Passionate about the intersection of education and technology, a small team of grad school friends set out to understand how digital tools could improve student life. A thought project evolved into a platform tackling the career counselling crisis in Canadian high schools. This is the story of Ikigai.

Role: Head of Product Development

Problem

Leading the product discovery process, it was evident that the range of problems students faced was endless and diverse. Some issues were global, others regional, some related to the classroom and others were personal or systemic. We knew there was an opportunity to make an impact, but where and how became complex questions to answer. I suggested we focus on a core problem, one that could have positive rippling effects on the other issues. At this stage, market size-ups would be very unreliable estimates because we didn’t have particular variables. It was also important to me to choose an issue that deeply resonates with the team. There was one data point that we kept returning to:

3 out of 4 high school students in Toronto are anxious about their future career choices (TSDB 2011)

This anxiety was confirmed by multiple studies with secondary students across North America. The cross-section of mental health, employability and a global economy changing more rapidly than ever stood out to us. Personally, the stat wasn’t all that surprising. It was a salient fear my peers and I felt throughout high school and university. Many EdTechs focus on tutoring and developing STEM skills, but the team felt none of these really addressed the student’s anxiety. We decided to investigate further. What specifically were students anxious about when it came to careers? Was there a trigger? What supports were available? How was this affecting their post-secondary decisions? What was the role of parents in all of this?

Here are a few things I noted while running qualitative research:
- In Canada, there is 1 Guidance Counsellor for about every 396 students. In some areas, the ratio can be as astounding as 1:826. The US average is 1:424.
- 80% of parents are not satisfied with guidance counselors in schools
- 90% of a guidance counselor’s time is occupied by student needs unrelated to career planning
- There are currently over 12,000 careers to choose from, but high school students plan a future for the same 10 careers students chose over 20 years ago
- 40% of jobs of interest to 15-year-old North Americans are at risk of automation over the next 10-15 years

Finding Our Space

After sorting through all of the secondary research, I hypothesized that an accessible career guidance platform with some 1:1 coaching or something that enabled job shadowing would be well-received by the market. It seemed student anxiety and choices stemmed from a lack of exposure to the careers available, focus on jobs rather than adaptable skills, and little to no personalized guidance that helps students bridge inner conflict between interests and leading a successful life. I assumed the lack of professional help meant students relied on their families and friends to help them decide what to do after high school. The injection of bias, peer pressure, and conflicting ideas from a past generation may put a strain on a student’s own confidence and journey. To validate our hypothesis, we moved on to collect primary research.

The team launched detailed surveys in parallel with interviewing a broad range of students, parents, teachers, and education experts. Much of the data is confidential and proprietary. Still, from a high-level perspective, parents were stressed about their children’s future and felt ill-equipped to handle the heavy lifting of providing career guidance. Student anxiety was underscored by a high proportion of students moving onto postsecondary education feeling unassured about the path they’ve chosen. Further data from our primary research helped us define what a solution would need and what the propensity to spend on an online tool was. This helped us build out the first iteration of our buyer personas.

With competitor research complete, we moved onto the drawing board to figure out our product vision. We had no tech competitors providing a holistic solution to the problem. Narrow product mixes like a quiz to tell you what jobs you’d like were mostly ineffective. Other competitors like external agencies schools could hire to support students were costly to school boards and mostly supported a handful of nominated students. There are private career coaches too, but their prices make them only accessible to high-income families. With the marketing lead, I hammered out positioning. This was the blueprint for me and the technology lead as we figured out what the MVP would be and how we would scale it over the years. Being a start-up meant considerable constraints on resources that we had to be cognizant of. Our well-rounded team has a Finance person who put together a fantastic financial model for the next 5 years. Now we knew what we were working with and what our growth targets needed to be! After assessing risks, value, and feasibility we set up our product roadmap highlighting priorities and a backlog.

Without getting into the weeds, here are a few things we needed our product to do:
- Appeal to teens to reduce churn
- Features 1:1 coaching with a career expert
- Provides a way to explore different career options
- Includes parents in the journey while ensuring students had space to be authentic
- Is structured with an end-point (we want to instill decisiveness not more confusion. a loaded platform would make more $ in the short-term but would likely not produce results for users; difficult to prove credibility quantitatively and really bad for marketing)
- Was scalable and low-cost

Designing The Solution

After much deliberation and feedback sessions, we decided an AI-driven solution would help us best balance the operational demands of what we needed to accomplish with the costs and user expectations. Image 1.1 shows the basic user flow of the product (minus onboarding, payment, etc.)

What are micro-courses? 2-3 week long courses that will let students trial a job through projects, short classes, and mentorship. Giving exposure will help students understand exactly what a role entails and if it’s for them. To begin, Ikigai plans partner with an online course provider or open-source material to make this happen.

Matching students with micro-courses centered around a job relies on a machine learning model that would provide a score— the “ikigai score.” What is the score based on? Well, that’s a secret. It took a minute to figure out how we could prevent a cold start. As the student engages with courses, the model will consider several variables to increase score accuracy. In combination with the nuanced approach provided by the career coach and the student’s own reflections, Ikigai will create a postsecondary plan for students.

There’s a lot more we want Ikigai to do, and in our semi-bootstrapped model, know we can accomplish once we cross 100 users. Job shadowing, assistance with University Applications at the end of the path, and a lot more. That’s why we’ll be designing Ikigai with a tiered subscription model. Bundling different features will help stagger development, deployment resources, and help us reach different user groups. Ikigai should be accessible!

We look to educational apps like Duolingo for inspiration around making Ikigai sticky for teens. We don’t want parents forcing students to use this— qualitatively we guessed that retention would be low. A boring app = the curriculum won’t be completed = no results = still anxious student = poor performance + reviews of Ikigai = lost business. Gamification is a feature that tends to motivate users. But to get students through the door, a blend of marketing and an inviting user interface design will be necessary.

Brand Identity + User Interface Design

The name Ikigai stems from a Japanese concept about finding your purpose in life. Watch this Ted Talk from Tim Tamashiro to learn more about it! You may have seen Ikigai explained by this graphic of 4 intersecting circles. At the intersection of all 4 pieces lies Ikigai, where one will find meaning in life. For a product empowering students to find their meaningful path in life, Ikigai was a fitting name. Check out the Image 1.2 to see how I came up with our logo.

Please note: Ikigai is a title we are holding onto for now. No one on the team is Japanese and we want to ensure that utilizing the name is not appropriative before a public-launch.

Our research showed that teens actually enjoy colours (as an scene kid in my teens, this came as a surprise). We looked at other successful apps used by teens and knew we had to strike a balance between lively colours and childish. Going bold reflects our desire to embolden students.

As I’ve reiterated before, this is a journey. They layout should therefore reflect a journey. Utilizing a path-like layout will communicate this while clearly showing the steps to the end. Visual indicators of progress keep people going! Each block on the path will lead to the specific page with the activity needed to be completed. This would also minimize the amount of navigation tabs, keeping the UI visually clean. During prototype testing, we found that it also reduced the amount of time spent figuring out how to use the path. Onboarding could be shortened to virtually nothing.

Below are a handful of the screens I designed. We came to these after user testing several wireframes. You can view the full prototype on Figma here.

Risks

• Outside of the ML model and assessment, there is no IP here. Competitors could exploit this

• Pricing models are lower than competitors, but will likely be restricted still to the upper-middle class

• Profitability in year 1 + 2 will be unlikely due to high capital costs

• Managing security, server, etc. will require additional team members with domain expertise

• Bold design doesn’t lend itself well to seamless updates down the line