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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“No, it's not 10,000, but it's similar to if the chess engine was playing without a major piece, like a rook or something, they would still be competitive against the best players. And this is”
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, I think there's a rating system that compares relative skill level and an average chess player somewhere like a thousand, maybe a 1,500 on the high end, a top grandmaster like Magnus Carlson's like a 2,800, and then stock fish and similar engines are like 3,600.”
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 does Yeah, I'll tackle them in sequence. I'll start with the chess one just because I have maybe a slightly unique take on that one. Chess and AI, they've been intertwined for almost a century. Like some of the early computing pioneers, they just figured, yeah, chess is an interesting game. We could test machine intelligence and write some algorithms. We're not. And then fast forward to like 1997 and you had IBM, they had their deep blue application, who actually beat the world champion back then, which was Gary Kasparov. That was like a huge moment of like of shock and reckoning of like, oh man. Is AI going to take over humans or we're going to have jobs and like all this stuff? And this is, you know, 30 years ago. And thankfully, we're all still here and more people are playing chess than ever, right? And so the game of chess and chess.com specifically have learned how to augment, I guess, the human playing experience with the power of chess engines, which, you know, are definitely a powerful form of AI. It's not LMs to be clear, but there.”
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 our new users in any given day. So those two things really go hand in hand. And that feeling has only been reinforced by chess.com. You know, over the last five years, like the first 15-ish years of this company was really under the radar. 800 million people play chess around the world. But most of that is over the board until recently there wasn't actually that much online. But five years ago, everything changed. You had the pandemic, you had Queen's Gambit. You had a lot of like YouTube and Twitch streamers. You had a bunch of kids playing it in school, et cetera. And so it's really the combination of those two things that make it take off. And it's like the growth experimentation is more the slow and steady or fast and steady, I should say, approach where you're just continually iterating, you're making the product experience better, but then every so often, right, there's a big wave that comes in, you can quadruple your, you know, red.”
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, I mean, I used to think it was verses, but now I realize that they combine really well. It could be rocket fuel for your growth. Yeah, being a product person, you know, I joined a lot of these companies because they're literally on the home screen of my phone. And I like, I like using them. And I consider myself someone that's not easily swayed by ads or TV commercials telling me what to buy. So I always like had an element of skepticism on the marketing side for much of my career. But then, yeah, you join a place like Duolingo and you see how Duolo the Owl has developed a personality through the push notifications and the product experience and then seeing the marketing team leverage that personality in their TikTok and in their YouTube and all throughout social media and just feed into those like memes and then we would track back in the product experience like how did you hear about us and put all those channels in there and some days it would be like holy like it's bringing in 20 30 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
“That's right. Yeah, the structure is rigid, but the ideas are the farthest away from rigid as possible, right? Like you have seen their, I don't know, Super Bowl commercials, their memes, their gamification tactics. Like, it's a super fun creative environment. So rigid is the farthest possible word to use. But what I just mean is they're consistent. They have templates for everything. And like their product reviews are like 10 or 15 minutes. It's just people go in and out. So it's just that kind of a surreal environment about how rapidly and consistently they work.”
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
“Really unique about them is they're integrated across tons and tons and tons of applications. There's not many, many products that work like that. That's really unique. And so now if you hear like Shashare their new CEO talk about like the AI superhighway and all that type of stuff, right? They can now use that technology to provide a lot more than just grammar writing. And so my point is just that like chess is about chess 100%. It's in the ethos. People are crazy passionate. That just means we're always dog fooding the product. It's just an amazing energy in the company to just use the product all the time, come up with ideas. And I love that environment. I think that's fun for me.”
