Inside Duolingo Unhinged Growth to a $500M Business | Cem Kansu (Duolingo)

we initially designed you to be a motivating coach within the app but social media made it like this haunting person that if you don't do your lessons he will haunt you down that wasn't necessarily our creation but we certainly over time leaned into it like sometime we made it like really wrinkly sometimes melty is what we called it the face is melting the last one we did is like we made his face like look like he got sick like he had like boogers coming out of his nose and one thing we I would say we take pride in we use the term unhinged as a very posit POS thing like when someone says oh that change is unhinged at dueling that means you've done a good job like you've really unhinged this change like our app icon is one when Duo does something really weird in our app like we're like yeah cool that's really unhinged and when I talk to other companies I say yeah like one of our product philosophies is making things unhinged uh people are like is that a good thing like do you want to make the product unhinged but I think that's in way our philosophy I think it really builds character When You're Building Product by kind of breaking these sanitize product Norms well welcome everyone my guest today is Jam consu Head of product at dingo over eight years Jim helped dualingo grow to 100 million monthly active users and half a billion dollars in annual revenue I'm super excited to talk to Jim about dualing rapid growth and how they will use AI to democratize education so welcome Jim hey it's great to be here Peter all right so I grew up in China

and like try to learn mandering it's such a huge pain like you got to memorize all these words but I love this quote from your CEO that du lingo wants to make eating broccoli feel like eating ice cream and it does feel like using dingo it feels more like playing a game with a lot of rewards so I guess just use some game terminology like what do you think dualingo core Loop is to make learning fun I think our core loop at the end is the dualingo lesson so if you look at dual ino's homepage we follow a linear path similar to how a lot of games have been designed actually and um the linear path of completing a lesson and at the end of the lesson there's a lot of Celebration so uh there's various parts that become part of your core Loop when you compal a lesson you extend your daily streak as a core part of the dualingo retention mechanic another one is you complete it generally you start completing quests we give you a set of daily quests to complete that's another part of the core Loop but at the end we are here to teach you a language or now we also teach math and music as well actually but when you complete a lesson the reward is intrinsically what you came to do allo for which is learning the topic that you came here for and I think the quote you used is one of our I would say fundamental beliefs of Building Product at dual lingo we are certainly not the first or not necessarily the only product that teaches language there's actually a lot of products that teach language obviously and if you don't have to get very technological either like books will teach you a language like books actually teach languages really well but there's a reason no one learns languages just off of books because it's boring as and I think the reality is if for us to succeed in teaching you a subject it has to be fun so this like this is kind of why like we want to make eating broccoli which is learning something by yourself which is hard to motivate yourself to do feel like eating ice cream and we do that through making the whole experience more fun adding these game mechanics that are like the streak the quests the leaderboards and adding a lot of character to the whole experience with our mascot duo or our characters all of these are in the intent of making learning fun so let's talk about some of

these features you've added over the years I mean f first of all the company is like I think over a decade old and still growing 60% year-over-year which is it doesn't happen to a lot of companies right but if you look back at the eight years you've been there like what have been some of the key products or features that have really helped drive this growth or is just kind of a lot of experiments and up updates I think it's been it wasn't the case that one feature just changed all of our growth curves it's certainly been over time as multiple features got introduced and improved our growth kind of kept compounding that being said there certainly are a few what we call growth levers that we've built over time that are known to help dueling Go's growth one of them is the streak so the streak itself existed ever since we launched dualingo however it's changed a lot and improved a lot over time and to set the stage the streak is exactly what you would imagine it's the number of consecutive days that you have done a lesson on Dual lingo and it counts up the more you do it and it has this natural retention mechanic the higher you go you the less you want to stop using because you've already built a high streak and the streak is a metric that a lot of our users take pride in so it really builds longer term retention that compounds over time uh streak certainly has been powerful the over time we've improved it to be a lot more fun to use so it's like it's a lot more animated Now versus it was just a static image before it's a lot more shown in your daily experience on your homepage on your profile anyway those but the streak is one mechanic the other one is leaderboards it is just reality that if you see your name ranked on a list of other human names you the human nature compels you to not be at the bottom of that list you want to be towards the top and I think our leader boards have been a big motivator for our Learners to well just do more lessons and that's how you win leaderboards the more lessons you do the more uh XP you collect and the higher XP you have you can win your weekly leaderboard it's a weekly cycle but leaderboards have been a big growth lever for us as well third is push

