Bloomie Tutors: Making online tutoring less of a black box

Role

Product & Design Lead. Led strategy, research, UX, and delivery across a team of one product designer and five engineers, collaborating directly with the founder.

Problem

Parents paying for virtual tutoring felt disconnected from the process, often stating they didn’t know if their child was actually learning. Early experiments with admin tools were too enterprise-heavy and failed to address this core parental anxiety.

Solution overview

Session capture:

A bot joins Zoom or Google Meet to record and transcribe sessions, with full transcripts accessible to tutors.

Lesson contract:

Tutors define lesson objectives using AI-generated drafts or manual entry, allowing the system to verify if those specific goals were met during the session.

Parent view:

Parents receive weekly WhatsApp reports featuring coverage summaries and short visual reels of class moments, which significantly increased engagement over plain text.

Tutor view:

Tutors receive summaries highlighting pacing and missed content relative to the plan, serving as both a time-saving reporting tool and a self-reflection aid.

Safety & escalation:

Raw transcripts are restricted to internal teams and tutors, with serious issues flagged internally for coaching before potentially involving parents.

Key decisions

Pivoted from B2B:

Discontinued a school admin product after field visits revealed it would force a move into enterprise vending rather than solving user needs.

Channel optimization:

Chose a WhatsApp-first, weekly aggregated communication strategy to prevent parent notification fatigue.

Dual-narrative reporting:

Parent-facing and tutor-facing driven by the same underlying session data.

Human-in-the-loop AI:

Restricted AI auto-generation to ensure tutors maintained control and report accuracy.

Outcomes

• Used by over 20 tutors across Nigeria, the UK, and Canada.
• Parent report view rates jumped from 54% to 81% after shifting to video reels.
• Reduced the average time spent reading a report from 2 minutes to 14 seconds.
• Established the framework that evolved into the roadmap logic for Bloomie v2.