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I made the case for a game tweens would actually play.
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 was the staff product designer for Level Up, partnering with a product manager from strategy through scope and launch.
Setup & stakes
A game had to earn its place with banks
Greenlight is a family-finance app that banks offer their customers. Those partnerships are earned again every year, and a flat year can put one at risk. The company had wanted to teach kids about money directly, not just through a debit card. That became my first project as a staff designer, just as a competitor was starting to pull bank attention.
The call
Match it fast, or build the right thing
The first ask was to match Zogo and move fast. But our players were tweens. In two weeks of research, they made the mismatch obvious: gift cards were not enough reason to keep coming back. I came back arguing that they needed a game, not another financial quiz.
◆ The game
A world, not a worksheet
Level Up turned money lessons into a small world kids could make their own. They chose a topic, played through short scenarios and choices, then earned lives, energy, and coins. They could spend them on digital items and customize a piece of the game, making progress visible and worth coming back to. Each lesson fit a short ride home, not another homework assignment.
Process
The meeting where the features got cut
Before we designed screens, my product manager partner and I made the full problem visible: what kids needed at each age, what would make the game worth returning to, and every feature the team was considering. When launch scope had to shrink, we walked leadership through that map live. It showed what shipped, what might, and what would wait.
Wide before narrow
Results
It became Greenlight’s pitch to banks
Level Up gave Greenlight a form of financial literacy its bank partners did not already have: a game kids could actually play. Instead of another resource page or dated browser game, it put learning directly in kids’ hands, on the devices they already used.
Numbers from the program's 2021 to 2023 run.
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
Level Up worked well enough to take outside the app. We adapted the learning model into Greenlight for Classrooms: a teacher-facing product with a standards-mapped lesson library, videos, and discussion tools built for a room of students.
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.