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
“Crazy. I mean, you shouldn't be surprised. Obviously, the name of the company is like this, but they've always hired people from around the world. The company's always been globally remote. They just hire people that love chess. They play all day. They watch the streams. Our Slack is always blowing up with people's chess moves and games and whatnot. You know, I think I want to say this a little bit delicately, but Duolingo, even though the product they're providing is around language learning, I think the original ethos of how to start the company was really around motivation, right? The hardest thing to its habits, right? How do you build that daily habit? And I actually in many ways see language learning as like their first vehicle and what they have a superpower in is that, again, the motivation, the habits, et cetera. So that's kind of Duolingo. And Grammly actually kind of similarly, right? Like people know them for the spelling and grammar corrections. But what's”
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
“Both teams, if they're well resourced, they can do enough to move each one of these various levers, right? And it's just a matter of the sequencing of them and what you want to prioritize first. But Gramley was kind of unique in that the core product experience itself was what drove repeated activity, right? It's that I previously mentioned that current user retention thing. What most drives that is the frequency and the quality of the suggestions that you get every day, right? And so it was an interesting learning in that I staffed up a growth team, tried to work on this metric, and then I realized actually like I'm kind of just getting in the way. Like this is really a thing that the core product team most influences. Let me have a conversation with the core product leader and then shift that over to them. So yeah, just a super interesting experience.”
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 a lot more meaningful strategic decisions as well And then the core product team also, you know, I'm used to in growth, like laying out the entire user journey that a user go through, you know, acquisition, activation, engagement, so on and so forth, right? And typically.”
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
“Kind of the right. The right functions, the right companies for demand gen and sales to go reach out to. So that was a very interesting kind of product-led sales work, right? And it's really. Fascinating thing for me to learn. And then on top of that, with all the transformation going on with generative AI and even recently with them acquiring CODA and superhuman and becoming more productivity suite, like the company is just evolving pretty rapidly. It's a really exciting thing for me to be a part of and to see from the sidelines. But that just made it at its core kind of a different growth job than Duolingo for sure.”
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
“That's the lingo. Grammarly, you know, this is an interesting company because they started as a paid product oriented at students. Then they expanded into more of a freemium model tailored to everyone, gradually focusing more on the professional base. And then as they accumulate a lot more professionals, they realize, hey, there's patterns, right? We're seeing that a bunch of marketing teams or a bunch of sales teams or a bunch of customer sport teams or whatever, right? particular functions within particular companies were really adopting grammarly at scale. And so they were able to then layer on much more of a managed kind of enterprise-y motion. And while I was there, I was focused on the consumer self-serve motion, but they weren't siloed, right? They were intermixed with each other. And so a big part of my job was not just to grow like the self-serve revenue and self-serve active users, but it was also how do you uncover.”
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 yeah, I mean, the ethos of the company, I mean, they hire a lot of intelligent, energetic people out of college, basically. And they give them a lot of amazing experimentation tooling. And they care a lot about the clock speed of the company, right? So it's a lot of creativity, a lot of ideation. The product experience of DulyGo actually like changes multiple times per day for each user, which is pretty shocking. And so I never worked in a place like that before. But it's really struck me about how consistently the company operated. And they had specs and processes for doing like each of those steps in their product development cycle. And they were really, really typed about 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
“First of all, there's obviously a lot of similarities, but I'll just focus my answer on the differences. So I think Duolingo, what struck me most working there is they're very particular. They have an approach of product development that is infused across like everyone in the company. And they tend to, they actually wrote a playbook about this. It's called The Green Machine. We took it out about 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
“Of the language you were learning, like you were learning French three years ago, but now you forgot most of it, right? And so when you open the app again, it encourages you to essentially replace yourself, like do another placement test and put you in the right spot. And so some of these types of mechanics for a more mature company can lead to pretty good ROI, I guess is what I'm trying to say.”
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 after some period of time, you kind of stack up a lot of inactive users in your product, right? And you also stack up sporadic users, right? People that may not have a daily habit, but they will use it once or twice a week or once or twice a month type of thing. And so eventually that math sort of adds up where you have, let's say, hundreds of millions of kind of dormant users that are coming back. And it's actually worth spending some time making sure that that kind of resurrected, for lack of better word, experience inside the product is really excellent and that you find novel ways to try to bring them back. Duolingo, as an example, they did a good job of using social notifications. And so if people would use like contact sync or something, you might get a push notification that one of you're like, that's friends just started using DualLingo and that might encourage you to come back and resurrect into the product and when you resurrect it in the product, it might be the case that you're proficient.”
