Finding hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com)

(instrumental music) Growth is... The job is to connect users to the value of your product. Growth sometimes gets this reputation that it's just pure metrics hacking.

You worked at three of the most successful consumer subscription products in the world. What do you think is the biggest missing piece that people don't get about building a successful consumer subscription product?

User retention is gold for consumer subscription companies. If you don't retain your users, then a lot of the onus is on getting them to pay on day one.

Noam Levinskey, he said that I need to ask you about the biggest monetization win that you found at Grammarly.

The lift product experience for most of the free users was that Grammarly was just a product to fix your spelling and grammar, because those were the free suggestions. What if we actually sampled a number of different paid suggestions and interspersed them to free users across their writing? All of a sudden, people were seeing Grammarly as a much more powerful tool than they were before.

What's the most counterintuitive lesson you've learned about building teams?

I saw some of the highest performers just being people that had very high agency, had that clock speed, had that energy, but they didn't necessarily need to have deep experience on that matter. Sometimes experience could be a crutch, especially in this world where the grounds are shifting so fast with AI. A lot of your learned habits actually need to be intentionally discarded.

(instrumental music) Today, my guest is Albert Cheng. Albert is known as one of the top consumer growth minds in the world. He led growth and monetization at three of the most successful and beloved consumer products in the world, Duolingo, Grammarly, and now Chess.com. Earlier in his career at YouTube, he worked on streaming and gaming features used by over 20 million people. His unique approach to growth blends marketing, data, strategy, and product management. And in our conversation, we cover a lot of ground, including his explore and exploit framework to find growth opportunities, his biggest and most interesting growth wins at Duolingo, Grammarly, and Chess.com, how he uses AI to accelerate his growth work, what he's come to realize about the power of brand and community in your growth work, his top experimentation best practices, why his goal at every company is to run 1,000 experiments a year, and so much more. A huge thank you to Eric Alabast, Noam Levinskey, and Jorge Mazal for suggesting topics for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get 15 incredible products for free for an entire year, including Lovable, Replit, Bolt, n8n, Linear, Superhuman, Descript, Whisperflow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, ChatBRD, and Mobbin. Head on over to lennysnewsletter.com and click Product Pass. With that, I bring you Albert Cheng. My podcast guests and I love talking about craft and taste and agency and product market fit. You know what we don't love talking about? SOC 2. That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta helps companies of all sizes get compliant fast and stay that way with industry-leading AI, automation, and continuous monitoring. Whether you're a startup tackling your first SOC 2 or ISO 27001, or an enterprise managing vendor risk, Vanta's Trust Management Platform makes it quicker, easier, and more scalable. Vanta also helps you complete security questionnaires up to five times faster so that you could win bigger deals sooner. The result? According to a recent IDC study, Vanta customers slashed over $500,000 a year and are three times more productive. Establishing trust isn't optional. Vanta makes it automatic. Get $1,000 off at vanta.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Jira Product Discovery. The hardest part of building products isn't actually building products. It's everything else. It's proving that the work matters, managing stakeholders, trying to plan ahead. Most teams spend more time reacting than learning, chasing updates, justifying roadmaps, and constantly unblocking work to keep things moving. Jira Product Discovery puts you back in control. With Jira Product Discovery, you can capture insights and prioritize high impact ideas. It's flexible, so it adapts to the way your team works, and helps you build a roadmap that drives alignment, not questions. And because it's built on Jira, you can track ideas from strategy to delivery all in one place. Less chasing, more time to think, learn, and build the right thing. Get Jira Product Discovery for free at atlassian.com/lenny. That's atlassian.com/lenny. (instrumental music) Albert, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.