notifications we are somewhat known at this point for having fully unhinged push notifications we have a various set of notifications but one of our notification that gets memed a lot in social media is our practice reminders so generally we send daily reminders because it really fits into the concept of learning you really learn the concept that you're learning like language or math or music much better if you do daily practice so we send daily reminders for our Learners to grow that daily habit and over time we realize if we write creative copy as written from the tone of Duo our mascot that performs better and that's a lot more delightful to receive rather than an app saying hey do your lesson so our push notifications have become quite improved over time it's a big lever for our growth we've also improved various things like how we use emojis the timing of notifications personalizing them anyway the list goes on but the one that is get that gets Meed a lot is what we call the passive aggressive notification if we send you a notification for a few days and you don't come back to the app we don't keep obviously spamming you forever we stop at some point and the last notification that you receive is meant to be like a text you receive from a significant other that is kind of pissed off it reads hi it's Duo these reminders don't seem to be working we'll stop sending them for now and this has taken a life on its own on if you kind of see this notification on Twitter Etc people have given this a lot of character but anyway it's it we tried to instill a lot of character and tone into our notifications and this is one of those that got a lot of attention the other part I would say for us is it's not exactly a growth lever as you would think as like something that is a game mechanic is obviously building better courses so it our courses are never static so if we have a French course it's not the same course all the time we keep making improvements to the course we sometimes add harder content so the course becomes longer or we improve for example various sections of the course over time if we can actually improve the content that makes it teach better and tailor the difficulty a little better to our Learners that also ends up helping our growth over time got it my guess is probably similar to like

retention for a typical app where the first few courses really matter right because I guess a lot of people cheering the first few courses so make them as use useful as you can 100% I mean it it's certainly well we for us actually there's the when you're a brand new beginner you know nothing about French and how we start teaching you matters a lot we have another challenge which is not everybody comes with zero knowledge of a language a lot of folks actually that are learning a language come with some level of knowledge like they might have taken two years of French in high school or their cousin was French they learned a little bit of French there's unlimited set of scenarios where you might know some and I think one of the challenges we try to solve is can we place you to the right place in the course where you are you're at the right place for how much and I think that's the other thing that we try to solve which is tailoring the experience to you based on how much French or if you're like intermediate Advanced can we get you to the right place it's a very hard problem actually but it certainly helps retention if you can kind of land the right person based on what they know to the right part of the courses got it and you've also done some pretty like deranged things like I remember you changed the icon of the app you change the out right you Chang the out to some like old hour or like someone the icon changed after people didn't use it for a while is that one of the things that you did yeah we've done that multiple times now actually and we've changed the app icon to effectively a state where dual looks messed up like that that's the intention to be very true is Duo has taken on this personality a little bit where some of it is our creation but users creation of this we initially designed you to be a motivating coach within the app but social media made it like this haunting person that if you don't do your lessons he will haunt you down that wasn't necessarily our creation but we certainly over time leaned into it anyway when Duo face icon changes for the entire user base so that's what the change is we change it for generally like a span of two to three weeks to be messed up like sometimes we made it like really wrinkly melty is what we call that the face is melting the last one we did is like we made his face like look like he got sick like he had like boogers coming out of his nose the trigger this has created is for users who have maybe like don't have the daily habit and they maybe forgot to do their lesson that day or that week or that month they felt like it was personalized to them and Duo is somehow pissed off at them for not doing their lesson so they come back think it's not personalized but it feels personalized when you feel some amount of guilt that do you didn't do your Spanish lesson and do was reacting to you and that feeling generally creates well people come back to the app and do their Fringe so that's kind of why we've done it yeah I think it's bretty man I think every other company is making their logo more and more boring right and you're giving Duo like some personality I mean that's genius I think yeah and one thing we I would say we take pride in which I've realized this is so normalized at dualingo but when I talk to other companies we use the term unhinged as a very positive thing like when someone says oh that change is unhinged at Duo that means you've done a good job like you've really unhinged this change like our app icon is one when Duo does something really weird in our app like we're like yeah cool that's really unhinged and I was when I talked to other companies I say yeah like one of our product philosophies is making things unhinged people are like is that a good thing like do you want to make the product unhinged but I think that's uh