💼 Hiring Quest – Product Manager @ Career-180
Challenge-based hiring quest with structured evaluation and real project outcomes.
Top performers get hired with a paid contract and the opportunity to work on real-world projects.
👋 We are Career 180, a comprehensive and interactive Career Knowledge Network where all career-related services are centralized in one place.
We’re hiring a Mid-Level Product Manager (3–4 years of experience) to tackle a challenge at the intersection of EdTech, career development, and skills-based learning: turning course completion into real-world capabilities.
🕓 Start Date: Immediate
🌍 Location: Hybrid (zamalek – 2 days onsite)
💰 Salary: EGP 55K –60K
🛠️ How the Hiring Quest Works
Register for the quest
Receive full instructions via email after registration closes
Submit your solution before the deadline
Top candidates will be invited to a technical review session
One candidate will be hired — others may be considered for freelance or future roles
🔍 Who We’re Looking For
✅ 3–4 years of product management experience
✅ Strong product discovery skills — able to identify the real problem before jumping to solutions.
✅ Ability to make clear product decisions, balance stakeholder priorities, and explain trade-offs.
✅ Experience with EdTech, SaaS, LMS, MOOCs, career development, or skills-based platforms is a plus.
✅ Comfortable using AI tools to prototype ideas, explore solutions, and turn concepts into tangible product experiences.
✅ Data-driven mindset — able to conduct research, analyze product metrics, validate assumptions, and iterate based on evidence.
✅ Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain complex ideas clearly and concisely.
🧩 The Challenge — "The Completion Trust Problem"
The Story
Learners finish courses and get certificates, but completed is not the same as competent. Completion based on watching videos is easy to game: skip ahead, leave a tab open, click through a quiz. As the platform grows and works with employers, corporate training buyers, and hiring channels, this becomes a trust problem. A partner asks, reasonably:
"If someone shows us a certificate, does that actually mean anything?"
Three internal stakeholders care about the answer, and they want different things:
Stakeholder
Wants
Why
Content & Instructors
Completion stays low-friction
Instructor payouts and rankings are tied to completion rate; mandatory assessments would tank it
Employer Partnerships
Certificates that are concrete and defensible
A corporate buyer has already asked how completions are verified
Growth & Marketing
The "certified learners" number keeps climbing
It's a headline metric in every pitch; a stricter bar shrinks it
Nobody is being unreasonable. Somebody still has to decide what a certificate should actually mean. You're that somebody.
what You Need to Solve
Design and prototype a way for a partner (employer or hiring channel) to check a certificate and understand how much to trust it, such that:
The trust signal is based on evidence, not just a completed-course flag.
It works across a catalog with uneven assessment depth: some courses have no assessment, some have an auto-graded quiz, a few have a proctored or project-based exam. You can't redesign every course.
It has a position on certificates already issued under the old, looser standard.
It's an MVP that a small team (about 2 backend + 1 frontend engineer) could ship in one quarter.
Real-World Conditions
Thousands of courses of varying age and quality
Roughly a third of learners come through corporate accounts where an employer enrolls staff in bulk; their engagement is lower and harder to separate from genuine effort
Instructor contracts often tie payout to completion rate, so you can't unilaterally redefine "complete" everywhere
Certificates have no expiry or versioning today; if a course is revised later, old certificates have no defined relationship to the new standard
Legal requires a defensible methodology behind any "verified" claim
The brief gives no exact numbers. Where your design depends on one, state your assumption and say how you'd check it.
We left some rules unspecified — on purpose
We're not telling you:
What separates a trustworthy completion from an ordinary one, or whether to use tiers at all
How to treat courses with no assessment
What happens to old certificates: grandfather, re-evaluate, downgrade, or something else
How to weigh instructor incentives against partner trust
Whether corporate learners are treated differently
Where the MVP cutline sits
Make a reasonable decision, document it, and move forward. Please don't contact us for clarification. How you handle ambiguity is part of what we're evaluating. (Questions about logistics or format are welcome until the registration deadline.)
