April 2026 at NextWork

Understand the strategy for April 2026 at NextWork and your part to play.

Introduction

⚡️ 30 Second Summary

Every team member at NextWork knows the mission matters, but it is surprisingly hard to connect your daily to-do list to the company's actual growth numbers.

In this project, you will pull your WAU baseline from PostHog, run compound growth projections to see how powerful (and fragile) 15% weekly growth really is, map your function's deliverables across three launch phases, and understand your personal contribution to April's launch date and weekly targets.

A note for our learners

This project was built for NextWork team members as part of our internal planning process. We're sharing it publicly because we believe in building in public and want you to see how we work behind the scenes. Some of the tools and dashboards referenced (like PostHog) are internal to NextWork, so parts of this project may not be directly completable. If you have feedback or questions, we'd love to hear from you in our community!

What You'll Build

A personal April action plan that connects NextWork's mission to meet the skill demand of the world to your weekly deliverables, grounded in real WAU data from PostHog and compound weekly growth math.

Want a complete demo of how to do this project, from start to finish? Check out our 🎬 walkthrough with Amber 🎬

By the end of this project, you'll have:

📊 Your current WAU number pulled directly from PostHog, plus a growth projection showing where NextWork lands at 15% week-over-week through end of year.
🔢 A "miss a week" catch-up scenario showing the recovery percentage needed when you skip a single week of growth.
🗓️ Your function's deliverables mapped across Phase 1, 2, and 3 of the Project Generator launch, with named cross-functional conflict points and how you will engage productively.
🤝 A personal weekly action plan for April with WAU targets for each Phase, plus one specific commitment to help another team member.
💎 Secret Mission: Design a process for handling project errors and quality issues with Learner Generated Projects.

Do I need any special access to do this project?

You will need access to NextWork's PostHog instance to pull your WAU baseline. If you do not have access yet, ask your team lead before starting. Everything else (a calculator on your phone or computer) is free.

Not sure if this project is right for you? Check if it matches your goals

If you're up for a bit of a challenge, quiz yourself on the key concepts up ahead in this project.

Ground in the Mission and the Big Picture

To build a meaningful action plan for April, we first need to zoom out. Way out.

The decisions NextWork is making this month only make sense in the context of the problem we're solving and the company-wide goals we're driving toward.

In this step, we'll connect April's Learner-Generated Projects (LGP) launch to NextWork's mission, vision, and North Star metric.

In this step, get ready to:

Understand the global skills crisis NextWork exists to solve.
Connect NextWork's Three C's Framework to the problem.
Write down why Learner Generated Projects advance NextWork's mission.

Understand the Problem NextWork Exists to Solve

The world is facing an unprecedented skills crisis. Here are the numbers:

44% of workforce skills will be disrupted by 2030.
That's 2 billion workers out of 3.5 billion globally who need retraining.
We have roughly 3 years to address this.

Current solutions are failing. Universities are too slow to adapt, online courses like Coursera have 3-12% completion rates, and 1 in 4 candidate profiles will be AI fakes by 2028.

Combine this with the rise of AI tooling and the "AI refugee" and we find ourselves in desperate need of a better way to learn and prove skills.

Completion rates matter

A 3-12% completion rate means that for every 100 people who start an online course, only 3 to 12 actually finish. Instead of accepting this as the norm, we at NextWork believe this is extraordinarily sad.

Behind every dropout is someone who wanted to learn a new skill, invested their time and energy, and walked away without the outcome they came for. NextWork exists because we believe learners deserve better. We do the hard work of building engaging, completable projects because every person who finishes is one step closer to closing the skills gap.

The Three C's Framework

NextWork's Three C's Framework addresses each failure in the current system:

Content solves the quality issue. NextWork projects are hands-on, accurate, and designed to build skills employers actually need.
Community solves the loneliness issue. Learning alone is why most people quit. NextWork's community keeps learners accountable and supported.
Credentials solves the trust issue. When 1 in 4 profiles are fake, verified project-based credentials give employers confidence.

This framework helps us to achieve NextWork's purpose:

Our Mission: To meet the skill demand for the world's toughest problems.
Our Vision: Become the number one place in the world to learn and showcase your AI skills.
Our North Star: 1 Million Weekly Active Users (1M WAU) this year.

Connect the Monthly Journey to April

Each month this year has answered a critical question that led us to April:

January: Does increasing volume of projects increase growth?
- Yes. Invest in scaling.
February: What does a quality project look like?
- Project Quality standards captured through Lock-In!
March: Are the standards robust?
- Yes. The entire team can generate projects, but speed is limited by the current system.
April: Can anyone generate a project on NextWork?
- ....let's find out!

