YouSaid · the spoken record

Albert Cheng

lines on the record: 103
first: 2025-10-05
most recent: 2025-10-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, thanks for having me. This was great. You can find me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Not a super active poster, but I read it all the time. If there's something that I said today that resonates with you and you just want to get in touch, trade notes, feel free to reach out.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Terrible compared to serious, serious players, but quite good compared to the casual ones. Yeah. Okay. The rating is about 1,800.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As I was thinking about my piano stories, I also remember that my mom used to have a quote that's just, she just said, like, nothing is more important than your reputation. And she used to say this. And I think the charitable understanding of this is that a lot of the small decisions that you make each day, how do you treat people? How do you show up? What's your character, et cetera, they can compound and they open doors for you? many surprising and amazing ways, right? Like a lot of these companies that have actually joined have come through relatively light connections and even just being on this podcast, right? I think I've seen a number of folks that I've worked with before be on this show. And so I think. Knowing the right thing, building a good reputation that can”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so last 20 years of my life, roughly, I've moved around a lot, but I've always been within walking distance of a coffee shop. It's just like a ritual that I go and get coffee and it starts my day right. Two years ago, I bought a house. And for the first time ever in my life, I'm like, not buy a coffee shop. And I was so depressed about this for a little while. So my favorite product is the Bred Bull barista. And it just starts my day off, right? I like making horrible latte art with it. And I think it's just a reminder. I don't know. Products that most impact me, I guess, are the ones that I use all the time. It's a daily habit and then the most caffeine. You got it.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know this is your team. The 49ers. I have season tickets, and I go all the time. We had a rough season last year, so hoping to turn around.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, these days it's football season, so I'm consumed by all the hot takes of my favorite teams that I love and the teams I love to hate as well.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our co founder at chess.com. His name's Danny Wrench, and he is quite well known in the chess circles. He's releasing a memoir called Dark Squares, and it is super fascinating. He grew up in an abusive cult. And was a chess prodigy. And so it is just this like. Unbelievable story, and I'm about halfway through it. It's a reminder that sometimes the people that you work with, you don't realize how deep their pasts go. But this is something else. And I think it should be out by the time this podcast releases.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's interesting. So it's 40 years old, but it's just packed with a bunch of different practical examples about copying and creative that work. And, you know, these are old school ads, right? But he took a very experimentation oriented approach to just try a lot of things. I think in the book, it makes a good reminder that what ultimately matters is to compel your users to some action, you know, for him is like buying a product, right? It's not about just creating clever ads or sexy creatives. It's to do things that compel that action. I think that's very true for many of our product and lifecycle teams. And so I shared that around as an interesting recommendation.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I like a book that I recommended recently at work is Ogulvi on advertising. Do you know this book? I don't know the book.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the truth of it is I have not just the four year old, but I also have a one year old. So most of the books that I'm reading these days are kids books, trying to make them laugh and awful. Wait, anything?”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, this is great. Hope it was useful for your listeners. I will say over the last few days as I was prepping for this, I was honestly a little bit anxious about like, you know, do I have enough deep, you know, independent frameworks that need to come up with, but just being authentic to my actual experience at these companies, you know, a lot of my lessons learned have been off the backs of other people that have tried, you know, similar things and have succeeded or failed. And I think what's important is that you have that like your mental sponge, right? You can try a bunch of different things. You can absorb them and then put them in practice right away, discard the things that don't work, right? And evolve them for yourself and for the company's needs. And so I don't know. I think that was just a realization that I had as I was thinking through this podcast. And I think that's partly why I haven't done too much public speaking.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It before you have validation that customers definitely want the thing is quite risky. It can lead to a lot of sunk cost once you get it out because you're just, you know, you need to see it through. You want to see it succeed. So yeah, this is a decade ago. Honestly, I had a great time at that company, but I still remember that vividly because it contained three or more kind of key lessons that carried forward as I have built many products since then.