Fifteen minutes
That’s how much uninterrupted time I get on a good day. Maybe it’s the S-Bahn from Zürich HB to the office. Maybe it’s the tail end of a nap that went longer than expected. Maybe my wife took both kids to the playground and I’m standing in the kitchen with my phone and a cold coffee.
I have two young kids. I work full-time as a Product Manager at Axpo, one of the larger energy companies in Switzerland. My calendar is wall-to-wall from 8 to 6 — roadmaps, stakeholder meetings, sprint reviews. After that it’s dinner, bath, stories, teeth, the long negotiation about whether we really need water again or if this is a stalling tactic.
So when do I study for IT certifications?
In those fifteen-minute gaps. On the train. In the waiting room at the pediatrician. During that brief window after both kids are asleep but before I’m too tired to think.
This is not a complaint. I like my job. I like my kids. But it means any study method that requires me to sit at a desk for two hours with a textbook is already dead on arrival.
The cost problem
At Axpo, like most large companies, IT certifications matter. They show up in job descriptions, in project staffing decisions, in conversations about who’s qualified to lead a cloud migration. If you’re a PM working with technical teams — and I am — having a cert or two signals that you speak the language, not just the slide decks.
The problem is what it costs to get there.
A training course runs anywhere from 500 to 2,000 CHF. That’s for a few days of instructor-led content that you may or may not retain. Some employers cover it. Some don’t. Either way, it’s a lot of money for something that amounts to “someone talked at you for 16 hours.”
Then there are the prep exams. The decent ones cost 30 to 50 CHF per set. You burn through one in an evening. Want to practice across all exam domains? That’s three or four sets. Suddenly you’ve spent 150 CHF on practice before you’ve even booked the real exam.
And the exam itself is another 150 to 300 CHF, depending on the vendor and level.
Add it up and a single certification can cost over 2,000 CHF. For a piece of knowledge you could, in theory, just learn.
The phone in my pocket
Here’s the part that actually made me angry.
I’d buy a prep exam set, open it on my phone on the train — the one time I actually have to study — and the interface would be unusable. Tiny buttons. Horizontal scrolling. Tables that ran off the screen. Answer explanations that required pinching and zooming to read.
These tools were built for someone sitting at a desk with a 27-inch monitor. That person has two hours to study. I have fifteen minutes on a moving train while trying not to miss my stop.
I tried three or four different platforms. Same story. Desktop-first, mobile-as-afterthought. Some didn’t even have a mobile layout — just the desktop version scaled down until everything was unreadable.
The whole thing felt backwards. The people who need certification prep the most — working professionals with limited time — are the people least likely to be sitting at a desk with nothing else to do.
How I actually learn
When I was studying for the Azure Fundamentals exam — the AZ-900 — I noticed something about my own process.
I’d start a topic by reading Microsoft’s documentation. Fine. Useful. But I wouldn’t actually know anything until I started answering questions about it. Being wrong, reading the explanation, and getting it right next time — that’s where the learning happened.
Not in the video. Not in the slides. In the mistake.
I started skipping courses entirely and going straight to practice questions. When I got something wrong, I’d read the explanation, go back to the docs if I needed to, and move on. It was faster. It stuck better. And it fit into fifteen minutes.
I passed the AZ-900. Not because I’d watched 30 hours of video content. Because I’d answered hundreds of questions and paid attention to why I got things wrong.
That was the proof of concept. Not for a product — just for a method. Practice-first studying works, especially when your time is carved into thin slices.
What didn’t exist
After the AZ-900, I started thinking about what the ideal tool would look like for someone in my situation.
It would work on a phone. Not “technically render on a phone” — actually be designed for it. Thumb-friendly. Readable without zooming. Something you could use one-handed on the S-Bahn.
It would be affordable. Not 50 CHF per practice set you’d exhaust in two sessions. Something that let you practice across an entire exam without mental accounting on whether each session was “worth it.”
It would measure whether you’re actually ready, not just how many questions you’ve answered. A percentage score on a fixed question set tells you very little once you’ve seen those questions twice. I wanted something closer to what the GRE or GMAT does — readiness scoring based on Item Response Theory, where the system models your ability against the exam’s difficulty threshold.
And it would adapt. If I’m strong on one domain and weak on another, stop quizzing me on the strong one. Put the hard questions in front of me. Use adaptive difficulty to make every one of those fifteen minutes count.
I looked for this tool. It didn’t exist.
So I built it
I’m a product manager, not a developer by trade. But I know how to scope a product, validate a problem, and find the right people to build with. The problem was clear because I was the user.
Pass-IT started as the app I wished I’d had during the AZ-900. Practice questions generated from official vendor documentation — not recycled dumps that go stale when a service updates. Explanations for every option, not just the correct one. Why A is right, and specifically why B, C, and D are wrong. That’s where the learning happens.
Seven question types, because real exams aren’t all multiple choice. Multiple response, ordering, matching, drag-and-drop, fill-in-the-blank, matrix questions. If the exam uses it, the prep should too.
The readiness scoring runs on IRT — the same math behind the GRE and GMAT. It doesn’t just count right answers. It models your ability per domain, accounts for question difficulty, and tells you whether you’d pass if you sat the exam today. That’s the question nobody else was answering.
And it works on a phone. That wasn’t a feature. That was the whole point.
Where things are
Pass-IT covers over 90 certifications now, across seven vendors — Microsoft, CompTIA, Google Cloud, AWS, Snowflake, Databricks, and HashiCorp. The questions track the official documentation, so when a vendor updates a service, the content reflects it.
It’s bootstrapped. Just me, from Zürich. No venture funding, no growth team. I built it because I needed it, and it turns out other people — working parents, professionals studying on the side, people with fifteen minutes and a phone — need it too.
There’s a free trial. No credit card required. I’ve always hated the model where you hand over payment details before you’ve seen whether the thing works.
I’m still a PM at Axpo. I still take certifications. I still study on the train. The difference is that now the tool I’m using was actually built for the way I study — in short bursts, on a small screen, learning from my mistakes.
If that sounds like your situation, it might be worth a look.