The primary milestone for April is to successfully launch Learner-Generated Projects (LGPs) in the app by April 25th, so we can achieve exponential growth for our Weekly Active Users and change the world.

Now that you've connected the mission to April and understand the big picture, let's get the real numbers.

Pull Your WAU and Set the Guardrails

You have the mission locked in from Step 1: April is about Learner Generated Projects. But strategy without numbers is just vibes. To bring this to reality, you need to know where NextWork actually stands right now.

So how many people are using NextWork each week? And what are the boundaries that keep growth healthy instead of reckless?

In this step, get ready to:

Find NextWork's current WAU in PostHog.
Record your growth baseline.
Internalize the three guardrail metrics.

Find Your WAU in PostHog

PostHog is the product analytics platform NextWork uses to track user activity. The WAU dashboard shows how many unique users engaged with the platform in the last seven days.

Open PostHog in your browser.
Click Dashboards in the left sidebar.
Find the sliding 7 day average of the WAU number.

Locate the most recent WAU number displayed on the dashboard.

What is WAU?

WAU stands for Weekly Active Users. It counts the number of unique users who performed at least one meaningful action on the platform in the past seven days. This is the single number that tells you whether NextWork is growing or stalling.

At NextWork, we track WAU from Friday to Friday, Austin time. That way, we know if we've hit our goal by midnight every Friday and can course correct on the Saturday for the following week.

Record Your Growth Baseline

Now that you can see the number, write it down. This becomes your variable for every calculation in the rest of the project.

Record the following two values somewhere you can reference later:
- My WAU baseline: the number you just found on the dashboard
- Date pulled: today's date

Why does the date matter?

WAU changes every day. Pinning the date to your baseline means you can compare future numbers to the same starting point and measure real progress, not noise.

Understand the Guardrail Metrics

Growth without guardrails leads to problems. NextWork uses three metrics to make sure growth does not come at the expense of quality.

Review the three guardrail metrics:
- Weekly Active User Growth must be at least 15%.
- Monthly Active User Growth must be at least 75%.
- Project Completion Rate must stay at or above 70%.

Why does Project Completion Rate matter?

If the completion rate drops, it means the quality of LGP content is suffering. You might be attracting new users, but they are not finishing projects. That is growth without retention, and it does not last.

💡 What is the relationship between weekly and monthly growth?

A 15% weekly growth rate compounds to approximately 75% monthly growth (1.15^4 = 1.749). The monthly target acts as a floor. If weekly growth dips one week but recovers the next, the monthly number smooths out the noise and tells you whether the trend is real.

Your baseline is locked and your guardrails are clear. Next up, you will take that WAU number and see what happens when you compound 15% weekly growth on top of it. Get ready for some math.

The Growth Math

You have your WAU baseline and your guardrail metrics locked in. Now comes the part that makes strategy feel real. What does 15% compound weekly growth actually look like when you stack it week after week? And what happens when you miss even a single week?

In this step, you are going to build a week-by-week growth projection for April using your WAU number, then calculate the cost of a missed week.

In this step, get ready to:

Build your April growth projection using the compound growth formula.
Zoom out to see the full-year compounding effect.
Calculate the cost of missing a week.

Build Your April Growth Projection

The formula for compound growth is straightforward:
- Future WAU = Current WAU x (1.15)^n
- ...where n is the number of weeks from your baseline.

Future WAU = Current WAU x (1.15)^n

This is the compound growth formula. Each week, you multiply your current WAU by 1.15, not your original baseline. This is why consistent execution matters more than any single big push.

Open Claude and start a new conversation.
Copy the prompt below into the chat. It uses the My WAU baseline you recorded in Step 2 (WAU).

I'm modeling April Weekly Active Users (WAU) with 15% compound weekly growth: each week I multiply the previous week's WAU by 1.15 (not the original baseline).

My baseline WAU at the start of April is [[WAU_BASELINE="WAU"]].

Calculate and list my target WAU for:
- Week 1 of April (baseline × 1.15)
- Week 2 of April (Week 1 × 1.15)
- Week 3 of April (Week 2 × 1.15)
- Week 4 of April (Week 3 × 1.15)

Show the math briefly for each step. Round to whole users. End by stating how many times larger Week 4 is than my baseline.

