Cem Kansu’s Post

One of the most important metrics we've developed at Duolingo is "Time Spent Learning Well." It's a proxy metric that helps us make sure we're optimizing for learning as well as growth. Learning how to develop proprietary metrics that fit your specific business is important for any successful product team. It wasn't easy to get here! Rachel Salvador, one of our Senior PMs, does a great job explaining how we developed TSLW and what we've learned about the Duolingo experience since implementing it: https://lnkd.in/dh9U4Yc4

I am constantly thinking about how to foster innovation in my product organization. Building teams that are experts at execution is the easy part—when there’s a clear problem, product orgs are great at coming up with smart solutions. But it’s impossible to optimize your way into innovation. You can’t only rely on incremental improvement to keep growing. You need to come up with new problem spaces, rather than just finding better solutions to the same old problems. So, how do we come up with those new spaces? Here are a few things I’m trying at Duolingo: 1. Innovation needs a high-energy environment, and a slow process will kill a great idea. So I always ask myself: Can we remove some of the organizational barriers here? Do managers from seven different teams really need to say yes on every project? Seeking consensus across the company—rather than just keeping everyone informed—can be a major deterrent to innovation. 2. Similarly, beware of defaulting to “following up.” If product meetings are on a weekly cadence, every time you do this, you are allocating seven days to a task that might only need two. We try to avoid this and promote a sense of urgency, which is essential for innovative ideas to turn into successes. 3. Figure out the right incentive. Most product orgs reward team members whose ideas have measurable business impact, which works in most contexts. But once you’ve found product-market fit, it is often easiest to generate impact through smaller wins. So, naturally, if your org tends to only reward impact, you have effectively incentivized constant optimization of existing features instead of innovation. In the short term things will look great, but over time your product becomes stale. I try to show my teams that we value and reward bigger ideas. If someone sticks their neck out on a new concept, we should highlight that—even if it didn’t pan out. Big swings should be celebrated, even if we didn’t win, because there are valuable learnings there. 4. Look for innovative thinkers with a history of zero-to-one feature work. There are lots of amazing product managers out there, but not many focus on new problem domains. If a PM has created something new from scratch and done it well, that’s a good sign. An even better sign: if they show excitement about and gravitate toward that kind of work. If that sounds like you—if you’re a product manager who wants to think big picture and try out big ideas in a fast-paced environment with a stellar mission—we want you on our team. We’re hiring a Director of Product Management: https://lnkd.in/dQnWqmDZ #productthoughts #innovation #productmanagement #zerotoone

Join us as we build the future of education and make it more fun! 💚🦉💚

Duolingo's Q1 results are in, and 2024 is looking good! I’m particularly excited about the increased rollout of Duolingo Max, our highest subscription tier with generative AI features. We’re also making some exciting improvements to Family Plan that will make it easier (and more fun) to study with the people you love. Read more from Luis von Ahn in his letter to shareholders: https://lnkd.in/dyNBnBRW #earningsreport #quarterlyresults

We recently outlined our best-practices for a successful product review at Duolingo. I imagine these could work at any product organization, so I thought I’d share them! Special shoutout to Natalia Castillejo for articulating these so clearly. Here are the 3 big guidelines we share with our teams: ☝️Present a single direction with conviction - This means: Bring one single proposal to product review rather than a menu of options. This will improve clarity. - Show ownership over the direction, and frame your proposal with conviction: “We propose XYZ as the best course of action and seek your approval.” - Asking reviewers to pick options for you or brainstorm solutions to your problem can be perceived as “delegating upwards”. 🧠 Propose changes that you have conviction in - Any changes should come from a clear insight and a deep understanding of the problem and goals. - Sometimes leadership makes an offhand comment or request, but they won’t have all the context! If you hear feedback that you disagree with, explain why you think differently and propose a better alternative. - Reviewers may not always agree with your pushback, but advocating for what you believe in shows ownership and improves decision-making. - After presenting your case, listen to the feedback and recap next steps. This may mean that you “disagree and commit.” 🧱Be concrete and avoid “approval by parts” - It’s easier to give feedback on concrete designs than explanations of designs. So, if you want design feedback, show the exact designs or prototypes that you plan to show our users. - Avoid asking design visualization questions like “would this be better if I swapped the illustration”. Visualizing big design changes is hard. Ask reviewers to clarify what’s not working, but don’t expect them to approve big design changes before seeing them. We’re hoping these guidelines streamline our review process and ensure that all of our PMs get the quality feedback they need to ship the next big thing! (P.S.: We're hiring a Director of Product Management! https://lnkd.in/dcEXqqEW) #productreview #productmanagement #bestpractices

I’m really excited by the ways Duolingo’s reach is evolving with the introduction of our Math and Music courses. We’re now poised to grow from a language learning app into an education company, and that has the capacity to truly increase our impact on the world. After 10 years of working on language, making learning a fun, daily habit, we knew these new courses would benefit from some tried-and-true features: 🔥 Streak, for the motivation to keep coming back every day 🛡 Leaderboards, which give a sense of achievement—and competition 👯♀️ Social features, that make solo learning into a team sport Of course, not everything we created for language can simply be ported over to new subjects. We are continuing to develop new features, as we figure out what the equivalent of Stories might be for Math, or Match Madness for Music. The new subjects also created unique challenges for the overall design of the app. Here are 2 that stick out: 🎼 Re-orienting for Music: Duolingo has always been an app that is vertically-oriented… until we needed to put a piano keyboard on screen. That requires you to hold the phone horizontally, and this changed our entire visual language!  👉 Non-verbal communication: Both Math and Music required us to expand the gestures learners could use in the app. For learners working out math problems, we introduced the ability to write with your finger. For Music, we needed to incorporate new interactions that helped teach rhythm, which is a crucial part of music. Tackling these challenges has been fun and exciting, and it is inspiring to watch these newborn courses start to take off. We’re seeing a growing number of multi-subject users—those who are learning a language plus math or a language plus music. Interestingly, these people seem to use the app more regularly than single-subject users (possibly because they can take a break from one when it gets challenging by switching to the other!). There are more amazing developments on the horizon. But what’s clear is that if we can do even half of what we’ve done with language with these new subjects, we’ll have put our mark on the world of education as a whole. Want to help Duolingo reach more learners? We're hiring for Product Managers in our NYC and Pittsburgh offices: https://lnkd.in/deC2Rctf #duolingo #edtech #learnings #productmanagement #productinnovation

Our VP of Product Engineering Sean Colombo shared the key growth lessons he's learned during his time at Duolingo, including how we found and expanded on our strategic advantage: