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The brief was to match a tool already on the market. I made the case for something tweens would actually use, and it became Greenlight's edge with banks.
A mobile game that teaches tweens money in bite-sized lessons. I led design and strategy from the first workshop through launch, and the spin-off it became, Greenlight for Classrooms.
My role & the team
I led product design and strategy across Level Up and Greenlight for Classrooms.
Setup & stakes
Teaching kids about an IRA their parents don’t have
Greenlight sells a family-finance app to banks. Partnerships renew; they aren't granted. A flat year loses a partner. Teaching kids about money directly, not as a side effect of a debit card, was something Greenlight had wanted for years. It became my first project as a staff designer. Then a competitor called Zogo started pulling our banks' attention, and someday became fast.
The call
Match it fast, or build the right thing
The ask was to match Zogo and move fast. But Zogo's 2021 product was text on images with a gift-card carrot, an MVP for adults who'll take a quiz for a $5 card. Our players were tweens, who shrug at gift cards. Matching it would ship fast and age badly. So I spent two weeks asking tweens what they actually wanted, and came back arguing for a game.
◆ The game
A world, not a worksheet
Open Level Up and you get a bold, sticker-book brand, a home of topics (Spending, Investing, Earning, Saving), and bite-sized lessons you play through with lives, energy, and coins. A lesson is a few quick beats (a true/false, a scenario, a choice), short enough to finish on a bus ride.
◆ Rewards
Ownership was the reward
Kids spend what they earn in a shop of digital items, with quests to unlock them. They customize a corner of the game that's theirs.
Process
The meeting where the features got cut
Level Up didn't start in Figma. It started wide: workshops with the team, a research wall on how 6 to 12 year olds actually play, and a feature map the whole team could argue with. When scope had to shrink to hit the launch window, I walked the C-suite through that map live instead of building a deck. A deck invites a new feature on every slide. A map with everything already on it, color-coded into this release, maybe, and not this round, turns the meeting into decisions.
Wide before narrow
Results
It became Greenlight’s pitch to banks
Kids took to it, and the feedback from kids and parents has stayed strong. The numbers the PM tracked:
And sales kept naming Level Up as the thing that set Greenlight apart in the room, the demo that moved bank executives.
The receipts went public. US Bank's launch release named the game. Bank of Clarke ran video ads for it. And it now ships through Greenlight's 150+ partner banks and credit unions.
A year into the partnership, US Bank published its own numbers: more than half of its Greenlight users completed a Level Up lesson, and the ones who finished five or more created 45% more savings goals.
◆ What it became
Then it left the app entirely
The bet paid off well enough that leadership took the game beyond our app, into classrooms. Greenlight for Classrooms is the teacher-facing version: a lesson library mapped to state standards, videos, and discussion built for a room of students.
Before it reached a classroom, the curriculum went through rigor with financial-literacy educators. This is where my background did quiet work: I've written curriculum and did half a doctorate in educational leadership, so structuring how a lesson unpacks was a job I'd done before.
I almost shipped a competitor's app to the wrong kids because it was the fast answer. What saved it was two weeks of asking tweens what they actually wanted, and finding out it wasn't the money. I've trusted that detour ever since.