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 I think just to take chess.com example, I think probably 80ish percent of our daily or weekly active users, I mean, I'll check the numbers, but something like that would be like a current user or an existing user. And then a new and a reactivated or resurrected user. Those are actually about similar size for a company of our scale. So even though there's a lot of attention on that new user experience, it's actually like pretty interesting that. Components of your active user base are actually not heavily weighed in the new user set after you mature to a certain degree.”
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
“Especially when companies mature a little bit. You actually focus most of your energy on the existing user retention mechanics. You find that that's a much, much bigger lever. One exception is that Gramley was a different type of product in that you install it and you don't proactively open it every day. So that was kind of interesting to me because I assume that you should always just focus on existing user retention. But for a product like Grammarly, it's actually the activation installation aha moment. That's really, really critical. will carry the user for a very, very long time.”
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 even more importantly, and you mentioned Jorge to kick this off, but he wrote that very, very popular article about the growth model, right? And how current user retention rate was the biggest thing for them. I think especially if you have a product that has daily frequency, like that's actually the retention that matters the most is that like of your existing user base that has developed a habitual pattern, how sticky is your product? And it's that retention rate that really compounds and build that builds that daily habit. So over time.”
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's achievable. It's achievable in theory, but there are so many options out there in the market, and people are feeling a lot of App and product blow to”
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 consumer companies tend to track essentially two main types of user retention. There's more of the new user one, kind of D1, D7, et cetera. I think when you have your D1 retention somewhere around like the 30 or 40% mark, like that's quite solid, I think for a consumer app. If it's much lower than that, then sometimes I might question like the intent of the user or the ability for that you to, I guess, acquire just mathematically acquire enough users such that you can grow a big enough daily active user base.”
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, I mean, 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 like day one, that's super hard, right? Then you're dealing with totally different business models where you're paying for users, you're trying to like aggressively upsell them before they hit any sort of habitual usage patterns with your product. A lot of apps naturally do that because that's how they break the mold and get their first users to do it. I don't know. I've been fortunate to join companies sort of after that initial phase, but especially like take Duolingo and chess.com. These are organic word of mouth kind of driven businesses. And in kind of both ways, like they grew the market, right? From a much smaller market. And as opposed to it being a very competitive space where you're kind of competing and taking market share from others and bidding for higher terms and stuff like that. So I don't know that there's something to 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
“Oh man, I probably should keep this and start paying. I think for a lot of consumer products, it's a little bit harder for that to work. And so I've typically seen more just normal free trials be the norm.”
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
“Teams and by companies and whatnot, right? And even if users are on the free plan, they still provide quite a lot of value in making sure that Grammarly can be purchased by a coworker or by a team member or whatever, right? So I think these things are usually why I lean toward make sure that the core value proposition that you're providing users is free and is sort of permanently free. And then you layer on kind of a sampling or a taste of some of the premium features that are on top of it. That's usually the sweet spot that I've seen. As to the trials reverse trials type of thing, I think it largely depends. I think if you have, especially a B2B feature where you may have some lock-in, reverse trials can be super powerful. You just want to get people in there. You don't need to ask for their credit card because they're using your CRM or they're investing quite a lot of time in like building out, you know, material and content. And so by the time that window drops, you actually feel.”
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, I think first of all, why do freemen subscription in the first place is a common question that I've joined all these companies that are freeman subscription. Like, what do I like about it, I guess? Well, one, I think it ties really nicely to like mission orientation of a lot of these companies. It's often like you want to spread the product as wide as possible because that's why the founders built the thing, right? You're trying to like improve education with like Duolingo or, you know, Grammarly or chess.com. Like these are meant to be widespread products with a really wide value proposition that fits globally, right? And so obviously the lowest friction to that is going to be a free product. So that alone is part of it. Another part of it is that a lot of these products primarily grow through word of mouth. And especially if you can build network effects in the product, like Dueling goes a bunch of social features or with Grammarly, like they have a bit of a B2C to B play as well. So you see Grammarly being used by”
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
“Basically, like a reverse free trial, but in real time, like while you're writing, as opposed to a time based one. So we kind of adopted some patterns that are in the industry, but molded it to Grammarly's specific use case.”
