YouSaid · the spoken record

Cem Kansu

lines on the record: 107
first: 2025-06-20
most recent: 2025-06-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It feels like you're getting a lot, and I think that that feeling of getting a lot feels better. I think the other thing that we've learned is there's a lot of emotion on purchasing anything, certainly something that is an upgrade to a consumer experience, like Duolinga going from free Duolingo to super Duolingo or Duolingo Max. And I think you want to convey that emotion in your design. Meaning Duolingo takes pride in like a fun being fun and animated, while our flows being animated on duo doing funny stuff through the flow, it works well because it like conveys that this is not just a boring subscription as a service purchase. It's like part of your experience and it's an upgrade. So anyway, youll illustrations, animation, and things like that that make it a fun flow that moves metrics at the end and increases conversion.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my God, we've tested so many things. Yeah, copy matters, how every company eventually puts like a checklist in front of you where like, oh, if you do this package, you get like two check marks, but if you do this other package, you get like 10 check marks. This has become like a very common way for subscription purchase flows. Weirdly, that also works because it's the psychological difference you can see visually. I'm like, oh, what I have now has one check mark. What I don't have has like 10 check marks. Well, 10 check marks.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think comparison is super important. What we've also seen is if you give one, it's for example, we have multiple packages now, there's super, there's family plan, there's max, we think you are a great fit for super individual. If we only show you one package and you have no anchor for different packages, it converts way less because it feels like if that's not for you, you're just going to decline. If we give you more than three packages on one page, it's too much. Like too much choice, you also convert way less. I think two to three is we've seen as a sweet spot. So you want some anchors to compare to, and of the time, if you give a choice of three, you want the middle option to be the option that you really recommend because that makes choice very easy. Humans love, I mean, on a menu too, if you think about it, if you have the lowest price, middle price, and highest price, middle price feels like the safe choice if you don't know what to choose. Very similar to if you're kind of offering someone a subscription choice, I think you”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There you go. So that actually makes a big difference. And honestly, this is one of those changes I love because it's user-friendly. If you don't like the experience, I want to remind you to cancel. We don't want people who forget and pay because of it. But that relieves the anxiety of entering a subscription free trial.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“over anything else start my free week start my free trial start your free trial or come up with any other combination we've tested probably many different things turns out if you put multiple zeros i think it like lights something up in the brain that you're like oh yeah i get it it's very free it's because it's like zero dot zero zero so copy matters that's one because there's with subscription there's natural aversion to entering a thing that might be hard to get out we also have seen talking about how easy it is to cancel is like an unlock in in conversion”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot. The biggest one I will say is what you say in your copy and strings makes a massive difference. And obviously you don't want to kind of sell something that you don't have. But how you talk about entering that experience makes a massive difference. I'll give you an example. We have tested many ways to, on the button that is going to start your subscription. We've tested probably endless number of things. Turns out if you say try for 0.00, which is not a normal human. Like I wouldn't talk to you. I'm like, would you like to try something for 0.00 pounds? Like, I wouldn't say that. But in the string, if you write multiple zeros and you hint at the fact that there's a free trial with multiple zeros, conversion goes up a significant amount.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it looks spammy in the app. So we try to do everything contextual. For example, if we show you an ad, we will say right after there's an ad free version if you'd like to upgrade. And that is in a way like you've discovered an ad okay. Maybe you didn't love it. Okay, but you can also find an ad free upgrade.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So I think it's twofold. One of them is honestly like hitting with a paywall is kind of the wrong approach in the sense that I think you want people to discover the paywall by experiencing features. That is the best way to honestly like convince someone to buy something, meaning let's say I would like to convince our users to buy Duolingo Max and its key feature is a video call. The best way to do it is have them try video call, actually. So a lot of our ways to do that is maybe show them a video of how video call works and then say if you're interested here is Duolingo Max or have them go into the experience, have a call themselves and then at the end say this is part of Duolingo Max. That is kind of the best way when it's like contextual and users discover that there is something to be paid to like experience. I think just like having people showing kind of what I would call like generic ads works way less better.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can acquire will land on your app and say, okay, you asked me to pay $80, $100, whatever it is, or $10, or I can just go to Duolingo and do it for free. So your paid costs go really high, so it makes it really hard to compete with a free, amazing product. So this is a very roundabout way to say if you're building your consumer app business, I think you want to make sure you have an amazing free growth flywheel. It makes you defensible, and it kind of spreads your product without.