Laying the foundation for a platform that no one had built yet.

‍Role
UX Strategy Designer

Company
Rita ABC (Mondai)

Year
2025–Ongoing

TL;DR

The Challenge

‍
Mondai is an AI platform built to democratize the future of work — giving learners, builders, and entrepreneurs a personalized roadmap to find their fit without relying on traditional systems. Before any screen could be designed, someone had to answer a harder question: who else is trying to do this, and how are we different? That was my job.

My Output

‍Months-long competitive analysis across the EdTech and AI career space, strategic landscape mapping, and support in transitioning the product from mobile-first to a web-based MVP.

The Impact
‍

The research informed how Mondai positioned itself before launch. The competitive findings shaped product decisions at a foundational level — what features to prioritize, what gaps existed in the market, and where Mondai had a real opportunity to lead.

The Honest Truth
‍

This is strategy work done in the dark. The competitors are real, the findings are real, and almost none of it can be shown. Working under NDA taught me that the most valuable research is often invisible — you see it in the decisions it shapes, not in the slides it fills.

THE CONTEXT

A platform with a mission. A market with no clear map.

Mondai by Rita is built on a conviction: no one should be left out of the future of work. The platform's mission is to democratize opportunity by bridging the gap between human potential and large-scale industry change — empowering the next generation to lean into their unique skills, bypass systemic barriers, and navigate a tech-driven landscape with the confidence to lead it.

That mission is bold. But bold missions don't launch in a vacuum. Before Mondai could define what it was, it needed to understand what already existed — and what was missing.

I joined the team as a UX Strategy Designer, embedded in a three-pod structure made up entirely of designers: research, mobile, and web. My work lived at the intersection of strategy and research. My first and most sustained contribution was understanding the competitive landscape Mondai was entering.

THE RESEARCH

Months of analysis. A market that was crowded in the wrong places.

Competitive research sounds straightforward until you're doing it for a product that doesn't fit neatly into any existing category. Mondai wasn't just an EdTech platform. It wasn't just a career tool. It was something newer — an AI-powered system that personalized learning and career pathfinding and professional development, all in one place.

That made the research harder and more necessary.

Over the course of my ongoing internship, I mapped the competitive landscape across the EdTech, AI career guidance, and professional development spaces. I looked at what existing platforms were doing well, where they were leaving users behind, and where the whitespace was — the gaps that Mondai could credibly own.

The specific findings are protected under NDA. What I can say is this: the market was crowded with tools that did one thing well and ignored the rest. Platforms that taught skills but didn't connect them to careers. Platforms that offered career advice but didn't personalize it. Platforms that served traditional students and left everyone else out.

Mondai's opportunity was in the integration. The research confirmed it.

THE PIVOT

The research pointed to web. We followed it.

As the competitive analysis was underway, a separate question was surfacing inside the team: was mobile the right primary platform for what Mondai was trying to do?

The work that Mondai asked of its users wasn't passive. It was deep — career exploration, AI-guided learning paths, structured self-reflection. That kind of focus doesn't live on a phone screen. It lives on a laptop, in a browser, with space to think.

I was part of the research that validated this, and part of the work that followed: supporting the transition from mobile-first design to a web-based MVP. Existing mobile concepts had to be reconsidered for a new surface without losing what made them work. Flows had to translate. Features had to maintain parity.

The pivot wasn't dramatic. It was a quiet, research-backed decision that pointed the product toward the platform where students actually wanted to do this kind of work.

REFLECTION

The best research is the kind no one sees.

Most of my work on Mondai can't be shown. The competitive analysis, the findings, the frameworks — they exist behind an NDA, visible only in the decisions they shaped.

That used to feel like a limitation. Now I think it's just the nature of strategy work. Research doesn't always live in a portfolio. Sometimes it lives in a product direction, a feature that got cut, a positioning decision made in a room you weren't in anymore. You know it worked because the product is better for it.

Mondai hasn't launched yet. The work is still happening. And that's the part of this internship no case study can fully capture — the ongoing, unglamorous, foundational work of building something from nothing, before anyone outside the team knows it exists.