in a way our philosophy I think it really character When You're Building Product by kind of breaking these standard kind of sanitized product Norms yeah like I'm curious if this just so talk about this icon thing more like does this come from bottom up or like did the CEO want to do this cuz like a lot of these big companies there like it goes through committee review right and like something like this probably not make it through honestly I don't quite at this point with a lot of ideas that circle around the company I don't know actually what where the origination was but that being said we have a very centralized product review process and I can assure you when we reviewed the app icon and the feedback that we gave so we have a product review process where our CEO is involved in product review I'm involved our head of design is involved and there's various product leaders that are reviewers the Fe feedback we gave was that there was not enough booger it wasn't messed up enough so it's like there's certainly a lot of we're not trying to build just hygienic product we certainly have embraced the kind of the unhinged product building philosophy in our review process as well I think this idea itself originally was bottoms up but then eventually we got really excited so I don't know where it bounced in our process but there's a lot of ideas similar to this where someone was like wait games for example do a lot of Icon changes what if dual lingo did that and it probably baked over time into everyone's conscious yes it sounds like a fun place to work I mean unhinged I would say so that we strike well okay so let's talk about how

you guys grew RAV too because it's still growing like 40% year-over year and I I think the team tried many different things right before finding this freemale model that works we can walk us through how this whole journey that you went on yeah definitely and this ties back to my personal story dualingo a little bit too so I joined 2000 in 2016 when dualingo had no Revenue so dualingo had a growing user base and the wisdom at the time for most consumer products was just grow you'll figure out how to monetize later but 2016 was already five years into dueling go existance so it was time to figure out how to monetize and I worked on our three business lines so I worked on ads I worked on in that purchases and subscriptions it's funny because if you go way back and find dueling Go's launch video a lot of these have now been taken offline our CEO Louis has talks where he's saying dualingo will never have ads never inap purchases and never subscriptions and those are the three things I built in that order and the reason that he had this at least these statements at the time was education the common wisdom was you monetize your content there was really and there's still not many products that can do freemium but education is mainly monetized through you lock your content behind the pay wall and you charge for the content and in educ people pay for the content that's the standard exchange that everyone is used to we never wanted to do that because we stand for access to education so we always wanted to provide the education component of dualingo free and wanted to figure out how to charge for the bells and whistles of dualingo and that was why we tried ads which you ask no one to pay for anything and then that purchases which were very optional things like repair your streak if you give us $2 type of purchases then subscriptions and subscriptions when you have ads the easiest feature to start with is no ads and then we kept adding more and more features into the subscription that's over time defined our business model to be effectively premium and one of the benefits of that is we still don't charge for learning today so you can learn if you pay or not you can learn the same French either way so our users who pay and users who don't pay learn the same amount of French and it's been a lot of trial and error honestly I think we it's not in hindsight we can say yeah we had like this exact Vision I mean we kind of did but we had to test what works like how much ads hurt retention versus also piss our users off what kind of ads work best does it work on session start or session end like how much ad load is the right balance for an experience that we want to make really delightful and related to that how you talk about the subscription if you call it plus versus super what color should your purchase flow look anyway there's an unlimited amount of ab tests We've ran to figure out what works and that's been our journey I would say to get to where we are now which now subscriptions makes up more than 80% of dualingo Revenue and it's grown quite a bit over time so anyway so I think it's it hasn't been like one change we did it nailed it I think it was a constant experimentation that changes the feature set how it's promoted how it's talked about who it's surfaced to Etc like I do think like the premium subscription model is pretty common in gaming too right and in the future you can have how gaming subscriptions people complain when it's like pay to win but a lot of games are doing like more Aesthetics based subscriptions so maybe you can like let people like stress up the hour or something like or maybe you already have features like that yeah we don't I mean we actually used to have outfits for duo so that's a feature we used to have and now we have for cosmetic features we have avatars so you users can set avatars on their profiles these avatars would appear in our social surfes we have a set of social features like on leader boards this Avatar is the one that represents you there's a feed where it's very we have a congratulator feed so if you complete a 100 day streak I can congratulate you and you can see my avatar congratulating your avatar anyway we have we certainly have I would say Ambitions to grow our social surfaces and connected to that potentially build more cosmetic items to make these kind of visuals more exciting yeah that makes sense and like