📦 What to Hand In
D1. Decision Memo
Limit: Maximum 4 pages
Must include:
Your trust model and how it handles courses with no assessment.
Your position on certificates already issued.
Your decision on the conflict between Content, Partnerships, and Growth, including who bears the cost and roughly how much.
Your MVP scope for one quarter, with 2 backend engineers and 1 frontend engineer.
Each key claim labeled as either backed by the brief or an assumption.
D2. MVP PRD
Limit: Maximum 5 pages
Must be written so engineering can start without a meeting. Include:
Certificate states and transition rules.
Required data changes.
Migration of existing certificates.
Acceptance criteria for each MVP item.
D3. Discovery and Validation Plan
Limit: Maximum 2 pages
Include:
Your three riskiest assumptions.
Who you would talk to.
What results would make you change your design.
D4. Working Prototype
Limit: A link or a screen recording of 3 minutes or less
Build a certificate verification experience that allows a partner to:
Enter a certificate ID.
See the verification outcome and the evidence behind it.
Requirements:
Use 20–30 sample records you create.
Cover courses with no assessment, auto-graded quizzes, and proctored or project-based exams.
Include corporate and self-directed learners.
Include a course revised after certificates were issued.
Submit the sample data with the prototype.
Any tool is acceptable; production code is not required.
D5. Three Diagrams
Limit: 1 page each
Create the following diagrams:
Trust Model: Inputs, rules, and certificate outcomes for each path.
Certificate Lifecycle: Each state and the event that moves a certificate between states.
Partner Verification Flow: Every step from receiving a certificate to accepting or disputing it.
D6. Metrics Table
Limit: Maximum 1 page
Include:
One north star metric.
2–4 guardrail metrics.
At least one metric that reveals whether trustworthy completions are failing in practice.
The threshold that would trigger a change to the model.
D7. Edge Case and Policy Register
Limit: 5–8 rows
For each case, describe the scenario and your proposed handling.
Must include:
A course with no assessment.
A course revised after certificates were issued.
At least 3 additional edge cases of your own.
D8. AI Usage Note
Limit: Maximum half a page
Explain:
Where AI helped you.
One AI suggestion you rejected and why.
D9. Unasked Question
Limit: Maximum half a page
Identify one risk, question, or opportunity not raised in the brief, explain why it matters, and describe the first action you would take.
D10. Working Log
Limit: Maximum 1 page
Document each work session, including:
Date.
Start and end times.
What you worked on.
What you cut and why.
Senior Bonus (Optional and not scored)
Six months after launch, a major corporate partner says several people they promoted based on "trusted" certificates underperformed, and they're threatening to pause the partnership. Be ready to discuss how you'd tell whether this is a flaw in the trust model, a data problem, or a mismatch in partner expectations, and what you'd change.
🤖 AI Usage Policy
AI tools are fully allowed and encouraged: for research, drafting, and especially for building your prototype. We're not evaluating whether you used AI. We're evaluating whether the judgment is yours. In the live review, expect to explain why you made your key decisions and where you overrode AI.
🧰 Tech Stack
None required. This is a product role, so use whatever lets you build and test fastest (AI app builders, Figma, no-code tools, spreadsheets, or simple code). You should be comfortable with a typical LMS/EdTech setup: course catalog, assessments, certificate issuance, corporate accounts, basic analytics.
📝 What You Should Submit
One link (anyone-with-link view, English) containing:
Problem & Solution Brief
Link to the working prototype, plus the sample data
Validation & Iteration Note
Demo video link
You keep the rights to your work, and Career-180 won't use it commercially.
📊 Evaluation Criteria
1. Strategy and Decision Quality — 25%
2. Prioritization and MVP Scoping — 20%
3. Discovery and Assumption Handling — 15%
4. Metrics and Analytics — 15%
5. Requirements Clarity (PRD, Diagrams, Prototype) — 15%
6. Edge Cases and Risk — 10%
📩 After Submission
Top candidates will be invited to a live product review session
Final hiring decision will be made within 5-10 business days after the review