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 sudden people were seeing Gramley as a much more powerful tool than they were before. And our upgrade rates like nearly doubled just through this change. And so I think this is interesting just modernization learning that especially if you work on a freemium product, try to have your free product be a reflection of like everything that your product can offer you. Obviously to an extent, there's some costs involved with some of the paid features and things like that, but it generally will pay it for itself if you're able to put your best foot forward and go do that. So that really worked well for us there.”
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
“That's right, correction. And then the second thing, which is, I think, equally, if not more interesting, is that I was at this company during this generative AI transformation, which is obviously still going on, right? And quite frankly, both the company brand as well as the lived product experience for most of the free users was that Gramley was just a product to fix your spelling and grammar because those were the free suggestions we were showing people, right? And so we decided to flip that on its head entirely. And we said, okay, what if we actually sampled a number of different paid suggestions and interspersed them to free users across their writing such that they were intermingled and we would provide a limited taste of what the paid offering had to provide? And on the surface, like even though it's rational, the concern is that if we give too much of this away, then what people want to subscribe and we found completely like that was not the case, right?”
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 a free user, the main things you get are spelling, grammar. They're basically correctness things. And as a paid user, you get that like, how do you improve your tone to be more empathetic? How do you improve your writing to be more clear? How can you rewrite entire sentences, that type of thing? And so the observed behavior from all that tracking and data was that actually a very small percentage of our free users was deciding to accept all of their suggestions. They were more kind of picking and choosing as they go. And I'm wondering if your experience is kind of similar 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
“So you're a big Fantastic. Glad to hear that. Gramley is a freemium business model, which means that over 90% of our users are on the free service and the rest of it pay for subscriptions, essentially, right? And so one of the teams, they work on subscriber conversion. PM there is Kyla. That team's great. And their job is to figure out the free to paid subscription path, right? And so one of the realizations, one is that we weren't actually tracking the events that well for the types of essentially suggestions that people were getting and how often were users seeing paywalls and stuff like that. That's kind of step number one. We have to put that instrumentation in. Step number two is that, hey, we noticed actually first, let me explain some of the logic. So as a free user, you basically get these underlines across your writing. And if you accept all of them, then you see the paywall and that encourages you to like subscribe for more.”
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 had the pleasure of working with GNOME and his product team at Grammarly. Some context first for those that don't use Grammarly. So Grammarly is an AI powered writing assistant. And so typically people will use it as a Chrome extension or a downloadable desktop client. And basically what it does is it overlays your writing with a bunch of different.”
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
“For us, we are still doing some handoffs between functions. I expect that to change over time and we are investing in some of design system components and MCPs and stuff to make it a little bit easier. But yeah, it's an investment and it takes time to smooth things 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
“The PMs are mostly using V0. The designers love Figmas. They're using Figma Make. The engineers are using a combination of tools right now. So cursor, cloud code, GitHub co-pilot, marketing teams use all sorts of tools for translation, subtitles, content adaptations, et cetera, customer support uses intercom, fin. So there's quite a lot of tools that are kind of used across the company. I would say though that something that is kind of annoying to me is that we haven't yet figured out the bridging from the tinkering to the workflow quite as seamlessly as I would like, right? And so each subfunction, even though the common, I guess, wisdom now is that AI is going to strip away these like functional titles. It is kind of true that based on your experience, like you may gravitate to using a type of tool more. And if that tool isn't as interoperable with some of the other tools that you need to pass down the chain to actually ship it into production, at least at our scale, right? I think for smaller startups, sure, PM should just go ship 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 mean, an adjacent example is a lot of the product managers, like where are tinkering around with all sorts of different prototyping tools right now, right? So it's like go from an idea to a representative solution today, right? There's a lot of humans involved in taking an idea, writing up a spec, doing a review, doing design, et cetera. I'm sure you've interviewed plenty of people that have talked about this specific problem, right? And so for us, like we've invested a bit in at least carving out the main screens of our product experience, things like our onboarding flow, our home screen, our chessboard as an example, and building like essentially AI prototypes of those using tools like a VZero or like a lovable, right? And when you have those foundational pieces, you can then share them with the rest of the company and they can use that as a starting point. And then they can try to, you know, put their ideas on top of that. And then they become a lot more discussible and hopefully testable relatively soon.”