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Entire pie of people who can use your product without having to pay. And we have a lot of users that use the app for free for five years. Eventually one January they're like, oh, I'm going to go ham on my French this year. I'll subscribe. It doesn't matter, but they use Duolingo. So to build basically a large user base, and if you want to build a large business, it's way more defensible to build a great free user experience and do it freemium rather than full premium. The other problem with premium is competition. So like the reason Duolingo has grown quite a bit in the past 10 years or even gained initial success was because it had an amazing free user experience. If you created the exact cool of Duolingo today, what you would probably do is, okay, like you want to make some money, apps have tried this actually. You kind of copy Duolingo exactly as is. You make it fully paid. You're like, I'm going to go fully paid and spend on paid performance marketing. Well, what happens is the users who”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really depends on what business you're building. But if you are building a consumer app business, I would very, very highly advise you to build a freemium model, meaning you should have a very great free user experience without asking anybody to pay. The reason for that is if you have a premium product, let's say it's all paid, you can only use the app if you subscribe or it's very limited, what you have to build is also a paid marketing engine. So you have to spend a lot of performance marketing to acquire subscribers, generate revenue from them, and spend it back on performance marketing. That's how paid products kind of have to grow. Free products, if you build an amazing free product, it takes way longer, but what you end up building is an organic growth flywheel. Meaning you tell your friends about Duolingo, I don't know if you do, I tell my friends about Duingo, let's go off of me, they can go experience the full thing for free, whether they appear or not doesn't matter. If they like it, they will also tell their friends. It just expands the end.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But yeah, so basically the no ads was a starting point and it was feature light honestly at the time. The subscription was kind of a nice to have more than anything else.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of users obviously were like, I love Duolingo, but I'll pay you guys whatever, can I remove the ads that no surprise because that's a common model. That was the idea for our subscription. So it's like we had ads, we had a no ad subscription. That was the start. And what we saw also at the time was there was a lot of user love for Duolingo. It sounds like you also love Duolingo. And we saw users just buying the subscription because a lot of our users was using Duolingo for five years. I just wanted to contribute something back. So I bought the subscription, even though I didn't know what was really in it.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We get paid by impressions, so views, I guess. So the rate that these ad networks pay you depend on how clickable these impressions are. It kind of both touch eventually the ad revenue you make if you're running in programmatic ads on your products.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct, but I think that is short term thinking at the end because you maximize a lot of maybe revenue now because you're putting a lot of ad clicks across the app. But the moment you ruin your free user experience, you kill your growth engine.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Ad Load is the key thing there. We stick to one, you will only see one ad at the end of a lesson. And that's not mid-lesson. That's not start of the lesson. You finish your lesson and you take a breather. That's the only time we show you an ad is what we aligned on. Versus you can put a banner ad on top of, you know, there's many tasteless ways to do it, which optimize.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't say I love ads as a user either. So I think you sacrifice because it is not a property you control, meaning if I bring an advertiser, they have to show their asset. And the asset comes with a five second timer on, I don't know, a video for selling you shorts, whatever it might be. It's a cost, I think, that you take. That said, there are many different ways to do ads. So I think treating ads as this like black box carrier of like, it's only bad and it can only hurt is a bit too simplistic.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the first experiment, and we're like, okay, our users are not running away, we are improving how the ads lock and when they're surfaced. And then I think over time it started snowballing to be like, okay, we can do this. We can do ads. Once we did ads, the second phase was, well, no ads was like a request people started sending us being like, can I pay you guys to remove ads? We're like, well, let's try that. That's a good start.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably wasn't one meeting, but there was a few key moments where I remember being like, how am I going to figure this out? One of them was sitting with Luis. In honesty, probably one of my first weeks and I in a very early product manager trying to figure stuff out. And I'm like, all right, Luis, like, here's our Azure map. I calculated how much money this is going to bake. Here are the experiments I'm going to run. And he's like, all right, what's it going to look like? And I show him like the prototype or like we look at it. He's been looking at it. He's like, these ads look like shit is his first response. He's like, I'm not sure if we should do it. And I'm like, okay, where did we hear you? I understand that this doesn't look like the pristine every other page of the app. It's different. It's another advertiser's property, but we can improve the look. We can change the design. Anyway, it was an iterative process from there to be like he's like, let's test, let's see what happens. And the other worry was like, oh, this is going to kill retention. We test it. It's fine. It's like neutral on retention.