Behind the product: Duolingo streaks | Jackson Shuttleworth (Group PM, Retention Team)

(instrumental music) ... Duolingo is a 14 billion company. It's hitting all-time highs, too. It just keeps going up. I think it doubled in value in the past six months. Streaks is the most impactful feature.

We have, right now, over nine million users with a year-plus streak. If you look at the numbers, I think this has been our biggest growth lever. And what Duolingo really focuses on is, you know, how do we help users build habits around language learning? Getting a user to come back the next day is the biggest problem to solve.

Well, let's get into the mother lode (laughs) of learnings from the journey of Streaks, talk about the key lessons, insights, and also where it turns along the way.

I'd say, like, test everything. We have run, in the last four years, over 600 experiments on the Streaks, so every other day. We've actually set up really good infrastructure for copy testing. We used to say, "Continue." Our, like, standard CTA is Continue. And we changed that to "Commit to my goal," and it was, like, a massive win.

There's so much human psychology that you all learn through all these experiments of just, like, how to motivate people, what motivates, what demotivates.

... say that you played a mobile game or that you've done it for 3,000 days in a row, I don't know, maybe that hits a little bit different than you've learned Spanish for 3,000 days in a row. (graphics whooshing)

(instrumental music) Today, my guest is Jackson Shuttleworth. Jackson is a group product manager at Duolingo, leading the retention team. This is a different kind of episode that I'm experimenting with, where we spend the entire conversation focused on the journey and lessons of a single feature, in this case, Duolingo Streaks. Duolingo is a $14 billion business. Just over the past six months, they doubled in value. They're hitting all-time highs in usage and market cap. They're also one of the very few successful, and also the single biggest, consumer app business in the world. And as you'll hear from Jackson, the Streaks feature is the single most impactful feature that most contributed to this growth and success. In other words, you could argue this one feature created billions of dollars of value, which, to me, means it is worth studying in-depth. In our conversation, Jackson shares the history of the Streaks feature, all of the biggest wins and wrong turns they've taken along the way, what he and his team have learned about what works and doesn't work with the Streaks mechanic, and also how they set up their teams to operate in a way that allows them to run over 600 experiments on this product and continue to find big wins. I hope to do more episodes like this on features and products that you'd love to hear more about. So, leave a comment, either on YouTube or on Substack, and tell me which product or feature you'd love to see me cover. And if you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Jackson Shuttleworth. Jackson, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.