You graduate on evidence,
not attendance.
Graduation scores the product you built and the evidence behind it, then checks you can direct and check the work yourself. You leave with a portfolio that shows it.
Your Product Book
From week 1 you keep a Product Book: plain documents, owned by you, recording every decision and the evidence for it. That includes your customer conversations, experiments, designs, architecture decisions, backlog, test and eval results, financial model and business case. In week 4 it moves into your code repository, where it also briefs Claude. Graduation is scored from what it contains.
The Graduation Scorecard
Your product's evidence is scored out of 100 across six areas.
| Area | Points | What it scores |
|---|---|---|
| Problem and market validation | 20 | Real conversations and research as counts, experiments against thresholds set in advance, and a willingness-to-pay test. |
| Product functionality | 20 | A live product, the build objectives met, and an unseen change built during the assessment. |
| Technical quality and security | 20 | Tests and evals in CI, a dependency scan, access and authentication tests, a threat model and prompt-injection tests. |
| Commercial viability | 15 | A financial model with unit economics, hosting and AI costs per user, break-even and runway, and the business case. |
| User experience | 15 | Usability sessions, accessibility checks, and real users reaching the first moment of value unaided. |
| Demo and founder presentation | 10 | The eight-minute demo-day presentation and a viva on the decisions in the Product Book. |
To graduate you need:
- 75 out of 100 or more, with no area below half its points;
- every must-pass check passed: secrets kept out of code, access control checked on the server, personal data handled lawfully and kept to a minimum, AI safety cases including prompt injection, and payments in test mode. A failure here means "not yet", whatever the score;
- the independent competence assessment passed.
Awards: Graduate (75–84), Graduate with Merit (85–91), Graduate with Distinction (92 and over). Your instructor and an external assessor score independently, then agree a mark. A review by an AI assistant can be part of the evidence, but it never decides the score.
The independent competence assessment
A 45-minute one-to-one in the week after demo day.
- An unseen change (30 minutes). You are given a small, realistic change to your own product that you haven't seen before. You work as you have all course, with Claude Code: plan it, build it, run the tests, explain every changed line in plain English, say whether anything safety-critical is affected, and commit it.
- A viva (15 minutes). Questions on your own Product Book: why this customer, which evidence changed your mind, what is still unproven, and what the numbers say.
Using Claude is expected. What is assessed is your judgement: that you can direct the work, check it and stand behind it. If you don't pass first time, you can retake it once within four weeks.
Graduation is included in the cohort and one-to-one options. If you take the self-paced edition, you can add graduation for £295: the same scorecard, the same assessment and the same standard.
Your founder portfolio
You finish with a portfolio you can show an employer, a customer or an investor:
- your live product and its code repository, with tests and continuous integration;
- your Product Book, including the financial model;
- your business case and responsible-AI statement;
- a five-minute demo video;
- your Graduation Scorecard, with the assessors' comments.
All of it is yours. We only feature your work if you agree in writing first (see the course terms).
Published outcomes
The founding cohort is our pilot. With learners' consent and without names, we record whether each product met its build objective, went live, found real users and passed graduation, and we will publish the results as plain counts, for example "9 of 12".
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