Compound interest is the 8th wonder of the world

Compound growth means each week's growth builds on the previous week's total, not the original baseline. By Week 4, you are compounding on top of three previous weeks of growth. That is why the end-of-April number is roughly 1.75x your baseline, not 1.60x.

Check your numbers!
By end of April, your WAU should be roughly 1.75x your baseline. That is the power of compounding over just four weeks.

Zoom Out to the Full Year

The four weeks of April is just the beginning.

Jump back into your sheet or calculations.
Using the same formula, calculate where your WAU will be by December 31st.
- You can use the formula: Future WAU = Current WAU x (1.15)^39.
- We use 39 because if we measure from the start of April, that is roughly 39 weeks.
Write down your December 31st WAU target.

Why 15%? Look at the company you're in.

Y Combinator considers 15% WoW growth the benchmark for strong early-stage startups. Companies that hit this rate in their early days:

Airbnb - 15-20% WoW booking growth after joining YC in 2009. Now valued at over $70B.
Stripe - Consistent double-digit weekly payment volume growth in YC W2011. Now worth $50B+.
DoorDash - 15%+ WoW delivery growth in YC S2013. Now a public company worth tens of billions.
Dropbox - Explosive weekly signup growth during YC S2007, compounding to millions of users before launch.

NextWork is targeting the same rate because the math works: 15% weekly growth sustained for a year means WAU grows by over 1,400x.

Calculate the Cost of a Missed Week

Now for the uncomfortable truth. What happens when you have a flat week with 0% growth?

Imagine you have a flat week with 0% growth. The following week, you need to make up for both the missed week AND the current week to stay on track 🤯
Calculate what percentage growth you'd need to make up for the missed week.

I got it! 💪

Nice work figuring that out yourself!

I want to check my answer...

To calculate this, multiply 1.15 x 1.15. This gives you 1.3225, which means you need 32.25% growth in a single week.

Now calculate what happens if you miss two consecutive weeks.

I got it! 💪

Nice work! The math gets scary fast, doesn't it?

I want to check my answer...

Multiply 1.15 x 1.15 x 1.15. That gives you 1.5209, meaning you need over 52% growth in one week to catch up.

The longer you wait, the steeper the climb. This is why prevention is everything.

What If We Almost Hit 15%?

What happens if the team sustains a lower growth rate for the full year?

Calculate where WAU ends up after 52 weeks at 10% WoW.
Calculate where WAU ends up after 52 weeks at 13% WoW.
Calculate where WAU ends up after 52 weeks at 14% WoW.

15% WoW is not a stretch goal. It is the target. It is everyone's responsibility.

If we do not hit it, we have all failed.

There is no "my function hit it but the team didn't." The only metric that matters is WAU growth at 15% every single week.

Is growth really the #1 thing? What about our learners?

We have two priorities at NextWork:

Build a loved product for our learners.
Grow.

#1 always comes first. Both are everyone's responsibility, but when push comes to shove, we won't win the long term game if we prioritise growth over a great experience for our learners. NextWork Operating Principle #1: Learners come first. Always.

What do we do as a team if we don't hit 15%?

If we don't hit 15% in a week, we have failed. It should hurt.

In this instance, we need to address the situation, work out what we can do next time, and take action.

Here's the plan if we get < 15% growth:

The team meets on Saturday at 3PM Austin time.
Maximus is responsible for arranging the meeting and making sure everyone shows up.
We discuss the upcoming week, the higher percentage target we need to hit, and what we're going to do to get there.
Remember: prevention is everything. Nothing is someone elses problem. It is far easier to hit 15% every week than to dig out of a hole.

The math makes it clear. Consistent execution every week is non-negotiable. Next up, you will break April into three phases and map out what each phase demands.

Map Your Function Across Prep, Test, and Launch

You've seen the numbers and you know what's at stake. The compound math from the previous step showed you exactly how small weekly improvements snowball into massive results by April 30th. But knowing the math isn't enough.

Now it's time to get specific about YOUR role in making this happen, phase by phase, week by week. April has three distinct phases: Prep, Test, and Launch. Each phase has different deliverables, different rhythms, and different cross-functional dependencies. Your job in this step is to map your function's work across all three phases and build a weekly action plan you can actually execute.

In this step, get ready to:

Map your function's deliverables across Phase 1 (Prep).
Map Phase 2 (Test) with success criteria.
Map Phase 3 (Launch) and validate your full April plan.

Phase 1: Prep (April 1st to 15th)

First, claim your lane.

Make sure you know your own domain: Growth, Community, Engineering, Design, or Ops.

Why does my domain matter here?

