Finding hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) — Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth Summary

Finding hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) — Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth Summary | Galaxy of Podcasts

The Conversation Breakdown

Keep a real free core

⏱ Untimed topic

Cheng connects freemium to broad access and word-of-mouth growth. His preference is a permanently free core value proposition with a taste of premium features layered on top. Free users can also introduce a product to coworkers. This is his experience, not a universal pricing prescription.

Choose trials for the product’s behavior

⏱ Untimed topic

He says reverse trials can work where users invest in setup and build a reason to stay, such as some B2B products. Consumer products can behave differently. The choice should follow how value and continued use develop rather than copy a successful company's paywall.

Match retention work to actual usage

⏱ Untimed topic

For a daily-use product, habitual users and their retention can become a major growth driver. Grammarly taught him a different lesson: installation and activation mattered because users did not proactively open it daily. One retention playbook does not fit every product.

Give returning users a good re-entry

⏱ Untimed topic

Cheng describes mature products accumulating inactive and sporadic users. At Duolingo, returning users could reassess their level rather than resume an unsuitable old lesson. Improving re-entry can be useful alongside new-user acquisition; his examples and performance claims are not independently verified here.

Let the right team own the metric

⏱ Untimed topic

He staffed a growth team to improve Grammarly's repeated use, then concluded the core product team had more influence through suggestion quality. He shifted the work to that team. Adding a growth team is not progress if it gets between the problem and the people best placed to solve it.

Start experimenting before building a platform

⏱ Untimed topic

Cheng encourages teams to begin with a manageable test and available tools. In-house systems helped some large companies, but he does not recommend building one from day one. The aim is to reduce wrong assumptions about users, not to recreate another company's infrastructure.

Use an experiment goal to reveal constraints

⏱ Untimed topic

He describes Chess.com's ambitious experiment-count target as a way to discuss tooling, ownership and which teams could test. A thousand tests without learning or impact would waste time. Celebrate useful results and faster learning rather than rewarding volume alone.

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

Executive Summary (TL;DR)

Key Takeaways

Keep a real free core

Choose trials for the product’s behavior

Match retention work to actual usage

Give returning users a good re-entry

Let the right team own the metric

Start experimenting before building a platform

Use an experiment goal to reveal constraints

The Conversation Breakdown

Keep a real free core

Choose trials for the product’s behavior

Match retention work to actual usage

Give returning users a good re-entry

Let the right team own the metric

Start experimenting before building a platform

Use an experiment goal to reveal constraints

Core Frameworks & Ideas

Free core plus premium sampling

Metric-owner check

Experiment goal as constraint finder

Actionable Next Steps

Notable Quotes

The One Thing to Remember