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

0:00 Duolingo is a$14 billion company. It's hitting all time highs too. 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 9 million users with a year plus streak. If you look at the numbers, I think it has been our biggest growth lever. What Duolingo really focuses on is you know, how do we help users build Habits around Language learning. Getting user come back the next day is the biggest problem to solve. Let's get into the mother load of learnings from the journey of streaks. Talk about the key lessons, insights, and also rock and turns along the way. I'd say like test everything. We've run in the last four years over 600 experiments on the street. 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, that you've done it for 3,000 days in a row. I don't know, maybe that hits a little bit different. then you've learned Spanish for three thousand days in a row.

1:05 Today my guest is Jackson Shettleworth. Jackson 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.

1:24 In this case, Duolingo Streaks. Duolingo is a fourteen billion dollar 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.

1:42 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 streak's feature, all 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 a streaks mechanic.

2:10 And also how they set up their teams to operate in a way that allows them to run over six hundred 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.

2:38 With that, I bring you Jackson Shuttleworth. Jackson, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Yeah, thank you. Long time listener, first time caller. So I appreciate it. So

2:53 This is gonna be a really interesting conversation. I've never done an episode like this before where We basically spent like an hour, an hour and a half going into one Feature of one product. But

3:05 This is a very special feature. It's a very special product. Um, have you ever spent like an hour, an hour and a half just talking about this one feature with anyone? Well, internally. So when we when we onboard new folks to the team, we'll do I actually just did this with somebody that joined the team recently where we spent, and I was like, hey, let's spend an hour just talking about the streak. We got through an hour and I got through about thirty percent of of what I I I wanted to share. Um, there's just so much. We'll talk about this, but there's so much that we've learned over the years. Uh, but never anything external like this. I think we've shared bits and pieces of learnings, but this will be like the The mother load of learnings, hopefully how Duolingo's built the streak. We should title this the motherlade of learnings of Duolingo Streets.

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5:57 That's V A N T A dot com slash Lenny. Okay, so for people that don't know anything about what Duolingo streaks are, can you just first give a Brief explanation of what is Duolingo Streaks, what is this feature all about? Well, presumably people know uh Duolingo is a language learning app. Um The the Duolingo streak tracks currently, anyway, how many days in a row you've done a lesson. So you come to Duolingo, you do a lesson

6:22 Your first lesson, you know, you'll start a streak and then Every consecutive day that you come, use the app, you'll extend your streak. And and I should actually put an asterisk ground. How many days in a row because we also have build flexibility into the features. So we have these things called streak freezes. It's like insurance for your streak. So You know, it's a pretty simple feature, you know, in in theory, but Over time we've layered on

6:44 challenges and goal setting and rewards and you know social features, you know, a lot of our notifications are tied to the streak. So Pretty simple feature to understand, but it's been a really rich feature for us to to build on top of. Some people will might be hearing this be like Duolingo Streaks. Like, what's the big deal? There's other people that are like, Holy shit, I want to learn everything I can possibly learn about Duolingo Streaks. So many companies are trying to copy what you've learned from this. Give people a sense of the impact that this one feature has had on Duolingo's success and growth. This is and and this is not just the, you know, subjective retention PM talking. I think this is our biggest feature at uh with the exception of the lessons. And I think it's actually worth start that.

7:24 Streaks are a great engagement hack. I I'm kind of of the opinion that any team, you know, any app out there can introduce a streak and if you figure it out, it probably works. um, you know, to retain users. But at the core, like You have to have an app that people want to use. And people really like using Duolingo. It's fun. It's delightful. You learn something. And so It allows us to layer an engagement mechanic on on top of that. Like the streak is really powerful. So It ships.

7:48 a disgusting amount of DAUs. Again, it is just it is it is our um one of our golden geese. And and again, what's cool is that like You know, you look at notifications, notifications for Duolingo is massive. I mean, you know, us sending better you know, whether it's copy or timing. So many of our notifications work. Because they reference the streak, because users care about the streak. And so

8:11 Not only is it itself, us iterating on the streak, a huge driver of DAUs, but it's also something that enables other really high, you know, valuable features. I was looking up some stats before I came on and It's pretty crazy. So we have right now over nine million users with a year plus streak. So nine million of our users have had

8:33 Uh you just Duolingo. Every or almost every day for uh, you know, well over a year. Um Which which is pretty which is it it's I don't know.

8:44 I like to imagine things in terms of like You know, okay, well, like if you put all these people in a city, you're you know, in a place, where would it be in like, ah it's like a very large city, nine million people, so For a year. Have been ha have a year long streak. That's incredible. I was just looking at the

8:59 The stock of Dueling. So Dillingo's a fourteen billion dollar company at the time of recording this. It's hitting all time highs too. It's like just keeps going up. I think it doubled. in value in the past six months, something like that. And what I'm hearing from you is Streaks is This other than just like the core

9:14 learning feature, which is just like the product of Dolingo, this is the most impactful feature. in terms of growth and In that retention specifically. I mean, if you look at the numbers, I think pretty objectively has been our biggest growth lever for for driving DAUs and and also say a lot of it's just related to

9:33 how we think about growth at Duolingo. And a lot of what we try to do is organic growth. You know, we Think about growth. you know, just as much as bringing new users onto the platform is not losing them. If you're just bringing people onto the platform and then they churn. that's not going to be sustainable. And so as much as we can do to keep our users coming back and actually retaining as users, it's gonna make it

9:53 It's gonna give us a much easier base to continue growing DAUs off of. Perfect. Okay. Talk about how this feature originally came to be. What was the original version of it? What was the original insight that Let it be one. Yeah, so the oldest streaks are as old as Duolingo itself. We when we launched Duolingo, we we launched with the street and I say we, I was like just graduating undergrad when when Duolingo launched. Um so this is well before my time.