April isn't a solo sprint. It's a coordinated launch across five functions. If Growth doesn't have carousels ready, Community can't preview them. If Engineering doesn't ship the LGP feature, nobody can test it. Your function's deliverables are load-bearing for the whole team.

The general structure for the days is simple:

Everyone works mornings Austin time on their own domain work.
Afternoons (1 PM onward) are dedicated on project work.

So what's happening in the mornings?

Growth: Studio set up, carousel generation, roadmap skill set up, Customer.io set up.
Community: Build labs, preview generation feature in calls, identify top community members, establish city groups.
Engineering: Build project generation feature. Content accuracy first, then UX, then tracking and data metrics.
Design: UX for the project generator experience, carousel designs.
Ops: Investors and Austin network invited to office-warming party, SF trip agenda finalized, hiring for Backend Engineer and Video Editor.

What about our WAU target?

It's still there! Everything we do is in pursuit of a great learner experience, and 15% weekly growth. Each week has a target number of active users that compounds toward the 1M goal. Your work in the mornings everyday should ladder up to directly to moving this number - either now, or for sometime in the future.

Phase 2: Test (April 15th to 25th)

Phase 2 has two sub-phases:

Internal test (April 15th to 20th): The whole team generates projects and posts projects on their personal LinkedIn accounts daily.
Closed community test (April 20th to 25th): Daily live testing with Maya and beta access applications.

What are we testing for? Great question!

Generating a project takes less than 60 seconds, excluding deciding what to learn.
Generation plus assets takes less than 60 minutes.
Generation plus assets plus YouTube Live takes less than 2 hours.

Phase 3: Public Launch (April 25th to 30th)

Hard launch date: April 25th. Project Generation is live for everyone. Here are the launch deliverables by function:

Community: In-person launch event, April report out.
Growth: Video content ramping to five assets generated from NextWork per day.
Design: Concepts and research for wider Explore redesign.
Engineering: Project Generator is live and being iterated on with feedback from learners and team.
Ops: Video editor hired (outsourced), backend engineer in final stages.

Launch is the starting line, not the finish line

April 25th is not the end of the work. It is the beginning. Once the Project Generator is live, the team shifts from build mode to observe-and-iterate mode. Watching the data, reading learner feedback, talking to learners in the community and in person, and shipping improvements is not a post-launch phase. It is a permanent part of running this product for as long as it exists.

You've mapped your function across every phase, understood your weekly action plans, and validated your work at each checkpoint.

But you don't work in a vacuum.

The next step is about cross-functional coordination. You'll make sure your plan actually meshes with everyone else's.

Cross-Functional Conflict

You have your personal growth targets, your guardrails, and your weekly rhythm locked in. But here is the thing about a startup this size: your lane intersects with everyone else's.

The question is not whether there will be tension between functions. It is whether you use that tension productively or let it fester.

In this step, get ready to:

Identify your cross-functional dependencies and name your conflict points.
Practice mining for conflict using a technique from Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team.
Commit to helping another team member with a specific action.

Why Conflict Matters

Patrick Lencioni wrote about teamwork through the lens of five dysfunctions, stacked like a pyramid:

Trust enables...
Productive Conflict enables..
Commitment enables..
Accountability enables..
Results.

The second dysfunction, Fear of Conflict, is about teams that maintain "artificial harmony." People hold back their real opinions, avoid disagreements, and the team never surfaces the best ideas.

What is productive conflict?

Productive ideological conflict means passionate debate about ideas, priorities, and approaches. It looks like the ability to argue passionately, with emotion and frustration, about an issue and walk away with no collateral damange.

💡 Why is artificial harmony dangerous?

"Harmony itself is good if it comes as a result of working through issues constantly and cycling through conflict. But if it comes only as a result of people holding back their opinions and honest concerns, then it's a bad thing." This is a core idea from Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

We can only have true conflict if we have a base of trust.

How do we build trust as a team?

Trust comes from being vulnerable with each other.
When we are vulnerable it means we are able to share our weaknesses with each other and can be confident they will not be used against us.

Every function at NextWork depends on others.

Open a journal or text document.
Jot down the answers to these two questions:
Who do I depend on to do my work?
Who depends on ME?

Why map dependencies?

When you name your cross-functional dependencies explicitly, you stop treating friction as a surprise. You start treating it as a predictable part of the work.

Now name your conflict points. Where do you EXPECT tension this month? Be specific.

