I always wanted to capture the real trade-offs we face at work. We talk a lot about product thinking, but most of the time engineers learn it the hard way, by breaking things in production or living with tech debt for months.
So I started a small project called InMind Lab. The idea is simple: put developers into interactive comic stories where they play as the main character and make choices. Do you skip tests to ship faster? Do you cut scope or take on tech debt? Each decision has an outcome that feels close to what happens in real projects.
The fun part is that it looks like a comic. The hard part is the pipeline behind it. I had to combine:
- a way to write scenarios with branching decisions,
- generation of panels with dialogues that are short and natural,
- keeping the whole story realistic for a developer (not a product manager),
- and making sure the language is clear and engaging.
It took many iterations. At first the dialogues sounded robotic. Sometimes the outcomes were too optimistic. Or the panels did not match the situation. Balancing realism and fun was harder than I thought.
Last week I finally managed to ship the first playable stories. It feels rough, but it already shows what is possible.
You can try it here: https://inmindlab.hyperskill.org/stories
🤪 Another thing I still need to work on is performance. Right now the stories take a while to load from the database, and it breaks the flow. This is high on my list to fix, because I want the experience to feel smooth and instant.
I would love feedback from fellow developers. Does it feel real? What trade-offs should I add next?
Top comments (2)
wow! Great idea, thanks!
I actually experimented with this idea a while back when I was mentoring some junior devs, instead of just showing them architecture diagrams and explaining trade-offs, I put together a kind of “choose your own path” doc where they had to make decisions and see the consequences. It wasn’t super polished, but it turned out to be way more engaging than the usual presentations, and people remembered the pitfalls better. The only downside was that it took a fair bit of time to prepare compared to just talking it through.