DAU had plateaued for two straight months.

Flat daily use, in a product with two audiences.

Glorifire is where students practice; the Stakeholder platform is where faculty and stakeholders follow and guide them. Daily active use had been flat for two months.

A daily practice habit, not a notification habit.

The objective was higher DAU and better D7 and D14 retention through a sustainable daily practice loop, with less dependence on paid, notification-driven engagement. These were the objectives: only reported DAU and session-time changes are on record, and no retention or cost result is claimed.

I owned gamification end to end.

With full charge from the CEO, I identified the problem and the behaviours to reward, defined points, badges and streaks, made the product decisions, and drove development through live launch.

Teachers found early prototypes “too game-y”.

Faculty are part of this product, not only students. Any engagement mechanic had to motivate students without looking gimmicky to the teachers who had flagged the early prototypes.

Teacher feedback described early prototypes as “too game-y”, prompting a shift toward more academic, achievement-oriented progress cues: professional progress indicators, academic badges and skill-mastery indicators. This is qualitative feedback and a design decision; no measured improvement is attributed to the change.

One configurable loop, not isolated point mechanics.

The system is built around configurable behaviour-based actionable items: rewards attach to product actions, and the same mechanics reach students and faculty. It was designed as one behavioural loop rather than isolated point mechanics.

Action → reward → progression → recognition.

Each mechanic has a job. An actionable item earns points, streaks and badges; avatars and rank and level make progression visible; leaderboards and the Hall of Fame turn it into recognition.

Faculty see the behaviour, and are rewarded for keeping myPlan honest.

Faculty and stakeholders get analytics on learner activity and the same leaderboards. The mechanics reach them too: a system-generated myPlan is shown to faculty, who confirm it as correct or incorrect, and accurate feedback earns 100 points.

Engagement against teacher credibility.

More visible game mechanics can lift student engagement and cost teacher trust. In this product, faculty are both an audience and part of the loop, through analytics, leaderboards and myPlan verification, so their trust is part of engagement rather than a separate concern.

The proof here is the system, not a number.

Design the rules, not the rewards.

A reward is only as good as the behaviour it is tied to. Making actions configurable lets one system reinforce different behaviours for students and for faculty, and the myPlan reward shows the pattern: pay for the behaviour that keeps the product honest.

What I'd do differently: shared goals before solo streaks.

I would shift the emphasis from individual streaks toward collaborative squad and classroom goals. Individual leaderboards tend to reward students who are already ahead and can discourage the ones further behind, who are often the students the loop most needs to keep. This is a product reflection, not a measured finding.

What I would measure next