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that was also the common wisdom at the time. It was the Facebook model, just grow. Doesn't matter. Ignore monetization. And honestly, it was good advice, but I think what we ignored is you can still have high retention. You can keep growing your product by also monetize at the same time. I think it felt like it would kill things, and it didn't. It was fine. Like, I mean, putting ads on Duolingo, if you do it tastefully, doesn't kill your retention. So you can still have very high retention and monetize the bells and whistles, but have high growth.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's lesson one that things change and your view on these change, but I think two, the reason there was a lot of resistance in the company for monetization is we launched with the view that if you did these things, you would screw up your amazing great consumer product. I think what honestly my job eventually turned into is obviously building these things, but also changing the organization's mind that there is a way to do these without going against our mission of providing access to free education and doing them well. The big unlock there was at the time, and honestly mostly today, all education apps would lock all of their content behind the paywall because, you know, that's so straightforward. Like, why did you come to this app to learn? Well, what are we going to charge for? Let's charge for the learning content. We did the exact opposite. We're like, learning content is completely free.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was the original plan. And as Luis announced Duolingo, he also said we will never have ads, never in app purchases, and never subscriptions and finally left. That's the exact three things I did as part of my job at Duolingo.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hindsight bias is easy to apply to our past and say, Oh, we waited too long. But I think at the time, a few things were, I would say, maybe headwinds to starting to monetize. One of them is Duolingo obviously has a very strong mission today, and that certainly was the case then when it first came out. Luis, you can find Luis's talk. This was a lot easier to find on YouTube, and I think it was on our corporate pages. I think we removed it now because we moved away from that. But the monetization plan for Duolingo was going to be everything was going to be free. So as users went through, did language exercises, they would do translation, and then we would crowdsource those translations as a service to anyone who wanted to buy it. So if CNN wanted to translate an article from English to Spanish, they would feed in to doolingo system. That article would be broken up into chunks, fed into users and exercise, and as crowds translated that as an exercise, it would populate back a translation.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I've seen their designs. It looks awesome. I'll say the hardest thing is to switch out of the thing we have. So even if we love the product, switching out is going to be a big debate because there's a huge cost. And I think people bring this up because you can switch from cursor to Windsurf. You don't lose anything, right? If the windsurf is better tomorrow morning, well, we'll start using that. Maybe these will change, like meaning the more code you build with one will just make it so much better. For example, now ChatGPT has memory. I think that is an amazing lock-in for chat GPT because now, since it remembers our chats, it can now give me smarter answers. That is a big lock-in for me to not use a different product.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like these statements come out of is there a data lock in? So, like, if you're feeding it more data, is the tool getting better? Or is there like a social lock-in where, I don't know, you're collaborating with folks and switching is painful. For example, a lot of enterprise tools have heavy data lock-in. Like we use JIRA for, for example, task management in the company. It's very hard to switch out of because all of our history has been now fed in there and switching out means we kind of have to leave that data and go elsewhere. We use JIRA for.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to say cursor. Because internally at Duolingo, I'm seeing way more usage and way more creation come out of cursor. That said, maybe we haven't experimented enough with Windsurf.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Users eventually get the best of 100 ideas rather than best of five ideas we can ship today. So I think just like creation goes up. And when creation goes up, the best things that go out to users are just going to be better.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. On a personal level, I'm super excited. And for the discipline of product management, I'm also super excited. Maybe you've had multiple folks on this show and I've heard this come up actually. It's like PMs do have imposter syndrome. Because they're like, when they're interacting with engineer, they're not technical enough. When they're working with designers, they're not creative enough. These tools level up everybody to have much, maybe not at the same level, but to a similar leveling field where we're all operating with like strong tools. So it helps PMs be a lot more productive and independent for themselves. So I think you uplevel product managers, which is good, like for my function, I love that. But you up-level everybody to be way more productive. This unlocks much easier product building. And I think this is very similar to just like a 10x productivity gain where the best ideas will eventually win. So creating 10x more prototypes doesn't, I mean, it creates maybe chaos at first, but then the”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The two things that really become 10x unlocks is when we figure out text to excellent looking pixel perfect design with just prompting. I think that is not there, but I think it will get there. So for example, we think that Bruno es Americano is kind of the experience we should build. So we build a character like Bruno that you can talk to and he's American. He teaches you American English. Let's say that's what we want to build. Without touching a single piece of code, can we create the best animated Bruno character that talks to you in American English? If we can do that, that is a massive unlock. And I think this is not super far. So that's like text to design. And then design to code. We have the design that we can build a prototype of that thing that is good enough to go into Duolingo and go out to real users. That is a 10x unlock.