Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com)
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Growth as the job is to connect users to the value of your product. Growth sometimes gets this reputation that it's just pure metrics hacking. You worked at three of the most successful consumer subscription products in the world. What do you think is the biggest missing piece that people don't get about building a successful consumer subscription product? User retention is gold for consumer subscription companies. If you don't retain your users, then a lot of the onus is on getting them to pay on day one. Noam Lavinsky, he said that I need to ask you about the biggest monetization win that you found at Grammarly. The lived product experience for most of the free users was that Grammarly was just a product to fix your selling in Grammar because those were the free suggestions. What if we actually sampled a number of different paid suggestions and interspersed them to free users across their writing? All of a sudden, people were seeing Grammarly as a much more powerful tool than they were before. What's the most counterintuitive lesson you've learned about building teams? I saw some of the highest performers just being people that had very high agency, had that clock speed, had that energy, but they didn't necessarily need to have deep experience on that matter. Sometimes experience could be a crutch, especially in this world where the grounds are shifting so fast with AI. A lot of your learned habits actually need to be intentionally discarded. Today, my guest is Albert Chang. Albert is known as one of the top consumer growth minds in the world. He led growth and monetization at three of the most successful and beloved consumer products in the world, Duolingo Grammarly and Outchest.com. Earlier in his career at YouTube, he worked on streaming and gaming features used by over 20 million people. His unique approach to growth blends marketing, data, strategy, and product management. And in our conversation, we cover a lot of ground, including his explore and exploit framework to find growth opportunities, his biggest and most interesting growth wins at Duolingo Grammarly and Chest.com, how he uses AI to accelerate his growth work, what he's come to realize about the power of brand and community in your growth work, his top experimentation best practices, why his goal at every company is to run 1,000 experiments a year, and so much more, a huge thank you to Eric Alabest, Nomlevinsky, and Jorge Mazal for suggesting topics for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get 15 incredible products for free for an entire year, including lovable, replant, bolt, N&M, linear superhuman view script, which overflow gamma perplexity, warp granola magic patterns, raycast, chapter D, and mobbin. Head on over to lenniesnewsletter.com and click product pass. With that, I bring you Albert Chain. My podcast guests and I love talking about craft and taste and agency and product market fit. You know what we don't love talking about? SOC 2. That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta helps companies of all sizes get compliant fast and stay that way with industry-leading AI, automation, and continuous monitoring. Whether you're a startup tackling your first SOC 2, or ISO 27001, or an enterprise managing vendor risk, Vanta's trust management platform makes it quicker, easier, and more scalable.
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