With the demand on product managers from tops-down company initiatives, it’s easy to let bottoms-up, experimental ideas fall by the wayside or never even make it into planning ceremonies.
But sometimes, small sparks from within the team can generate clever solutions to old problems — or at the very least, teach us something new.
In a team brainstorm where we workshopped ideas for new growth vectors, this idea of creating a Pomodoro Timer was born. The motivation was relatively simple: time management can feel challening when you’re learning something new — but with the right tools, it gets easier and more rewarding.
The opportunity space
Students have made one thing very clear: focus is a commodity with an increasingly high price. Between phones that never stop buzzing, group chats that somehow always light up during study time, and the ever-present pressure to be doing all the things, it’s like the universe is running a full-time distraction service made to drive up the price of focus.
A fall 2024 survey of +1,000 college students found that 52% have trouble concentrating on tasks several times a week or more. In the same study, 51% of students reported feeing overwhelming stress or anxiety on a weekly basis, showing that over half of college students regularly struggle to focus.1
There are a lot of areas where our product serves students well today, like memorization, practice problems, and classroom games, but as we workshopped our ideas we stumbled into a shared truth — we had left the herculean challenge of focus to students.
And in some cases, instead of pushing back distractions with our product, we were introducing our own set of demands.
Our solution
Could time management be a growth vector for Quizlet? Are there lightweight ways we might be able to release features that get us closer to answering that question? If so, where do we start and how long do we wait before calling it quits?
These were just a few of the questions we had while starting on this quest. And with some data1 to support that there was a there there, we began to cobble together a Pomodoro experience that we felt good about and along the way, we learned that there’s a lot more to interval timers than meets the eye.
Key takeaways
- We leveled up our ability to build and launch simple, impactful tools quickly. Building the Pomodoro Timer pushed the team into areas slightly adjacent to our core day-to-day work — rapid prototyping, lightweight user research, growth-focused product development. Even though it wasn’t part of the main quest roadmap, it sharpened our ability to ship a tool quickly, test demand with minimal friction, and work across design, engineering, and product in a tighter, faster loop.
- We came away with playbooks and intuition that will make future bets faster and smarter. Through the project, we developed lightweight internal frameworks — like how to validate side projects, how to track usage without overbuilding analytics, and how to balance polish vs. speed. These are now tools we can reuse not just for focus-related features, but for any future lightweight experimentation.
- It’s a portfolio piece for the team that reflects craftsmanship, agility, and creativity. The Pomodoro Timer is now a living artifact we can point to: A tangible example of our team's ability to spot a student need (focus support), spin up a solution quickly, and create something delightful, brand-aligned, and functional. It’s a standalone showcase that captures initiative, taste, and cross-functional collaboration — visible to internal stakeholders, and even externally if we choose.
- It expanded our internal network and created new champions for future side innovations. The side project opened doors to working with new groups across the company: lifecycle marketing teams who wanted to promote it, product teams who thought about using it in context, and even partnerships folks thinking about our broader Quizlet network. People we wouldn’t normally collaborate with became part of the project’s orbit.
- We gained credibility and recognition for being proactive builders, not just roadmap executors. Even though it was a small build, the timer got visibility across leadership and student communities — and it showed that small, student-centered ideas could have outsized brand and engagement impact. The project created a new narrative internally: that side projects can deliver real value, fast-ish.
Building the Pomodoro Timer wasn’t just about creating a focus tool — it was about leveling up our team’s skills, expanding our toolkit, building our creative portfolio, widening our network, and earning credibility for future bets.
Side quests aren’t distractions.
They’re how we build the muscles and artifacts that change what we think as possible for our teams.