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A problem like you never just purely want to chase a like, you know, wouldn't it be nice if we did this as opposed to, you know, this is our user and this is the problem that we're solving. This is why it's going to delight them, et cetera. That's kind of one second. Second is you got to consider, especially in these more like marketplace type businesses, there's more than just one end user. And we focus so much of our attention on the writer app without realizing, oh yeah, the drivers are carrying a lot of the brunt of this experience. And our operations team is as well, right? And so when the drivers are confused or disgruntled, that can lead to a challenging overall experience for the product, right? So that's definitely another one. And the third one is like we did a lot of actually PR prior to the service going out just to get the word out. And PR has its time and place, but I think doing it.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The blue commuter shuttles, like 15 person shuttles, they would essentially drive from Various neighborhoods into downtown San Francisco. It's kind of a commuting use case across between the public bus system and an Uber and Lyft. So I was there for some time. I led product there. And the core service was really loved by its users. It was reliable and fast and affordable enough. But we got pretty interested in this idea that maybe we could improve utilization. Maybe we can make the service a little bit more innovative if we offered dynamic routes, more similar to Uber and Lyft. Like how could we, like the drivers are driving these fixed routes, but if they have spare time, they can go out of their way, go pick up somebody like at their house or something and like keep going. So we tried this. We called the chair direct. Really interesting attempt, but I learned a lot of lessons there because ultimately it didn't work out. One lesson is like this was kind of a solution searching for.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, in the growth world, you're failing all the time. So I'm not going to pick a specific growth story because those don't actually eat my ego too much. But earlier in my career, I did a lot of core product work. I worked for this startup called Chariot. I don't know if you ever lived in San Francisco, but.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so these companies that we've talked about in the podcast are about 500 to 1,000 people. Typically, these companies will have been around, let's say, 10 to 20 years. Like they're durable, ideally profitable. They have a good leadership team, but there's still a lot of dimensions to go figure out. A lot of them are in key inflection points. So they're certainly not stagnant, right? You need to find a place that's dynamic too.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's harder to kind of ship things and get them out the door, which eventually drove me nuts a little bit. On the flip end of the spectrum, these tiny startups, they move incredibly fast, but I grew like all my gray hair from those tiny startups because no one knows about your company. And so you're recruiting people one by one. You're, you know, trying to get users one by one. So yeah, you can learn fast and ship a lot of things. But if you're trying to make a big impact on the world, it can be actually pretty grueling to do so at really, really, really small startups. Now, some of them do hyperscale and make it out. And obviously, I'm not one to trash that because that's the path that I tried for quite a while. But for me, like, I really like the zone where I can contribute at scale, but also execute at a pace that's more on like the daily and weekly scale, right? As opposed to monthly and quarterly.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I definitely believe that everyone has a company stage that they shine best at. I've personally gone through this journey of big tech to like tiny, tiny, tiny startup, then landed in the middle, which I consider like my own Gold Luck zone. I talked earlier about like what actually gives me personally a lot of energy is seeing across a company's efforts, but also the company being small enough that it can get into the details. I can work with a specific teams. I can read, experiment, you know, results. I can look at the pixels. And so I find that the balance of those two things tends to fit best with medium-sized companies. But that's me, right? I think a big companies like Google, you're dealing with immense scale, which is interesting by itself. You learn a lot of best practices from your peers. They have all the kind of tools and functions that you would possibly want to go learn from, but they can tend to move slower.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, a lot of it actually happens outside of the interview process, interestingly. So a lot of it is, you know, the types of questions they ask, have they actually tried your product and gone deep into it? A lot of it is the references, it's the like communication that they have to even set up your interview. Like it's the energy they bring into the conversation. You can actually pick up a lot of soft signals on some of these traits. Over time, you can kind of pick up on some of these patterns. I don't know that I'm perfect at it, but I've learned to balance those things quite a bit more than I did in the past when I would just purely read from my questions and my rubric and not care about anything else.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, learn habits actually need to be intentionally discarded. You need to have a beginner's mind on this type of stuff. So I think this is more true than ever. Like looking for people that respond and move quickly and think Know just faster and move faster, right? I think speed, the fastest speed of learning, those types of companies are the ones that I want to bet on because I think those will end up surviving and thriving.