For example:

"Engineering is prioritising content accuracy first, then UX. Design might push for UX earlier."
"Growth wants to scale content volume to x5 assets/day. Community might push back if quality drops."
"Ops needs the video editor hired before launch. Growth needs video content now for LinkedIn."
"Community wants more live testing sessions. Engineering needs uninterrupted build time."
"Design wants to rethink the full Explore page. Ops wants a scoped MVP by April 25th."

Mine for Conflict

Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team introduces a technique called "mining for conflict."

Instead of waiting for disagreements to surface on their own, you proactively pull them out into the open. Here are powerful questions to ask in a meeting:

"Does anyone disagree with this approach? I want to hear it now, not later."
"What is the thing we are not saying about this?"
"If this fails, what will be the reason?"
"Who has a concern they haven't voiced yet?"
"What would you change about this plan if it were entirely your call?"

Pro tip

Mining is not confrontation

Mining for conflict is about making space for disagreement, not creating it. You are giving permission for honest debate. The goal is better decisions, not drama.

Make Your Commitment

The last piece is about contribution. Not vague, "I will be supportive". Specific.

Here is an example:

"I will help the engineers to improve the Project Generator every day during April by generating a project and giving her feedback by 5PM."
Think through this structure:
- My commitment: what specifically you will do.
- Who I am helping: the person and their function.
- By when: a concrete deadline or recurring schedule.

Why be this specific?

Vague commitments like "I will support the team" are impossible to hold yourself accountable to. Specific commitments create real accountability because someone can check whether you followed through.

You have named the tensions and made a commitment. You have mapped your lane, set your targets, built your rhythm, and now connected it all to the people around you. That is your April, owned.

Secret mission

With Learner Generated Projects going live, project quality is no longer fully in NextWork's hands. In this secret mission, you will design a lightweight process for handling project errors in learner-generated content.

In this secret mission, get ready to:

Define an error taxonomy with four categories.
Design a reporting flow with severity levels and response times.
Assign ownership and propose a tracking tool.

Design a UGC Error Handling Process

Clean Up Your Resources

Decide whether to keep your resources running, pause them to come back later, or delete them entirely. This project costs $0 and runs entirely on free tools, so there are no ongoing charges.

Resources you used:

PostHog dashboard (cloud-hosted, free tier)
Phone or computer calculator
Your personal April action plan (document you created)
Growth projections and calculations
Cross-functional commitment notes

✔️ Keep everything running

No action needed. Choose this if you're still actively building or want to keep testing right away.

Your action plan, growth projections, and cross-functional commitments are personal documents with no ongoing costs. Your PostHog dashboard runs on their free tier with no charges.

✋ Pause - I'll come back to this later

Save your work so you can pick up where you left off.

Make sure your April action plan is saved somewhere accessible, like a Google Doc or local file.
Bookmark your PostHog dashboard URL so you can return to it easily.
Save your growth projection calculations in a spreadsheet or note for reference.

No services need to be stopped since nothing is running in the background.

ⓧ Delete - I don't want to use this again

Remove all project resources and start fresh if you ever want to rebuild.

Delete your April action plan document if you no longer need it.
Log out of PostHog if you are on a shared machine.
Delete any saved growth projection notes or spreadsheets.

Your PostHog account will remain on the free tier. You can delete it from your PostHog account settings if you want to fully remove it.

Well Done!

Nice work! 🚀 You've just built a personal April action plan that connects NextWork's mission to your daily work, grounded in compound growth math and cross-functional accountability.

You've learned how to:

🎯 Connect NextWork's mission to retrain 2 billion workers to the April LGP launch, understanding the goals, guardrails, and North Star driving every decision.
📊 Pull your WAU baseline from PostHog and set weekly targets for every Friday in April.
📈 Run the compound growth math and see that 15% WoW growth equals 1,437x over a year, and that missing one week means you need 32.25% the next.
🗺️ Map your function's deliverables across April's three launch phases (Prep, Test, Launch) with weekly checklists tied to WAU targets.
🤝 Name your cross-functional conflict points, because artificial harmony is the enemy of good decisions (Lencioni).
🤲 Make a specific commitment to help another team member with a name and a deadline.
💎 Design a UGC error handling process to protect project quality as content creation scales beyond the NextWork team.

Ready to quiz yourself? 💪

p.s. Does it say "Still tasks to complete!" at the bottom of the screen?

This means you still have screenshots left to upload, or questions left to answer!

Press Ctrl+F (Windows) or Command+F (Mac) on your keyboard.
Search for the text Return to later.
Jump straight to your incomplete tasks!
🙋‍♀️ Still stuck? Ask the community!