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
“Data informed, I guess. And I think what's also kind of interesting is that just human nature is that if you have a question that you feel like, you know, you might be a bit embarrassed to ask or you don't want to bother someone. You just don't ask the question, right? And so by the nature of having these tools, you get actually a pretty large explosion of questions being asked. And I think you see this in ChatGPT too, right? It's like just having a thing, right, that you can converse with that you feel comfortable in makes a huge difference.”
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
“Think one of the latest things that we've been tinkering around with is this Texta SQL capability. It's actually pretty powerful. We have this data request Slack channel where for the longest time, and this is still true today, like people will toss in all sorts of just one-off questions. How many subscribers do we have in South Africa? Or like, you know, how long did somebody play puzzles like last last month or something? And these ad hoc questions, they often take a lot of like human time to just go in and, you know, a data analyst needs to prioritize it and find time to go run the query. And yes, you can invest in self-sort tooling to improve at this, but also I found that AI is quite good at doing that first pass answer as well. And so we're working on like kind of training some of these Slack bots to essentially be the first party provider of a lot of these answers, which makes the company as a whole a lot more.”
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
“One thing that I try to focus on at a company of our scale of like a chess.com, right? We're running roughly 250 experiments a year. So we're not the highest in the industry, but we run a decent volume, right? And so when that happens, I invest in these experiment explorer tools. And we can talk about AI as well as another way to kind of uncover and pick out these nuggets of wisdom. But basically these explorer tools can allow me to look across the spectrum of experiments that are going on. try to figure out if there are patterns between the hypotheses and the learnings that are happening. And if I'm starting to see like more and more experiments that are not statistically significant, that may be a signal to me to say, okay, we might have kind of tried to exploit a little bit too far. Like there might not be as much juice to squeeze. Hey guys, let's like, you know, get back to the table and brainstorm and be a little bit more divergent with our thinking.”
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
“Exactly right. Yes. At the end of the day, users, I think within a company sometimes you can have this siloed approach where you break apart the product experience in 50 different ways and distribute them across different teams and you assume that users interact with each of the different features with a different mentality. But oftentimes that's actually not necessarily the case. And so sometimes you can surface an insight that's more human psychology based that can resonate across the entire product experience. And so I think when you can find that, you can double down.”
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, exactly right. I mean, in my experience, the typical win rate, and I hate to use that term for experiments, is often something like 30 to 50%. Usually you're not actually like, you're trying to bunch of things. A lot of hypotheses turn out not to be true. You know, consumer products are very unpredictable like that. But when you do find a thing that breaks through the noise, and it could actually be a hugely losing experiment too, those are also super valuable, right? Surfacing those across the company. original PM running that experiment doesn't necessarily need to be the person that figures out what you should do for all the other parts of your product experience but the onus is on them to clearly articulate what their hypothesis is what they found such that then as like a growth leader I can encourage people to kind of swarm around that and try a bunch of different ideas such that the success rate is up and the impact is up so it's just kind of oscillating back and forth between the two that is the magic”
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 PM working on puzzles can now think about okay, how do I audit these cold patterns in my product and think about making them more positive, right? I can change the success rate. I could tweak some copy, change the color of some buttons. And so you now can take this experiment win and expand it out 10x across your organization. And that's the kind of exploitation phase of it. So when done right, right, you can oscillate between the two until you saturate out of exploitation mode and then you encourage the teams to brainstorm and get more creative again.”