going to the more recent years there's being a focus on International expansion right and like a lot of companies when they think International expansion they just think like let's localize our content or something but I think you guys have figured out like a more holistic strategy even beyond the product can you give a preview of that you certain Market yeah definitely so I think we do a few things so when we think about a market that dualingo doesn't have as much awareness or adoption we end up doing a few things one of them is we want to make sure we offer the language courses that market might need for example if you want to grow in Japan if you don't have a Japanese to English course meaning teaching English for people who know Japanese you're probably not going to grow so we want to make sure we have content coverage for us so we the product has to work for this Market that's one two is generally solve any product issues that might exist for to to give some examples in China you end up having to do very custom things for your product to a be able to work in China you need WeChat login Google plin doesn't work etc so does the product work properly in that market and let's solve all the either the performance issues or things that are blocker to usage is Step number two and I'll talk about all the product levers marketing levers second and then the third is making sure the product is localized properly uh sometimes when entering a new market and if the market adoption is low it tends to be the case that even the translations of the UI strings that we use aren't exactly great so the localization of the product itself has to be good but assuming the product works perfectly and you've tackled those I think the second one is just getting adoption I think we do a set of few things we don't spend heavily on marketing in any Market we are even for priority markets that we want to grow in one of our marketing playbooks is always doing unhinged stuff on social media Tik Tok has been a big lever for dual lingo as in well it started with the us but now over time we've also built local Tik Tok accounts that just build their own Tik Tok content that's the similar unhinged that we do in our main account from the US but they do it in Japanese in Japan Etc so few key markets actually now there's the number of Tik Tok accounts that are localized are growing so anyway social media and making sure it's local custom and unhinged I guess is one part of the Playbook some amount of Performance Marketing especially in the early adoption days we do but it's it ends up being a small percentage of our growth but it certainly helps kickart more adoption depending on the Market the marketing Playbook uh changes for example in Japan we do TV because TV is a is an important channel in Japan but we don't do tv anywhere else so depending on the market and what might work there we do that and then in some other markets again depending on what works in that market I think that's the thing we try to learn first before we had and apply the same Playbook everywhere we also work with social media influencers from time to carry over our unhinged brand into their audience yeah you wanted to become unhinged and go viral make some memes and that's how the word spreads right I think it's I mean yes in a way I think that works and it's not only we do unhinged stuff just to go viral I mean that's certainly part of the theme but it really also builds character meaning it also builds brand Affinity if we were if we didn't have Duo and if Duo didn't have so much character du lingo wouldn't be a loved brand as much as it is now so it builds this brand love for dualingo itself when we have when we take a stance on our brand and character rather than being super sanitized and say yes we are the education app so we never want to take ourselves seriously because it really builds a better brand if you're a bit more unhinged and have more character is at least our belief yeah I totally agree okay so let's talk about

AI so I saw some random tweets from random people saying like oh open ey now has realtime translation like it's game over for dingo I love to hear your thoughts on that or it's like just people's concerns I I this question so yeah the and we get this a lot and it's what open AI is able to do is also amazing that being said I do also believe when people say dualingo is doomed they're making this assumption that no one will need to learn languages I think that is a very unrealistic assumption and here's why real-time translation tools have been around for a long time like Google translate can do a real-time translation quite well actually and it's been able to do that for a long time that has not reduced the need to learn languages the same the demand has for learning languages has only gone up over time it certainly has not gone down this is very similar to having calculators does not reduce the need to learn math it's a very similar problem and with simult like with real-time translation the one other challenge that you end up having is even if you can do the most instant the best translation a lot of languages you need to complete a full sentence receive that sentence to be translated back to a different language because the order of where the verb is and how it's structured might need to be reversed for the other language so you end up having this lag I'm saying all to say there's still even with the best translation services there's still the challenge that you can't go get a knowledge job with a simultaneous translation service because would you want to work with someone that has a I don't know a 15-second lag in every interaction for now that I don't think humans want that today um that's one the other one is the other challenge is there's many other reasons to language other than just be transactional with other humans it's very hard for us to even pinpoint like the top reasons to people learn a language on dualingo because it's incredibly longtail and Branch tail they might connect with their Heritage they might have relatives that speak Spanish that they want to get few words with they want the authentic experience of ordering their cappuccino in Italian all of these are still not solved with real-time