Transmission // Polaris Academy

Don't study product.Live it.

Step inside Polaris Academy — a living city where you become a product manager — mission by mission, decision by decision. Real crises. Real trade-offs. Real consequences.

Explore the city
Philosophy

This is not a course. It's a career, compressed.

No lectures. You get a company in crisis and a decision to make.
No multiple-choice trivia. You read dashboards, interview customers, and defend trade-offs.
No passive progress bars. XP is earned by judgment. Bad calls cost you — and teach you.
No generic feedback. VEGA, your AI mentor, watches how you think and coaches the gaps.
The city

Ten districts. Your first is open tonight.

IN DESIGN 🚀 Launch Harbor Ship a product to a market that doesn't know it wants it yet.
IN DESIGN 🌌 Growth Galaxy Loops, funnels, and experiments — turn a product into a compounding machine.
IN DESIGN 🧪 Experiment Labs A/B tests that don't lie to you. Design experiments, dodge false positives, kill your darlings with data.
IN DESIGN 💰 Monetization Mile Pricing, packaging, and the nerve to charge what your product is worth.
IN DESIGN 🎨 Design Quarter Partner with design on a product people feel — without writing pixel specs.
IN DESIGN ⚖️ Ethics Commons Dark patterns convert. Decide what you'll never ship — and learn to defend it.
FINAL ASCENT 🏛️ Leadership Tower The final ascent: stakeholders, executives, and the art of saying no.
How a mission works

Brief. Investigate. Ship.

01 / BRIEF

Walk into a crisis

A company, a broken metric, a deadline. VEGA hands you the mission — the rest is on you.

02 / INVESTIGATE

Follow the evidence

Read live dashboards, question the team, interview customers. Every insight you log becomes ammunition.

03 / SHIP

Make the call

Diagnose the root cause, choose a fix, pick the metric that proves it — then watch the city react.

XP for judgment, not attendance achievements RANKS Recruit → CPO S–C mission grades EVIDENCE log everything
Mission 01 // Analytics City

Your first crisis is waiting.

Wavely lost 17 points of retention in three weeks. Somewhere in the data is the reason. Go find it.

M-01 // THE RETENTION CLIFF
XP0
LV 1 · RECRUIT
Phase 01 // Briefing

Welcome to Analytics City.

VEGA — your mentor

Mission objective

Find the root cause of Wavely's retention collapse and ship a fix — before Friday's board meeting. Log at least 3 pieces of evidence before you accuse anything.

Phase 02 // Investigation

The metrics room

Something in here explains the cliff. Inspect the tiles that look suspicious — each one you read is logged to your evidence file.

Wavely · D7 retention · last 8 weeks

0 / 3 insights logged
Phase 03 // The team

Wavely HQ, 41st floor

Dashboards tell you what happened. People tell you why. Talk to all three before moving on — and mind what you say to the CEO.

0 / 3 conversations
Phase 04 // Customer interviews

Talk to a real user

You've got 3 questions with Ria — she installed Wavely last week and hasn't opened it since. Choose carefully: open, behavioral questions get truth. Leading questions get politeness.

Ria · new userHey! Sure, I've got a few minutes. What did you want to ask?
3 questions remaining
Phase 05 // Diagnosis

Name the root cause

The board meeting is tomorrow. Review your evidence file, then commit to a diagnosis. A wrong call here costs credibility — and XP.

Phase 06 // Ship the fix

What do we build?

You've named the disease. Now prescribe the treatment — and choose the one metric that will prove you right or wrong.

Phase 07 // Deploying

Shipping v2.5…

Two weeks later

The city is watching the numbers.

Wavely · D7 retention · post-launch

Phase 08 // Debrief

Mission complete.

VEGA — your mentor
MISSION GRADE