Practice scenarios
Practice the decisions, not the definitions.
A scenario puts you in a real professional situation with real stakeholders and asks you to make the call. The people in the room respond to what you choose. Ten to fifteen minutes later, you see what your decisions set in motion.
Scenarios are part of the Competency Cafe learning app, in development.
You get the room, the people, and the call.
Courses give you the frameworks. Scenarios ask whether you can use them when the stakeholders disagree and the constraints are real.
A scenario opens on a situation: a roadmap standoff, a customer escalation, a CEO with a great idea. You work through three to five decision points. Each choice is an intent, not a script. You pick the direction, and your character says something that fits.
The characters treat you as a colleague. Nobody lectures. Nobody grades you in the room.
What you decide in the first five minutes shows up in the last five.
Scenarios track consequences, not points. How you handle a stakeholder early determines whether they back you later. A decision you make to move fast turns up again when the thing you skipped comes due.
That is the part reading cannot teach. Consequence awareness comes from watching a decision play out, and most professionals only get that on the job, where the reps are slow and expensive.
The plot is written. The dialogue is not.
Every scenario has an authored script underneath it. The situation, the decision points, the branches, and the moments that teach something are all written, reviewed, and tested in advance. Nothing important is left to chance.
On top of that sits a language model that handles how the characters actually talk. Same plot, different conversation each time. A director hears a different version of the same meeting than an individual contributor does, because the characters adjust to who you are.
The same problem is a different problem at every level.
An individual contributor prioritizing means sprint planning. A director prioritizing means deciding which product line to end. The launch catalog runs ten scenarios across four role levels, from individual contributor through VP.
Some are practice reps: a customer escalation you work through until the moves feel natural. Some make the downstream cost of a shortcut visible, like the onboarding you kept postponing. Some are genuinely ambiguous, the kind where two good leaders would disagree, and the point is the reasoning rather than the answer. Those are the richest ones, and most of the director and VP scenarios are built that way.
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Individual contributor
Sprint Zero: New Product Kick-off
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Manager
The Roadmap Standoff
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Manager / Director
Research vs. Ship
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VP
Board Prep
No score. A record of what your choices did.
At the end, the scenario describes what actually happened. Not how well you did. What resulted.
"You kept Javier engaged when he was ready to disengage. He backed your proposal in the follow-up meeting."
"When Dana pushed for a decision, you explored options instead of committing. She moved on to Priya's recommendation."
You see which competencies the scenario exercised and what XP went where. You see what would take you further: the courses that teach the frameworks you reached past, and the scenarios that put you in the same room again.
Over several scenarios a pattern appears.
- Customer-first or business-first
- Move fast or be thorough
- Direct or diplomatic
- Data or instinct
- Delegate or own it
Nothing here is scored. It is a description of how you tend to work, which is useful to know about yourself before someone else notices it first.
Try the role before you want the role.
Pick a role on your career path and play the scenario built for it. About twenty minutes of a realistic day in that job.
There is no application and no self-assessment. You do not claim the experience, you demonstrate it. Someone with ten years of stakeholder management will feel that in the room. Someone earlier in the path will come out with a specific list of what would take them further.
The audition updates your readiness for that role and points at the courses and scenarios that build it.
Scenarios come with membership.
Scenarios are a members feature. A free account gets you one skill tree, your saved progress, and every free resource on the site. Membership adds the scenarios, 10 sessions a month, coaching conversations, all the skill trees, a course each quarter, and the community.
Sessions reset monthly and do not roll over.
Buying a course on its own gets you the course and its teacher chat. Scenarios stay with membership.
Start with a course. The scenarios are waiting when you are.
The menu starts at $30 for a Coffee course. Membership adds the scenarios, the coaching conversations, and the rest of the skill trees.