language translation the second part so we also then I'll expand on your question is not just translation but oh now ai tools can teach language like you can actually learn language by talking to chat GPT and it's awesome that you can do that the I'll refer to my original example there are also books that teach you a language why have books not disrupted language learning because it's boring so unless every experience we build on top of our learning which is the every kind of fun element we talked about even including Duo doing really weird to our streak our game mechanic and the whole experience of dualingo is really one of our core differentiators like we make learning fun and until a tool can do that very well it's hard to see how dingo would get entirely replaced with AI yeah I think learning a language or learning something new is like it's like work working out right you got to do it for like a long time to actually see results so these other products are already optimized for that so exactly and people learn languages like a lot of folks learn languages for brain training reasons AI isn't exactly the simultaneous translation that AI can do doesn't replace that but AI is probably a game changer inside dualo itself right you're probably using it to do a lot of stuff if you can cover some how you're using AI to make the product better we do use AI for sure I would say we use generally AI is used for two main reasons at duelingo today the list is technically longer but the two big ones that have been I would say transformational at least in the past few years is one is content creation and the second one is building interactive features using generative AI content creation if you think about a dualingo course so let's say the dualingo course that teaches English to French it used to be the case that it would take many human hours to write all that content out and then if you also want to change it you would rewrite the whole thing out again um like if you want to AB test for example a new way to teach past tense you would rewrite the whole content again so that's the it's many hours spent and any improve you Improvement you make is again many hours spent by humans now we can use we're not at a point where you press a button and you generate a dualing course entirely on generative AI however a lot of our hours have now been reduced because you can generate much quicker content using generative Ai and then you can prompt and edit a bit to get to final State rather than doing everything by hand so content creation has gotten much faster and it has enabled us to launch courses faster make improvements to the courses faster so the whole machine of content creation at dualingo has gained insane speed in the past two years uh because we now use generative AI to generate a lot of our content the second one is I

would say interactive features so one feature we're very excited about that we launched recently is what we're calling video call so it mimics exactly a video call experience where you call one of our characters her name is Lily she is the character's Vibe is she's an emo teenage character that kind of doesn't care is her vibe but that's kind of the fun character we gave Lily but the idea is you call Lily since we know how much Spanish because we know how where you are on your course Spanish or French whatever language you're learning we tailor the vocabulary that Lily is using and the speed that she talks to your proficiency level and you can practice conversation with her exactly as you would with a real human that you would have video called in Spanish or in French whatever language you're learning it's really been transformational to teach speaking one of our challenges for teaching conversation has always been mimicking a real life conversation and previous kind of chatbot like experiences we've created were always kind of too dumb and but I think now with the gp4s of the world it's actually quite smart so we can tailor this and you can have an almost an entirely free form conversation that's tailored to your Spanish level so it's not too hard it's not too easy using Ai and that's unlock this massive use case that we always wanted to get better at which is conversation practice yeah so anyway long story short those have been quite transformational to how we build product here yeah I'm like really impressed by I haven't played with it myself but I saw some videos oh you have to it's really good it's good and yeah it's like it has like lady seems to have a lot of good personality maybe you can give us like a brief inside look at how this product was was built like what had me some of the challenges like any kind of story you can tell around this yeah so the whole story about this feature actually started with another feature we have which is called roleplay and that is a text based version of what you it's not exactly video call but it's a text based back and forth where you practice conversation and that was now we had we rolled that it's called roleplay it's part of dualingo Max our subscription product and it's we put you into a scenario and say okay you're at a cafe order coffee from this Barista and then you chat you effectively type and you go back and forth ordering your coffee we realized that was really good for producing language but since it's typing based and we G we still give you the options to speak and type but when you have the typing option you people are just going to type because imagine a language you're not comfortable in typing is going to be much easier than just speaking out loud so you people default to typing and typing does not train your conversation skills as well so when we built the typing version we really liked it and it's still live but I we thought we could improve it and over time as also the llms and G of AI improved the output they provide the latency of these products we wanted to prototype something that is speaking based like full speaking based and the one thing we wanted to avoid is making it look like a dualingo lesson we really wanted to mimic as real life as possible so we prototype ended up prototyping a much