Imbellus Assessments

The Company

Imbellus aimed to reinvent how we measure human potential. Rather than exclusively measure what people know, it built game-based assessments that seek to measure how people think. In this way, rather than measuring pure skills, like mathematics, and inferring distant underlying abilities, Imbellus tried to measure that underlying ability itself.

After I left Imbellus at the end of 2019, the company was partially acquired by Roblox, with continuing partnerships with McKinsey. Its assessment strategy lives on in those organisations.

The Process

Imbellus designed tasks that sought to measure the mental constructs involved in using a particular abstract skill. Add those measurements together in the right way, and we have a proxy for, say, measuring problem solving.

The Work

The company was mostly split into science and engineering. I served as a Product Manager, working on the logic that powers our games.

We ran our assessments globally as a web application, which means that it carries many of the same challenges as a live game. Logins, user management, data extraction and organization, and database design were critically important to keeping all our measurements consistent and valuable.

My Role

It was my job to make sure that an end user could take our assessment anywhere in the world, that their experience was optimal, and that the output scores could be generated and delivered appropriately.

Unlike many of my other games on this page, this was not a solo project. The Imbellus assessment was worked on by a full team of designers, engineers, and businesspeople, built for a for-profit, investor-backed company.

When designing, developing, and deploying our game-based assessment, I:

• worked with a large team of engineers,
• prioritised tasks and run sprints,
• designed new features and do code reviews,
• planned for and stood up a large live operations team,
• designed and built admin tools for our assessments, and
• managed API and database integration between our systems and our partners' systems

Best of all, I also ran our company's game jams!