Transmission // Polaris Academy

Don't study product.Live it.

Step inside Polaris Academy — a free product management simulation where you practice real PM skills, 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. GUTKU, your AI mentor, watches how you think and coaches the gaps.
The city

Ten districts. Your first is open tonight.

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. GUTKU 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
Questions

Before you enroll.

Is Live as PM free?

Yes. All missions are free to play. Create an account (email or Google) so your XP, grades and progress follow you across devices.

How is this different from a product management course?

Courses teach product management by lecture; Live as PM is a simulation — you practice it. You walk into a company in crisis, read the dashboards, interview users, name the root cause and ship a fix. Your judgment gets graded, not your attendance.

What product management skills do you actually practice?

Metrics diagnosis and root-cause analysis, customer interviewing, hypothesis testing, prioritization and roadmap trade-offs, positioning and launch strategy, and growth loops — one district of Polaris Academy per skill.

Who is Live as PM for?

Aspiring product managers, career switchers preparing for PM and APM interviews, and early-career PMs who want to sharpen judgment on realistic scenarios before making the mistakes at work.

Do I need product experience to start?

No. Mission 01 assumes nothing — GUTKU, your mentor, coaches every decision. Missions unlock in sequence and build on each other.

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.

GUTKU — 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.

GUTKU — your mentor
MISSION GRADE