uglier version of what we have now which was you talk to Lily there's a phone call sound so when you call her feels like a call she answers the phone and then you're in a conversation the thesis is we want to mimic real world as much as possible because that's when you really learn how to converse if we make it easier and we give you a lot of scaffolding for example we don't put text we you cannot read what she's saying that's very intentional even though it would make it much easier it also doesn't help train your conversation skills as much on top of that to make it also feel like you're calling your friend she's actually a little sarcastic as well as you talk to her so uh sometimes she will make sarcastic comments and spontaneously say Teenage things because that's her personality anyway all of these have been intentional and they've kind of been added over time like we started with some amount of prompting to what we think Lily should be but then we've iterated on so we've been working on it for a year now we've iterated on it many times and our process has been we have a thesis we prompt it we test it internally if we like it that goes out to our Learners and then if we don't or we keep actually like our internal abills almost every few days just get a new version of Lilia that we're testing we're trying to make it more delightful smarter one of the new additions we did was memory so she now has a memory of your previous calls so if you tell her I'm going to Mexico next week if you talk to her next week she'll be like are you ready for your trip to Mexico are you in Mexico anyway so she kind of keeps track of what you've told her which has been a big upgrade anyway the list goes on but I think our goal is to continuously make it better because we really believe this is the future of how people will learn how to speak languages yeah and did you also like R out some beta partners or beta customers and or like how do you know when it was ready for release cuz this AI stuff it's like very iterative it can go off the rails or maybe you wanted to be unhinged like how do you know when is actually ready yeah we want we certainly are okay with unhinged but we certainly also put some guard rails so it doesn't hallucinate that being said so we work with open AI for this feature video call and I mean they've I think they also care a lot about guardrails so they've they put a lot of guardrails to the output that being said how we test we first test internally everything I think that we now have 800 employees not everyone tests every feature but a lot of our employees are very much daily users of dualingo we have we keep streaks as well in internally We Care streak is a bit of a social status here and inside the company so a lot of people test our products and dog food so dog fooding is Phase One generally if dog fooding goes well and that's where we refine a lot of our features we do AB testing at small rollouts so we do a small rollout see how it performs both qualitatively and quantitatively and then increase roll out over time so I think that's been our approach okay let's talk about your product culture a b more just WRA wrap up like I've worked at companies where like PMS have this like love

hate ratio of AB testing right because like you can easily just abest something and then just launch it to get some quity Milestone or metric right but so you guys have this really strong AB culture but you also believe in taking a Long View the app is beautiful and fun so how do you kind of balance these two things I think a lot of companies have trouble with this yeah I think let me see I don't know if we have a silver bullet but you are certainly right that we try to balance rapid AB testing but not rapid AB testing our way into insanity and shitty product features so one is cultural so we really have instilled from our CEO to leadership and to every product manager designer engineer so everyone that works on the product that quality matters so it's we wouldn't roll out something or or launch something just because it moves metrics because that's how you test your way into really shitty product right like you can send an extra notification that will move your daily active users you can send one more two more five more 10 more but at some point people are going to delete your app so there's certainly going to be AB testing will drive you to insane weird shitty experiences so I think what we do generally is culturally we have this understanding that like we got hold the bar somewhere related to culture we have a central product review process where the same group of leaders review every change that go into the app so that builds consistency so generally and product review holds a very high bar for introducing something that might feel spammy to our users so adding an extra notification another badge somewhere Etc all of these we take really great care and end up like if even if teams want to push forward we end up saying this is too spammy we should not do this and even we don't end up saying that a lot I think a lot of the teams have instilled that they like we really care about building quality experiences yeah that's the other one three is I think it's we have this operating principle this maybe goes back to cultural and connects that we call Take the Long View so you can always optimize metrics in the short term like you can get more users by sending more notifications you can increase your Revenue by building kind of like slightly obscured purchase flows Etc but this really only helps you in the short term but everybody knows that if you want to build a hundar company which is the something we have we aspire to do you have to build things that are tasteful for the user and I think that's ingrained in I would say kind of everyone's mind yeah I think like Roblox the company I work for also has the same view Take the Long View exact same principle actually um is it the same words you guys say Take the Long View that's awesome yeah but I think it's it also comes down to incentives right like I think like you know do you promote these PMS for like not shipping anything like I think