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've talked a lot about products, so maybe I'll flip to the team side for a bit. I think the standard way to hire and build a team is, you know, you fill out a JD, it's got a whole bunch of different characteristics that you're looking for. You typically will find a short list of companies that are kind of similar to yours, and then you try to hire for that, right? I think that's kind of the typical default path that a lot of companies take. And I was really struck by my experience working at some smaller startups or, you know, take Duolingo as an example where over and over and over, I saw some of the highest performers just being people that had very high agency, had that clock speed, had that energy. Yes, they cared about the mission, but they didn't necessarily need to have deep experience on that matter. And in fact, sometimes that experience could be a crutch in certain ways, especially in this world where the grounds are shifting so fast with AI. A lot of your”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so like something we're experimenting right now is just like purely if you say that you're new to chess, we're gonna craft a more delightful learn how to play experience as opposed to dropping into a life game. That's an example. Another is like hiding your ratings for the first five times such that you're not seeing your rating kind of plummet. So there's a lot of tips and tricks you can do.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and it could be worse. That's true. And so typically what a lot of mobile games will do is they'll just create a super simplified version of the game. It's harder for us to do at chess. And so, without changing the rules of that, right, I think that, I don't know, it's just very eye-opening to me that when you're trying to learn something, whether that be language learning or chess or whatever, usually those first steps are fraught with a lot of self-doubt and reinforcement that you're not good at the thing. And so it pays to be very intentional to craft experiences that guide the user around that.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of your investment inside the product experience. And so when you nail those three things, you can end up with a long-term learning journey that can be quite successful. And then to flip over to the chess.com side, like what we see is that over 75% of our new users, they classify themselves as like, I'm completely new to chess or I'm a beginner. And unfortunately, if you're new to chess and you're a beginner, you're not going to have that fun of a time playing live games. We see this in the data. It's like less than a third of those users actually win their first game. And when you lose a game, user retention is 10% worse than when you win a game.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, like Duolingo would not have started without this insight from day one, right? They aim to focus on motivation and build a lot of these tactics. Jorge actually had this model of gamification patterns having essentially three pillars to it. You have the core loop, you have the metagame, and then you have the profile. And so we actually thought about it that way too, where your core loop is your lesson that you go through. You do a lesson, you get some rewards, you extend your streak, and then the next day you get a push notification. It's kind of the core loop of the product and making that really tight is super important because people need a habit to stick to. Then you need a metagame, which for Duolingo is kind of like the path, but it's also the leaderboard achievements, kind of long-term things that you're going to strive to. Such that you have like long-term, I guess, motivation to continue doing the thing. And then the profile is also critical because you build up a profile over time. It's reflection.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Experiences around them. And that worked amazingly well. So as opposed to going against, I guess, human intuition and trying to get them to share stuff that they otherwise wouldn't on the margins want to share, like lean into it more. Actually, like grab the moments where users are already organically screenshotting and make those much, much, much better. And you can kind of 5x or 10x and drive a lot of growth that way too. So that's not so much an experiment. That's more a core product thing, but it just resonated with me that that was interesting.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we did something interesting. We spun up a variety team. And Virality is this like really amorphous thing to me. I think it's really hard to generate virality in your product. But Duolingo is a product that is shared quite a bit. And so we invested actually in some time to essentially add screenshot tracking for like a brief period of time in the app just so we could find out the hotspots of where users were doing screenshots. And you see this in other apps too. It's not necessarily like, you know, some horrible thing. But we did this for some period of time and we were able to basically articulate and say, okay, streak milestones are the obvious one. Really funny challenges that you get in the Dualingo experience is also super highly shared. Advancing in the top three of a leaderboard is not a thing. Anyway, so you can find these different moments where that's the case. And then we staff those moments with illustrators and animators and created these really delightful.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I already shared one at chess.com and one of Grammarly. I mean, I could talk a bit about Duolingo as well. Duolingo, and you had Jackson on the podcast, right? Where you talked about the streak? Yes, talked about the streak. So I also don't want to steal his thunder because I was going to think about that. But the amount of learning through commitment and putting streaks on a calendar and just getting people started as opposed to achieving some large milestone, that was huge.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was like, drive up pretend. It's kind of weird. Like, we're seeing people use the features a lot more. Why is user retention going? Going negative. So I have plenty of horror stories around that type of stuff.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The system matters just as much as any given experiment, probably even more, right? I think starting with a growth model so you have an understanding of Your company grows in the first place, and which channels you're going to leverage is critical. You need to make sure that you are instrumenting your product in and out. Otherwise, you're going to run experiments and have wonky results. I won't name which company, but I was part of a company that in-house experimentation tool about three months into the company. We're running like some experiments. And we realized that user retention was actually configured backwards. So all positive results were negative results.