Education Cohort Payback and Retention Intervention — Consulting Director

The mandate

Education cohort reporting does not yet establish which acquisition and retention interventions improve realised contribution. The consultant will build and validate a bounded pilot method connecting those economics. The assignment concerns evidence and intervention design, not campaign execution, curriculum change or a guarantee of learning, retention or commercial outcomes.

The deliverable is a Cohort Payback and Retention Intervention Pack with source definitions, realised-contribution baselines, experiment hypotheses, approval boundaries and results interpretation. It must show how refunds and delivery obligations affect payback. Retention hypotheses remain testable proposals rather than conclusions inferred from a visually strong funnel or a selectively chosen group of customers.

Discovery opens on 19 October 2026 before three dated acceptance stages. The baseline and sample cohort bridge are due on 30 November 2026; the controlled intervention design and pilot evidence on 11 January 2027; the fresh-cohort validation and complete pack on 18 February 2027. Accepted stages attract 25%, 35% and 40% of the fixed project fee.

The product P&L head and finance sponsor jointly accept the work. They must reproduce sampled economics, verify approved experiment conditions and distinguish causal evidence from coincident changes in customer behaviour. Final approval requires internal teams to use the pack on a fresh cohort and recognise when an intervention conclusion remains uncertain or needs further product-specialist review.

The sponsor provides authorised acquisition and enrolment data, revenue and refund records, approved experiment permissions and named finance and operations liaisons. Customer-sensitive information is minimised. Campaign management, production analytics deployment, academic intervention ownership and major pricing changes are excluded; added scope requires priced change control, revised dates and appropriate authority before work.

What you will own

• Establish cohort source definitions and realised-contribution baselines, separating paid enrolment, revenue reversal and continuing support obligations before designing the proposed payback or retention intervention tests.
• Reconcile acquisition costs to cohort outcomes with explicit timing and allocation rules, showing where apparent efficiency changes arise from measurement rather than durable commercial improvement.
• Define retention hypotheses with product and operations owners, preserving specialist approval and distinguishing an evidence-based commercial proposal from an academic or customer-outcome guarantee.
• Construct controlled pilot alternatives with stop conditions, permissions and comparison logic, avoiding selective success measures that conceal refunds, delivery costs or adverse effects on contribution.
• Test intervention evidence on difficult cohorts or changed acquisition conditions, recording uncertainty and model failure rather than tuning every result into the preferred growth narrative.
• Validate internal users on a fresh cohort and inconclusive-result case, observing whether they preserve causal limitations and route product or pricing decisions to authorised owners.
• Deliver the accepted pack, source dictionary and evaluation guide with campaign execution, academic changes and production analytics dependencies clearly outside the completed consulting pilot's acceptance claim.

Candidate qualifications

• Demonstrate director-level cohort economics, product P&L or commercial project delivery in education or a comparable consumer business. Provide a redacted intervention case personally designed and tested, with operating authority retained. Candidates must establish actual product-economic judgement rather than infer it from growth tenure, presentation quality or a director title alone.
• Show practical CAC, payback, contribution and retention analysis with source, timing and refund limitations understood. Explain a result that appeared positive but was not causally persuasive. The consultant must distinguish financial interpretation from academic, regulated or specialist product conclusions and keep customer-sensitive information within authorised minimum-use boundaries.
• Provide objective project acceptance evidence including controlled tests, failed assumptions and reviewer challenge. Describe how a fresh cohort exposed a weakness and what changed. The sponsor needs a method ordinary internal teams can maintain, not a static funnel dashboard or a promised retention improvement detached from experiment permissions and accountable product decisions.
• Establish eleven years of relevant experience, mature functional scope and a completed transfer of evaluation methods. Disclose agency, channel and competing-product remuneration, particularly incentives linked to the preferred intervention. The fixed project fee cannot become a success commission, and campaign or pricing implementation must remain separately approved rather than silently acquired through consulting involvement.

Application

Applications for this mandate are received in one way only: through the India Board Terminal's application process. It is automated end to end. Your Executive Passport travels to the mandate holder in its confidential form, your answers to the three questions below are read before anything else in your file, and every stage that follows is recorded on your applications page.

There is no address to write to and no intermediary to call. The mandate holder reads what the Terminal delivers and nothing else, which is what keeps the process the same for every applicant and keeps your name out of it until you release it. Applications close on 7 October 2026. Mandate reference PCT-CON-2026-IND-35.