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
“That's really counterintuitive to when we initially built the feature. We thought that people wouldn't want to use it after losses or to see their mistakes such they could like work on their mistakes. That turned out not to be the truth when it came to the human psychology and the actual data of it. And so we made some changes in the product experience when you lose a game now as opposed to surfacing your blunders and you're like horrible stuff that you did, we flip it on Ted. And so we show you your brilliant moves, your best moves, and we have Coach say something encouraging, you know, losing just part of learning, like keep it up, that type of thing. That change alone was pretty dramatic for us. It grew game reviews by 25%, subscriptions by 20%, user retention by a lot as well. So that was fantastic. But the point is that it doesn't just stop there, right? You have to take that insight, share it broadly across the company, right? Now adjacent product managers 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
“Saturation and stagnation where you're just locally maximizing a thing. And even though this principle of explore and exploit, it's typically thought of as a macro thing. I like to work with my teams more on the micro on the insight level. So I'll give you a concrete example. So I work at chess.com. And one of our priorities is to encourage chess players to improve, to learn and improve. So one of the PMs that we have Dylan, he works on all the learning features. The most used learning feature in our product is called game review. So you play a game of chess after the game's over. We have this virtual coach that teaches you about your worst moves, best moves, et cetera. And his job is to like improve user engagement and retention. And so he's in this exploratory phase trying to figure out like, how do I drive more of that type of activity? And what he observes is that 80% of people that review their games actually do so after a win.”
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. I initially came up or heard about Explore and Exploit through my engineering partner at Grammarly Normal. And I think he actually had taken some reforged classes. So maybe their original inventor of it might be Brian Balfour, who I know has been on your pod. But anyway, it's a great concept. The gist of it is that when you're in exploratory mode, think of it as like finding the right mountain to climb. And then when you're in exploitation mode, it's like focusing your resources on climbing that mountain effectively. And certain companies, I think the warning is to basically spend too much of your time on one end of the spectrum, right? If you do too much exploration, you can have your team feel a little bit too scattershot just trying a hundred different random ideas. What's the through line? What's the strategy? How do you pattern match successes across them? And if you do too much in exploitation, which is often the MO of growth teams, it can lead to this 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
“Think music and growth, they both rely on this just consistent repetition. Like you're constantly making mistakes, you have the super tight feedback loop. You have to get really resilient to just making mistakes all the time. And you know that the way of learning is through those mistakes, right? So that's kind of a thing that I learned very early. And the second thing that occurred to me is that they both have this structural underpinning to them with growth, you have a growth model. You have metrics. You have experiments. You have channels, things like that. But you also need on a day-to-day basis to have creativity. You got to come up with like interesting solutions, a hypotheses to test. And the same is true on the music side, right? You have music theory of scales and stuff. But to create beautiful music, you need that passion, that emotion, that flow. So I think that's the beautiful combination between the two.”
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
“My intrinsic motivation for music wasn't necessarily as strong at that point. And so I decided to go to engineering school To your original point around the relationship between music and growth, I didn't really reflect on this until recently. I have a four-year-old and I'm like starting to teach him how to bang on the keys a little bit. But a couple things stand out. I mean, one is 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
“So I can listen to a song and then just a very, very clear understanding of which note I'm supposed to start with and if I'm playing something wrong. So it's very helpful. It's unfair, definitely. So anyway, yeah, I quite got quite good like as a teenager in high school and even considered like studying at a music conservatory.”
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
“Accelerated my interest and abilities in piano was like, I feel like I hit the lottery. I had perfect pitch. And so I was able to quickly understand whether I was like playing the right stuff or the wrong stuff and just pick up music pretty rapidly.”
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
“That's very flattering, but I appreciate it. Yeah, I grew up playing a lot of piano. My parents were immigrants from Taiwan, and I was the oldest kid that they had. And so I definitely felt that strong encouragement, if you will, to learn a bunch of things, take them seriously, study hard. And so I did, right? And like my parents, even though they weren't musically proficient, they had a deep love for classical music. So I was a stereotypical baby that would listen to Mozart, I guess, when I was sleeping type of thing. And I still vividly remember like we had this upright Yamaha piano. And at the very top of the piano, we had this countdown clock from 90 minutes, literally every single day of my childhood. Just practice really, really consistently. At first, like, I really was irritated by that thing, but as I grew older, I started to appreciate music quite a bit more. But anyway, like I think what really...”
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
“That is super nice. Thank you, Jore. I've learned so much from him. I'm the type of weird person that likes to wake up before their kids and like pull up a bunch of browser tabs and look at experiments. So it was perfect that Jorge brought me into the growth world at Duolingo, learned a ton of best practices, and he's just a great guy. Thanks, Jorge.”
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 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.”
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