For your team · The Operator

The Operator

General Management & Continuous Operations · General Management & Continuous Operations

Run a company day by day, in-tray by in-tray, decision by decision.

The Operator throws out the batched-round model and replaces it with continuous operations. Every active day, your team's inbox gets 2-5 small events: a customer complaint, a star engineer resignation, a regulator letter, a partnership offer, a viral tweet thread. Some events are multiple-choice with explicit consequences; some require a real written response that an LLM grades for decisiveness, reasoning, and operational realism. Your company state — cash, headcount, customer health, team morale, brand, operations — is persistent and compounds. Professors control which days are active (weekdays only, or every day, or Tue/Thu/Sat — any pattern works) and how many events fire per active day. The feeling is what students always ask for: it actually feels like running a real company.

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Learning objectives

  • Make decisions across multiple timescales simultaneously — today's cash, this quarter's strategy, this year's positioning.
  • Write decisively under time pressure when stakeholders disagree.
  • Read partial information and act anyway; every event is incomplete by design.
  • Build team rhythm for handling continuous interrupt-driven work.
  • Balance four operating pillars (customer, team, brand, ops) without optimizing one at the others' expense.

The loop

  1. 1
    Inbox arrival
    On every active day, the cron fires fresh events for your team. Most are minor; some are urgent.
  2. 2
    Triage
    Skim the inbox. Pick the urgent ones first. Decide who on the team takes which event.
  3. 3
    Choose or write
    Choice events give 2-3 options with consequences shown. Written events ask for a 100-200 word real response.
  4. 4
    Watch state move
    Cash, customer health, team morale, brand, ops — every response moves them.
  5. 5
    Repeat
    Day after day, week after week. The leaderboard rewards teams who stay consistently healthy across the whole sim.

Pillars & scoring

Every team is scored on four pillars that compound across the sim. They aggregate into a composite the leaderboard ranks by, and the professor can see per-pillar deltas in the gradebook.

Customer Health

NPS, retention, and satisfaction (0-100). Drifts down naturally each day; lifted by good customer-facing responses.

Team Morale

How energized and bought-in the team is (0-100). Hit hard by missed events and tone-deaf people decisions.

Brand Health

External reputation (0-100). Compounds over many weeks; tanked by PR misses and reputational events.

Operations Health

Whether the day-to-day still works (0-100). Supplier issues, security incidents, and system outages drag this down. Runway from cash + burn is scored separately in the composite.

Hero features

  • In-tray inbox

    Every active day brings fresh events with a ticking response window. Open events are visible immediately on your dashboard.

  • LLM response grader

    Written-response events (100-200 words) get evaluated by Claude on decisiveness, reasoning quality, and operational realism — your quality score (0-10) scales how much your response helps or hurts state.

  • Flexible cadence

    Professor picks active days (Mon-Fri / every day / custom pattern), events per day (1-5), response window (2-168 hrs), and total sim length (5-112 active days). Tune the sim to your course.

  • Persistent state

    Cash, monthly revenue, monthly burn, headcount, and four 0-100 pillars (customer health, team morale, brand health, ops health) that drift daily and respond to every event. Composite = runway*0.30 + customer*0.20 + morale*0.20 + brand*0.15 + ops*0.15.

  • 5 industry tracks

    SaaS, DTC Products, Consumer Mobile App, Agency, Restaurant — each industry has its own event mix.

Fit & format

Pacing

Highly flexible — pick any day-of-week pattern. 30 active days at 3 events/day = ~6 weeks Mon-Fri. Shorter or longer at the professor's discretion.

Cohort shape

Designed for ~15-30 students in teams of 4-5. Each team runs one persistent company.

Best for

MBA general management, executive education, undergraduate intro-to-management capstones. Especially strong for blended/online courses where weekly check-ins don't fit.

Differentiator

The only sim with continuous operations instead of batched rounds. Students live in an inbox; the LLM grades written responses in real time; cadence is fully professor-configurable. Closest analog: actually being a manager.

Sample discussion prompt

One of many pre-authored prompts from the sim’s Week 1 debrieflibrary. Grounded in the team’s actual decisions and used as a scheduled teaching moment.

Week 1 debrief

Triage order tells the story

Look at your Week 1 event log. Which event did you open first each day, and which did you leave to the last hour before the window closed? Was that ordering deliberate (urgency read) or accidental (whichever email was on top)?

Sample decision

A single in-tray event drawn from the sim’s live event catalog — the kind of decision a student team sees in their inbox on any given active day.

From: Maria Chen · VP Customer Success

Largest customer is threatening to leave

Our biggest customer (12% of ARR) just sent a 4-page complaint about our recent product changes. Their CTO wants a call this week. They're hinting at not renewing in Q3. What's your call?

  • CEO joins the call personally, listens, no commitments
    Signals you take it seriously; buys time without conceding.
  • Offer a 20% discount for 12 months and feature priority
    Saves the account but sets a precedent and burns margin.
  • CS lead handles it; no exec involvement
    Stays in lane but the customer reads it as a brush-off.
LMS

Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace, Moodle via LTI 1.3. Students launch from your LMS with single sign-on; one-click grade publish posts scores back with the rubric breakdown as the comment.

Pricing
$20 / student
$10 / student for Founding Faculty, locked 2 years

Per semester. No platform fee, no per-section charge, no seat minimums. Institutional invoicing available.

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