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That sounds insane. I hadn't heard that. I think these stats are very much of the autocomplete variety. Like what Curses a lot of times good at is you start writing code and then you can autocomplete with AI, that's great. That's awesome. I mean, it's not a 10x unlock if you can do that. Like meaning if you're writing an article, if you can complete 20% of it with autocomplete, it's the same. It's like, yeah, it's good, but it's not a massive life-changing accomplishment.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't. So, my read is like, it's not that exciting. And I think there's a lot of hype generated around some companies are putting out statements that are like, okay, like we're not going to hire engineers anymore.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think my read right now is more of the latter. And also the magnitude of multiplication is way lower than like 10xing things. I think it's maybe in the realm of like 10 to 20 percent more productivity of an average engineering capacity.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'll give you my take. We will have more engineers. However, the definition of an engineer might look different in five years, meaning this hybrid, I'm going to call it the prototyper role, where it's like a hybrid of engineer, designer, PM will be way more common. And I think that will be a lot of the headcount growth that organizations experience rather than, I think right now when you say engineers, like software engineering is like a very defined discipline, I think we'll end up with these like undefined builders that can use AI tools really well. And I think companies will employ a large number of those”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's to our advantage. I mean, we can cut process. We're not doing process because we love process. I think if we can speed up all of our product teams to us, that's an advantage. Like we would love to disrupt our own process as soon as we can so that like every individual can ship product faster.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a really good question. I don't think it becomes obsolete, but the way we use these tools, and maybe it will be Figma, maybe it'll be a different tool, is going to change significantly. I think we'll go from basically text of an idea to a prototype of an idea rather than everything in between. Maybe Figma is the tool that we used to do that. Maybe it's something else. But then now there's like three, four steps to get there, or actually even more. Like there's basically texture design and then design to code is kind of how things go. Actually, there's text to spec, spect to design designed to code. This is going to all merge is my guess. So this process is changing already.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot. I think specs, like you know, companies write product specs that go from someone's idea that turns into a product spec and then that goes into design, that goes into engineering. This process is like dead. Like why would you write specs if you can go from your idea to an exact prototype? So this whole middle assembly line of creating product is a dead process.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think you give me a clap. Money is another incentive. So I think you can reward people with compensation. That's another obvious one. And I think the third is in an organization, I think it's also in the tech company or like Duolingo, we bake it into how we think about performance. So if someone is actually creating more output with AI, well, they'll probably get promoted faster.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One is recognition. I think that's what we do right now a lot. So if one of our product managers automates the task, we encourage them to share it with others and we clap. I think that is one way to recognize someone that has done something great.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's gonna be inertia, right? I think it's like just saying, yeah, we should all use AI. I think that doesn't actually get groups to be like, yeah, like I'll go do this tomorrow. I mean, some people will, because they're excited, I think what tends to work is, I think in one incentives, you should incentivize people to automate repetitive tasks. I think you should award and highlight people doing that. That's what we do. I think that helps.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In my opinion, that will get solved in, I don't know, maybe 12 months. But I think if you know how to use these tools to create product, build product, and you can kind of harness their power to build great things, you'll come out ahead.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Learn AI tools in and out today, and they will look different almost in like four weeks. So I think you should be experimenting with how AI tools build product like very heavily. This is what I admire my own team. Like we have basically told and aligned with our team we will be AI first as a product team. This is very similar to when companies went mobile first in like 2012. It felt really artificial and weird because like tech companies looked at their user base and said, oh, 1% of our users are on mobile, 99% is on web. Going mobile first is kind of stupid. Like we're investing in 1%, but like quickly in like three years they realized that was the right bet to take. But it was quite artificial. Anyone that's going into products should bet on the same thing, which is you should build AI first, even though when you use these AI tools and say, all right, create me a great app. You end up with like a dinky web app.