or a new school system purchase process.
Do not rely primarily on cash rewards, prizes, or points for their own sake.
Keep teacher and administrator setup burden low.
Work within one major initiative over the next two quarters.

Format

Use sections for user and problem, options, recommendation, metrics, and risks.

How Khan Academy actually played it

Khan Academy explains why it treats motivation as part of the learning experience instead of a layer of points and prizes, citing its chief learning officer's test for which problems schools should prioritise. It points to tools such as Live Team Game as examples. A useful read on choosing a problem that is important, tractable and evidence-backed before building features.

Pick problems that are important, tractable, partly within the customer's control and backed by evidence.
Avoid bolting on gamification; design motivation into the core learning loop.
Clarity, feedback and visible progress shape motivation.
Be wary of tool sprawl and scattered pilots in your customers' environment.

Built from Student Motivation Is One of Education's Hardest Problems. Here's How We're Tackling It. by Aviv Weiss, Khan Academy.