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you need wins. You got to celebrate them. People feel good about the learning. It's applied across the board. Like, who's not going to be energized by that, I think? Right. So you can't just set goals in a vacuum and, you know, create it from top, right? People have to see it working. And when it works, like the metrics move and you learn faster and you ship faster. And that's a great environment to be part of.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I started this podcast with the example of the game review and the positivity and how that was shared. I mean, I think those types of things are really what motivate people, right? They need to see this working in practice”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, definitely a lot of credit to the CEO and co founders like Eric and Danny. They're amazing. It's not their intuitive way of thinking about growing companies, but their mental flexibility and encouragement, right, to evolve and add this as a tool for the company has been awesome. And they've been on the front lines preaching product-led growth and experimentation just as much as I have. So I'm glad that you brought that up because I think that is critically important for me joining a company to not be at odds with the co-founders and the existing approach of the company. I think that's absolutely. I think the”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conversations about what would need to be true to actually hit that goal. And so that leads to insights. Like, actually, we need not just product management or engineering to be running these experiments. We can experiment with lifecycle marketing, changing copy of push notifications and emails. We can experiment with app store screenshots and, you know, keywords and stuff like that. We have all sorts of content marketing teams, et cetera, right? We could have engineering enable no code for specific screens. Think about our home screen or our pricing screen where we might want to do a lot of just tests that are configurable without engineering support. We might want to just like track our progress and look at it from time to time and make sure that we have the right observability around this. So anyway, that's the stuff that really matters as opposed to the hitting that goal itself. So don't tell the team, but I don't actually care that much if we actually hit a thousand.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so part of having team members that are fanatical about chess is that the company can get pretty damn far just like building for themselves, building for the community and not actually being very experimentation and data oriented. The problem with that is that you can have relatively lumpy growth, right? And so part of the kind of excitement of me joining the company was to help smooth that out and bring in that experimentation mindset. So prior to 2023, the company practically didn't experiment at all. Last year, they did about 50. This year they're on pace for about 250. And then next year, we have that ambitious target of 1,000. Did I make it up? Yes, absolutely. I made it up, but it's still a target and a thing for the teams to think about. And a thousand experiments by itself, like if you just did that, but you didn't learn, you didn't make an impact, and that's kind of a waste of time, right? The whole point of setting a goal is that you can have.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We used Statsig at Grammarly, and I saw that they recently got acquired, so that was exciting news. Dual lingo and chess.com both have an in-house experimentation approach. Pros and cons to either. Obviously, Duelingo is an experimentation machine. And so it's been a huge accelerant to have our own thing specifically tailored to be excellent at that. But no, I typically don't encourage companies to build experimentation in-house from day one. At a certain scale, it can make sense. And some of these companies, right, they were started 15 years ago when these tools weren't out. So it was just something they had to do.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“State of product report, and it was like 40% of product teams basically don't run experimentation at all. And there may be some good reasons for it. I mean, it could be philosophical or maybe you're more, you know, B2B oriented or whatever. So I get it. But I think for a lot of, especially if you work on a consumer product that has some degree of scale, some degree of frequency with your product, you can collect enough data and also I have found, you know, I can pattern match all day long. I've worked a lot of companies, right? But I'm wrong all the time. And I think consumer behavior can be very fickle. And especially when you work at a company, you become a power user naturally. So sometimes you may forget like what the actual user experience is for a brand new user. And so you leave a lot of opportunities on the table if you don't even try to experiment. So I just encourage taking that first step. Just run an A-B test. Find a third party tool or something that you can integrate quickly or even just work with your engineers to spin something up. Just get in the.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Years by need, right? And so the teams working on them should think from that perspective and then from there, right, then ladder into like specific problems to solve hypotheses, et cetera.