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so. I think what is likely to happen is there is clear work definitions of what an engineer does today, what a product manager does, and what a designer does. I think these are going to converge way more than what's happening today in technology organizations. So I don't know if they'll converge fully. I think that's maybe a little far, but they will converge in the sense that there will be a lot more, all of them will be capable of taking over each other's jobs in multiple ways because AI tools will enable them to design faster or PMs to start designing more or PMs to vibe code more or designers to do the same or engineers to stretch into design or PM. So I think these roles will converge more. That's already happening, honestly.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a great question. I think today, the traditional product team is you're going to have somewhere between five to 15 people. That's the traditional product team that has engineers, designers, and product managers at its core, and it might have other functions like data science, marketing depending on what they're doing. What I expect is going to happen, which is maybe the chess example is a good example, is these teams are going to be smaller because you might not need as many people to do the task at hand, which might be just like we just need to create a prototype of this thing. We just need to figure out if this is the right design. We're probably not going to need as many people. So we'll have smaller number of people on each team. But honestly, I'm hoping by doing that, we'll be working on much more innovative bets quicker. Because again, like this chess example is a good one. If we can do that like 10x more, well, dueling go will hopefully be 10x better over time.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's way shorter and way less people. Our experience with doing this was with math and music before. It was triple the amount of people and double the amount of time it takes to get a course out. The big unlock there is I would say maybe two things. One of them AI coding certainly speeds up because you can prototype quickly, get feedback, iterate rather than if you couldn't do that, you have to have an engineering team that's like building prototypes and that's a much slower process. The second one is honestly I think having great people. I mean, we had a great PM and a great designer and they know how Duolingo works, what we think is good so they can independently make really quick decisions. So I think staffing a great team with great tools was the big unlock.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where we're like, this is very much headed in the right direction. We really enjoy using this prototype. And then we staffed a team with engineers, and now it launched this week. So in a span of eight months, it went from like, I don't know, this is kind of an interesting idea to like a full launch of a new Duolingo course.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a great question. You know, I would love to say we have this super ironed out process. You follow ABC and you have the perfect answer to the question of what to invest in. The reality is it's a lot messier than that. But chess is a really good example of bottoms-up innovation in the company where it's not an executive that had great idea and said, yeah, we should go in this direction. So as a product manager and a product designer, they didn't have an engineer on the team. They went and prototype basically they're like, we think chess will be a good subject for dueling it to do. We're like, kind of weird, doesn't exactly fit, but we're like, yeah, cool idea. They went and prototyped almost like a full chest lesson experience with no engineer. So like RPM vibe coded basically the whole thing. Our designer created excellent looking designs. We tested it and we're like, this is a pretty good dueling go lesson. So like they kept iterating actually like on this vibe coded prototype. And then until a point.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think we bring a lot of smart people in the company together. We have them all tested and see if we can align for the most part. We don't all have to align, but generally if enough high judgment people are like, yeah, this kind of works. Like I can actually practice speaking better than everything else I could do on Duolingo, which was the case where we have something good on our hands. Let's make it better.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty much exactly. And I think for smaller stuff, like if it's not an entire new feature, you can do it all in one go. But if the extensive iterative prototyping is good because you don't have to invest like months of time before you see if it works or not. So you validate if it works and then you kind of do the other steps.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Extensive prototyping. I think, let's say we have an idea. We think calling Lily is going to be a good way to practice our Spanish. The way that the first prototype is going to look is like, it's not going to be well animated. The illustrations are going to be janky. Maybe there's going to be like error codes in some part of the UI, but we'll test the core interaction of can she give us smart answers? We'll try that. And then we'll be like, okay, if she can, let's move to problem number two. It needs to look engaging. We solve that. So I think extensive prototyping is your prototype test and like refine what the spec is.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, great question. So we use Figma for a lot of our designs. That said, for something that is an experience, you got to experience, Figma is good for us to say, this isn't headed in the right direction. Let's go to prototype. We have a product review process where our CEO, Luis, is involved. I'm involved. Our head of design is involved, and our product leaders are involved, where teams come, they show their change, and we give feedback, they refine it, and they either go to prototype or they go straight to an A-B experiment. Wow. So depending on the size of the change, we might do extensive prototyping. In the case of video call, we prototype for like maybe two, three months. We did one change. We tested it. We didn't like it. We iterated, and then it was ready to go out to our users.”
2025-06-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source