Inside atama plus: How a PO Builds Products Students Love

Hayashida Tomoki, Product Owner at atama plus, explains how a knowledge-graph-powered AI tutor is built and prioritized to create genuine student enthusiasm.

• atama plus embeds a subject knowledge graph inside the product to trace each student’s root misunderstanding, not just surface errors — a feature Hayashida says is rare among ICT education tools.
• Hayashida joined atama plus as its first UX designer when the company was roughly 10 people, 6 months post-founding; he became PO last year as the org scaled.
• As PO he owns 2 of 5 scrum teams, sets weekly backlog priorities, and co-designs quarterly OKRs — with OKRs split into one development-ready objective and one cross-functional discovery objective run in parallel.
• Customer site visits run 4-5 per month; before each visit Hayashida explicitly maps how the specific school’s student cohort diverges from the target persona to avoid skewed feedback.
• The hardest ongoing challenge is unpredictable interaction effects among content updates, CS process changes, and varied school deployment models — anchoring on non-negotiable product concepts is the main mitigation.
• Company culture is codified in a physical book produced over ~6 months; every new joiner does a group read-through with existing staff, and the book is quoted openly in all-hands meetings.
• For user empathy, Hayashida sat Japan’s national university entrance exam (Center Shiken) to experience atama plus as an actual student would.

2025-06-26 · Watch on YouTube