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it resonates deeply with me because I feel like growth sometimes gets this reputation, I guess, that it's just pure like metrics hacking or cold people that just are trying to move a particular metric up and we're going to do whatever it can to like, you know, throw walls and pay walls and add friction and all these spots. And even though that could theoretically work at like a micro level on a specific feature or specific metric, I think what's most healthy for a company and I want to work at durable companies, right, is to think about the user holistically, right? And when you take that framing of connecting users to the value of your product, that value can change for a user over time. And that also lines up really nicely to the journey, right? Like what someone that's not even a user yet needs to understand about the value proposition is super different than what a habitual user of 3 plus.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that ideation, that research cycle was much, much faster. I talked a little bit about prototyping, also just becoming much, much faster than before. We have not yet gotten to the point where product managers themselves are actually shipping the code into production, but it's dramatically shortened the amount of time it takes to conceive of especially like a bolder idea that you might have. And so when I talked earlier about explore and exploit, right, a lot of the Explore was harder to do. But now it's a little bit easier to do. You can take a broader concept and visualize it. And what you can visualize it, center around the team, get people to click around it. That makes a world of difference. So those are just a couple examples that come to mind.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there would be a lot of manual writing of these analyses docs. You'd have to read them. You'd have to understand what insight you want to kind of grab from them and then write another spec to translate that idea. That's still happening to some degree, but I think that's a spot where even tools like ChatGPT are super helpful, right? You can just plug in like an analysis that another person wrote and just have.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And so historically, I don't even mean historically, but just a few months ago, right? Like we were operating in a, it's got kind of history, I suppose.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like to describe growth as the job is to connect users to the value of your product. And in order to do that, what I like to do is think about that user journey again and essentially staff teams that are oriented around each element of that user journey. And those teams have specific metric goals. They have roadmaps, et cetera. And then they go run against them. So that's like how it's structured. AI, I think, can be applied to speed up some elements of that essentially experiment cycle that you get through. So one example is in product discovery. As opposed to core product, which tends to have longer timeframes than you might do like, you know, thorough user research or market research, you know, it's more foundational, more for first principles, et cetera. Growth is a little bit less like that. It's like you're running a lot of experiments and you're the output of any given experiment is the input like to your next idea.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so through the neural network, it just gets smarter every time. And because it can have that repetition times a billion or a trillion, I don't know exactly what number, but it's going to get pretty damn good.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, my understanding is that the one the documentary is incredible, by the way. I don't know if you've watched Alpha Go. It's amazing how they took something so technically deep and made it so emotional and human. But I think that's the crux of how we feel, I guess, about AIs and the products that we build, actually.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Create or look at chessboard images on ChatGPT. A lot of them have the wrong number of squares. They're not set up properly. And so, you know, I don't want to be too dismissive. I'm sure it's going to get much stronger at reasoning. And actually Google recently sponsored a tournament where all the top LMs played a tournament against each other. So that was pretty fun to watch. They're improving, but. You know, this chess is specifically a game that having a trained, you know, deep, deep computing engine is just going to be much, much more powerful than LLMs.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not unexpected. You know, interestingly, LLMs themselves are quite bad at playing chess. Like, they hallucinate moves. They look at patterns, right? They're very good at pattern recognition, but not so good at going super, super, super deep on a specific chest thing. And if you've even tried to like.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To apply the right technology for the right feature to provide value to the user. And so we try not to ever lose sight of that and let hype get us too carried away.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Watching some of these chess engines played has opened up a lot of creativity and new strategies, new lines, new appreciation for the game. And our chess.com approach is that we can bring this technology for every user, even people that have never moved a piece before. I talked earlier about that game review product. That's exactly what this does. So behind the scenes, we're running chess engines to basically spit out evaluations for every move that you make. And then we translate that and make that approachable to the user using their native language and play an approachable style, right? And even with audio and things like that as well. And that part of it, like the personality, the speech back to the user, that part is LLMs. And so I guess my point is that, again, Chess and AI have been intertwined forever. But for us, what's most important is that we keep the customer at the North Star of it. We're not just supplying LLMs just because it's the new hot thing.”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the ELA score. ELA rat Yeah, and really, it's like it's because computing power is so amazing and there's so many techniques for how to do like deep evaluation on specific chess lines. They can calculate tens of millions per second. So it's not realistic for a human to compete against that. But yet, like,”
2025-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source