PRODUCTHEAD is a regular newsletter of product management goodness,
curated by Jock Busuttil.
product falling into place #
every PRODUCTHEAD edition is online for you to refer back to
tl;dr
Dissect your monolithic metrics to drive growth in more easily influenced segments
Don’t kill the golden goose of growth by oversaturating a channel
If growth is your goal, have a sense of urgency
hello
At some point or another, you’ve probably encountered Duolingo, the language learning app. Even if you’ve not used it directly (or seen the memes), you’ve probably heard about how the company dramatically turned around its stagnant user growth.
This week I’ve pulled together a few perspectives that describe how Duolingo has gone about this. As should be a standard disclaimer by now: don’t copy and paste other company’s strategies unthinkingly. What worked at Duolingo in their context is not guaranteed to work in your organisation’s context.
First up chronologically is lead data scientist Erin Gustafson. She talks through how they broke up their monolithic daily active users (DAU) metric into smaller segments that they could hopefully influence more easily (spoiler alert: they could). Interestingly, she also notes how one of the new segmented metrics (current user retention rate or CURR) is becoming its own monolith (90% of DAU), leading to a similar problem as they had before.
Next up is Jorge Mazal, former CPO of Duolingo writing for Lenny’s Newsletter. He shares the different approaches they tried to reignite growth from 2018 onwards, what failed miserably, what was mediocre and what really unlocked growth for them.
Among the many insights, he shares a cautionary tale of how Groupon killed one of their vectors for growth. Emailing users once a day worked well to keep them engaged, but when they started emailing users too often they opted out and that channel ceased to be effective. Even if you discover a relationship between an activity and growth, it doesn’t mean it will scale linearly for ever.
VP of Engineering Sean Colombo continues Jorge’s story and adds more detail from the development perspective. He highlights the importance of the urgency to drive compound growth, and how they achieved that by running experiments with as many users as possible and launching on their biggest platforms first. (Some may consider these approaches risky. Again, your mileage may vary.)
Speak to you soon,
Jock
what to think about this week
Meaningful metrics: How data sharpened the focus of product teams
Our business grows because learners love our product and spread the word to their family and friends, some of whom eventually download the app and subscribe. Rather than investing marketing dollars to drive immediate revenue, we play the long game.
Sounds great, right? But maintaining a healthy ecosystem of Daily Active Users (DAUs) at various points in their lifecycle is a delicate balance.
How do you decide on the metrics that matter?
[Erin Gustafson / Duolingo]
How Duolingo reignited user growth
In this post I’ll cover some of our early failures and then our first big wins that helped us turn around growth, including launching leaderboards, refocusing on push notifications, and optimizing the “streak” feature. These, together with several other efforts across Product and Marketing, helped us grow DAU by 4.5x over four years.
Dramatic growth and a more ideal customer base
[Jorge Mazal / Lenny’s Newsletter]
How a sense of urgency leads to growth at Duolingo
At the start of 2022, we combined several growth-related teams into a single “Growth Area” at Duolingo in order to ensure one area of responsibility with the shared goal of growing DAUs. As a co-lead of this new Growth Area, and having worked on growth at Duolingo for four years at that point, I made a doc called “Colombo’s Musings on Growth” with some opinions on what I felt was driving our growth and how we could keep up the momentum.
How to move quickly and strive for growth without sacrificing quality
[Sean Colombo / Duolingo]
upcoming events
TODAY: 4 valuable product & culture lessons from UK government digital teams
Tuesday 9 September @ 16:00 (UK) / 17:00 (Berlin)
How digital teams in UK government used open working, transparency and continuous improvement to transform the culture there. The four lessons are:
- Build a community to multiply learning
- Work in the open, it makes things better
- Have shared principles to guide you
- Seek to improve people, process and product continuously
[Product People]
recent posts
What to expect from your face-to-face product manager interview
Your product manager interview is as much about you getting to know your interviewers as it is the other way around. Here’s what you can expect along with my tips for standing out from the crowd.
Go a bit meta and challenge the premise of the exercise
[I Manage Products]
Moving up to a CPO or VP Product role
Stepping up to a Chief Product Officer (CPO) or VP Product role doesn’t so much change what you do. Rather it amplifies everything. This guide lets you know what to expect.
Liberating and terrifying in equal measure
[I Manage Products]
I want to update my pricing strategy. Where do I start?
“My product currently has one tier of per-seat pricing for all customers. I want to change my pricing strategy to cater differently for SMEs and enterprise customers. Where do I start?”
A few pricing concepts to consider + further reading
[I Manage Products]
can we help you?
Product People is a product management services company. We can help you through consultancy, training and coaching. Just contact us if you need our help!
Helping people build better products, more successfully, since 2012.
PRODUCTHEAD is a newsletter for product people of all varieties, and is lovingly crafted from a sudden resumption in state-sponsored childcare.