Nerds.family

Nerds.family is a workforce development platform I co-founded with Oskar Lakner (CEO), Dorota Piekarska (CMO), and Marcin Ostrowski (CTO). We build practice-based academies where people entering or transitioning into tech careers learn by doing real work — not by sitting through lectures or collecting certificates.

The company exists because traditional bootcamps, online courses, and CV-based screening all struggle with the same problem: they can’t show whether someone can actually do the work in context. Academy 360 was built to make capability visible through structured practice.

The Academy 360 Model

Academy 360 is a three-sided model that aligns employers, mentors, and participants in a single system. Employers get a vetted talent pipeline and an employer-branding engine. Mentors bring real-world domain knowledge and structured evaluation. Participants get credible proof of capability built through practice, not credentials.

The model works for both external talent pipelines — feeding employers with vetted candidates — and internal workforce development, supporting upskilling or cross-functional transitions within an organization. The platform logic is role-neutral: tasks, submissions, reviews, and progression aren’t tied to coding. The same architecture supports Engineering, Product, Customer Success, and other tracks.

How It Works

Participants work through six sprints over two to four months. A sprint isn’t a lesson block — it’s a structured sequence of tasks that moves participants from orientation through practical work into review and refinement. Tasks involve individual work, collaborative exercises, live-session preparation, peer reviews, and final artifacts, sequenced to build capability progressively. Participants work on realistic, role-shaped problems and produce outputs that resemble what they’d be expected to deliver in an actual workplace.

Peer review is a core mechanism, not a side feature. Participants don’t only submit work — they also review peers, learn to evaluate quality, and receive structured feedback from others. That builds judgment and accountability alongside technical skill. Mentor feedback adds a second layer: domain-grounded evaluation, reference solutions, and the kind of context that only comes from someone who’s done the work professionally.

Task sequencing adapts based on demonstrated strengths and gaps — each decision affects what comes next, with differentiated emphasis across role-specific challenge paths. By the end, participants have a deployed, shareable product they built themselves: visible evidence of work, not a grade or a completion badge. All academies run in English to support globally distributed cohorts and align with the language of modern tech work.

The result is observable evidence of skill acquisition — artifacts, progression data, review behavior, and quality signals that together form a much more credible picture of readiness than any certificate or self-reported skill list. That evidence is what makes the model useful to employers: not just “this person completed a program,” but how they work, how they respond to feedback, what they deliver, and how consistently they progress.

The model is built on a simple conviction: skills are proven through real work, not declared on paper. We critique traditional bootcamps and CV-filtering because they optimize for credentials over capability. Our platform matches trained candidates with employers based on demonstrated competencies, shared values, and actual work output — where fit means alignment between demonstrated capability, working style, values, and the demands of a specific role.

Relativity Partnership

Our flagship partnership is with Relativity, the legal technology company. Nerds.family powers the Ascent Academies phase of Relativity’s Relevate workforce development program — a structured, globally accessible talent pipeline across three career tracks: Engineering, Product Management, and Customer Success. Each cohort runs 20–30 participants through three to four months of free, practice-based training.

The partnership is an example of embedded employer collaboration: Relativity’s domain, language, and role expectations are woven into the program design. Legal data intelligence runs throughout the learning content, and role-specific tasks reflect the actual work Relativity teams do. The academy isn’t a generic program with the employer’s logo on it — it’s built around their world.

My Role

I lead product strategy and own the assessment and progression logic that sits at the center of the model. That means designing how the platform measures progress, how task completion and review behavior translate into judgments about readiness, and how the system bridges learner development with employer decision-making. The psychometric thinking shows up everywhere — in adaptive task sequencing, in how we define skill acquisition, and in how participant evidence gets structured for employer interpretation.

The Team

We’re a small team based primarily in Gdansk and Krakow — developers, educators, and one psychometrician who keeps asking whether we’re actually measuring what we think we’re measuring.

Learning systems should be judged by observable change, decision usefulness, and credible evidence of capability. Academy 360 helps organizations grow talent in a way that also reveals talent.

If you’re building a talent pipeline or rethinking how your organization grows capability, reach out. I’ll tell you honestly whether Academy 360 fits.