there's a really good example someone gave me at ROBLOX like at ROBLOX you can like not ship anything for several quarters or not move a match for several quarters and then in the fourth quarter or like then all of a sudden it moves a lot like that is something that you don't have to like try to optimize try to improve everything every qu quarter oh yeah I'm just CU like now that you're the head of the product like how do you reward the right behaviors is just kind of Common Sense do right behaviors yeah no I mean we reward the combo of both business impact and quality product building I think in the absence of one and just the other for example if you work on a lot of stuff and you build really quality things but you don't ship anything and you don't execute well that's not a that's we can't call that a win or if you have a lot of business impact but you've really tried spamming your users to get impact well we can't reward that either I think we want to reward the combo of you understand what a quality experience for users mean and using your high quality bar you build impactful features that drive business impact that's what we really reward for product management here and I would say it's worked out well and PM design engineering very similar philosophy so our product teams end up having to balance both it's not super easy so I'm not going to make it sound like we figured it out it's the perfect formula sometimes it does Clash when you have a business metric that you really want to drive but I think generally that tension between the two or tension or kind of the balance works out well and like reflecting back on your eight years at dualingo I'm sure you've uh managed a

lot of PMS coached do you have any like closing words of advice for prodct folks watching this interview how they can have a fulfilling career how they can become a little bit unhinged do you have any good advice for them yeah a few bullet points I always end up saying one of them is especially if you're building consumer experiences understanding mobile design if you're building mobile or just general good user design becomes a major differentiator for product managers that go a long way I think there's a lot of product managers that I think end up having a hard time when they are so removed from the pixels I think good products really live and die in the pixels and I think PMS can't just at the spec level like I wrote the strategy I don't know what the design is going to look like can't be a winning combo for PMS that's certainly not the case at dualingo we so having a good eye or a good understanding of good user experiences really helps certainly we don't expect our PMS to be like designers themselves where they can go design the best flow but they should really understand what great design looks like and they can tell like if the copy off is a little bit or if a pixel doesn't look great they should have that eye as much as or as close to a great ux designer would so I think that's one advice I give and that's one area we train a lot of our PMS to get better at as well um that's one the other one is optimizing for business impact so I think we talked about this a minute ago which is a PM career Arc if you look at PMS that have done various things in their career a lot of times you want to make sure you can I mean the one metric that really matters is driving business impact and making change business impact doesn't have to be dollars users a would also be solving your hard business problem but I think you want to be at a place or at a team at an org at a company where you feel like you're working on impactful things I think that really matters in building a good career Arc that you feel good about and that will teach you more than like for example projects that take a long time and might not be the kind of the impactful work that you're excited about so being excited and having kind of clear impact on the company or the product is matters and important the third one is I I always recommend optimize for Learning and the one of the best ways to learn is trial and error so product management you can't read a book or take a course and learn what how everybody learns is apprenticeship an apprenticeship is getting your hands dirty and to learn faster what at least we have seen is the more trial and error and at bats you get the faster you learn so the more experiments you run the more specs you write the more productiv you present anything like anything that comes with the core job if you can do that at a higher volume be there like do it because for sure your career Arc will move faster yeah I love those so like just kind of recap like you got to have a high design taste high ux quality you gotta have impact I mean you got to ship you gotta ship have impact if you don't ship exactly yeah because I think that's really good advice because uh a lot of times like it really runs me the wrong way when like a lot of times this PMS just like they have some like strategy document or like some like threeyear plan or something and just like spend time like they don't give a about the actual product man they don't care about the copy or anything just on a strategy document and I'm like dude like next month you're GNA learn something new that completely invalidates your threeyear strategy so exactly the strategy documents go kind of useless in three months has been my experience especially if you're at a fast moving org or the other thing that Rod me the wrong way is I see a lot of PM resumes that say their main accomplishment was aligning stakeholders like present it to the CEO what was the product you shipped so your the career Arc that really matters for product management is what have you shipped yeah man let's Chang the culture together I'm glad to have this yeah cool well this is awesome where can people find you j or they're more about doing I am on LinkedIn and Twitter both active on both so people can find me in either of those places it's j my name and last name so jeem consu in either of these platforms awesome this is awesome chat thanks so much for your time CH yeah thank you Peter this was awesome