← helena.cool

Hola, I'm Elena.

I've spent the last nine years building learning experiences and helping people to achieve their language learning goals. I started as a learning designer shaping curricula and then I became a product manager building the features millions of learners use every day. The last few years I focused on helping Learning Designers to create quality content at scale. I care deeply about effectiveness: what actually helps people learn and build, not just what looks good in a demo.

I'm also a language learner myself. I speak Spanish natively, English fluently, and I'm working my way through Swedish which recently led me to build my own vocabulary trainer from scratch, just to understand what good learning tools are really made of.

EdTech AI-assisted learning Spaced repetition Human-in-the-loop CEFR Community
Work experience +
Product Manager, Internal Tools 2023 – 2025
Busuu

This role was about something I find genuinely fascinating: how do you use AI to help humans produce better learning content at scale, without losing the quality that makes it actually work for learners?

I owned the product strategy for the internal tools that our learning designers, linguists, and content teams use every day. I defined the squad vision and roadmap, and led the development of AI-assisted features, including an instruction review tool and synonym suggestions that reduced operational workload dramatically and cut support tickets significantly.

The most interesting design challenge was the human-in-the-loop workflow: making sure AI accelerated the work without replacing the expert judgment that learning quality depends on.

Product Manager, Learning Experience & Community 2020 – 2023
Busuu

This is where I got to combine my linguistics background with product thinking in a direct way. I led a full content redesign for high-revenue language pairs, working closely with learning designers to apply CEFR principles to the actual product experience, not just the curriculum document.

One of my proudest projects was contributing to Smart Review, an award-winning spaced repetition feature for premium users. It's the kind of feature that works because of the underlying pedagogy. Watching it drive real retention improvements for learners was amazing.

I also worked on motivational design: the small moments in an app that make someone feel good about showing up. Post-lesson celebrations, study plan prompts, early engagement nudges.

Lead Learning Designer 2016 – 2020
Busuu

Before I was a PM I was a learning designer, and I think that background shapes everything about how I approach product work. I designed CEFR-aligned curricula for Spanish and Romance languages and collaborated closely with Product and Design on how pedagogy translates into feature decisions.

I improved session depth significantly during this time by understanding what made learners want to keep going. That curiosity about learner motivation is something I've carried into my product role since.

In 2020 I received the British Council ELTon Award for Digital Innovation for the Grammar Review feature, one of the highlights of my career so far.

Skills & strengths +

I'm most useful at the intersection of pedagogy, product, and data, where understanding how people learn meets understanding what to build and whether it worked.

Product
Roadmapping A/B Testing User Research Agile Jira Figma Miro
Data
Amplitude SQL Tableau
AI & Learning
LLMs AI content workflows CEFR Spaced repetition Curriculum design
Languages
Spanish 🇪🇸 Native English 🇬🇧 Fluent Swedish 🇸🇪 B1
Side projects +

I am very curious and I build things to understand them better. These are the projects I've made outside of work.

Svenska A1, Swedish vocabulary trainer

A browser-based vocabulary trainer built from the Kelly Corpus, a frequency-ranked dataset of Swedish words tagged by CEFR level. It uses the SM-2 spaced repetition algorithm (the same one behind Anki), three exercise modes: flashcards, multiple choice, and typing. I use Claude AI for on-demand example sentences. Built entirely in one HTML file, hosted on a Raspberry Pi in my cupboard.

helena.cool, this website

Hand-coded from scratch in 2020 and continuously updated. Runs on a Raspberry Pi. A space to think out loud about product, language, and learning.

Visit the site →
Miscellaneous: speaking, talks, voice over and podcasts

I love poetry. I got to speak at the ASYRAS conference in 2009 about Emily Dickinson's Mystical Element. You can read my master's thesis here.

I have also been a Speaker at UCL Educate on creating research-driven products. I was the voice for Google Assistant "Talk to Busuu" and I worked with Oculus and Meta on the first VR videogame to learn Spanish. I dubbed Carla.

In 2019 me and my colleague Paula recorded a few Podcast episodes, you can listen here.

Things I believe in +
Education & awards +

My background is in linguistics, which shapes how I think about language products not just what words mean but how people acquire them, what makes a curriculum coherent, and why some explanations land and others don't.

MA Linguistics & Literature
Universidad de Salamanca
BA English Philology
Universidad de Salamanca
Certificate of Pedagogical Aptitude
Universidad de Salamanca
CLTA Spanish
Goldsmiths University / Instituto Cervantes

Awards & speaking

🏆 British Council ELTon Award for Digital Innovation
2020, Busuu Grammar Review feature
🎤 Speaker, UCL Educate
Creating a Research-Driven Product
🎤 Speaker, ASYRAS Conference
2009, Emily Dickinson's Mystical Element
What I'm looking for next +

I'm looking for a role where I can keep growing as a product manager, and where the goal is to genuinely empower people, not just drive engagement with an app. I'm particularly interested in products working with AI and education, but I'm open to any role that will challenge my skills and support my professional growth. I'm a learner at heart.

I'm based in Stockholm and open to remote or hybrid roles in Europe or UK.

If that sounds like your team, I'd love to hear from you.

hi@helena.cool →