10:18 Um, but we launched with a streak feature. The You know, the initially how how the how the feature worked was you'd come to Duolingo and you'd set a goal for yourself. Um, and it was an XP based goal. So Duolingo, a little bit of like, you know, nomenclature. We have a experience points based system that drives a lot of our features in the app. And the way you'd said it is you'd say, you know, based on what your language learning goal was. you know, may you have maybe a ten experience point goal versus a fifty experience point goal. And so extending your streak would be

10:47 Hey, can you hit fifty experience points if that's what you set your goal to be? This worked well. I think this also speaks to like how Duolingo initially grew. You know, we were uh Luis launched it with a TED talk, you know, we probably had a more tech forward user base, you know, initially. And so this whole idea of like an experience point space streak system made sense. But what that also meant is that you could have a user come and use the app, do multiple lessons a day, and maybe they just set too hard of a goal for themselves. And then lose their streak, which I I I don't you know, you don't need to be an expert in streaks to understand that's that's probably not good. You know, the nice thing with how we initially set it up though is it really did connect with what your goal was. So if you were serious, let's track

11:25 how good you are at being a serious language learner. But I'd say one of the most impactful experiments we ran. was about fo it's was actually as I was joining we had or or just after I joined we'd we had run this experiment. Um, was to move it from a XP based streak to just do one lesson a day and you'd extend your streak. And and you know, the risk that you can sort of imagine as

11:47 Well then users kinda care less about it'cause it's not connected with their goal. And we saw none of that. I mean this was Huge driver of DAUs just making it making it easier to extend your streak, but I think really importantly is still meaningful. Right? Like The unit of use, and you know, as you're thinking about building a streak, like I think it's really important to think about like what the unit of use of your app is.

12:09 Um, the unit of use for Duolingo is like doing a lesson. And so if what we care about is users coming back every day and doing a lesson, because it shows that they're actually engaging with the app. then it doesn't hurt us to make our streak focus on just do one unit versus multiple. And so that was like probably the big C change experiment that we ran, um, you know, at the time was moving from an XP base streak to a one lesson streak. It's also simple. And I think that's like one of the things to think about with streaks. It's always easy as a PM to like, over you know, have a million goals or objectives for what you want your feature to be and and and potentially build a more complex feature. You know, one lesson streak, it's just easy for more users to understand.

12:46 Yeah, that's exactly what I was gonna say. And just for folks that aren't super familiar with XP, it's basically experience points and you get them from like doing things. It's like a Yeah, you do you do stuff on Duolingo and then based on what you did and how well you did it. We give you experience points. This actually drives a number of our features in our app. So leaderboards is the big one. You know, we have a leaderboard system where you try over the course of the week, you battle with twenty nine other people and y y you want to win. That's all driven by XP. So we do have other features in the app that really benefit from this XP system. The streak is just no longer one of them. Awesome. Okay, so I want to talk about the journey from that point to what it is today, but a quick tangent.

13:23 I saw Luis tweet just this week, someone asked him. How do you decide whether to optimize for learning? or engagement. And he's like No question. Uh everything we do is focused on engagement because

13:36 you won't learn anything if you're not coming back to the app. As an engagement PM, that was like the coolest thing he could have ever tried. It's well, again, very much as a you know, object uh subjectively, I guess, as a engagement PM. I mean, that's how I've you know, I I and I'm sure my learning the the learning folks at Duolingo will cringe when they hear it. Like I see myself as a learning PM as much as an engagement PM because The easiest way not to learn on Duolingo is not to come back the next day. And so if we don't make the app retentive, you will have no opportunity to engage with our learning features. Now I do think that there is a long tail of learning where

14:11 If you start to dumb down, and honestly, this is this is something we we wrestle with this streak as well, you start to dumb down the experience and your users aren't actually learning. They're not going to care. I mean Streaks work best when they're sitting on top of an app, you know, uh that that users care about. Um But Yeah, I mean, if if you can't come, you know, if you don't come learn on Duolingo, you know, if you don't come back to Duolingo, then you're not learning. So um, we I mean we track a lot of this with

14:36 know, the work that we do, we make sure that as we're making changes to the streak, we're not hurting the learning experience and we don't have a ton of interaction with it. So we're constantly thinking about this, but Thank you, Louise, for saying that. It makes sense to me. Okay, so let's get into the mother load of learnings from the journey of streaks. So the first version went from XP to one lesson. Talk about the

14:59 Key lessons, insights, and also wrong turns along the way to what we see today. Duolingo has very much uh you know, has a has a strong like test it. philosophy. Um, you know, we're willing to test a lot of different honestly we'd much rather test it than like debate it for you know days and days. So we actually followed up this experiment with, and this is this is a little bit later with Hey, what if we make it even easier to extend your streak? And so we actually tested

15:26 Hey, if you if you Do one exercise. Just one exercise in a lesson will will extend your streak. And in and a lot of like the insight was good. Like you look at the funnel, hey, there's a lot of users who are starting but not finishing lessons, they're not extending your streak. The lost aversion doesn't kick in, they don't, you know, come back. So this kind of followed that train of thought.

15:45 Well we realized when we ran this experiment is Um, you know, DAU's mo moved, not one bit. And and what we would what we were doing by and this if we go back to like unit of measure. You know, we had we had dumb down the universe and nobody thinks about I just wanna come you do one question on Duolingo. Nobody thinks about that.

16:05 Um, so we had more like a a a less clear unit of measure that we were basing our streak around. And and the users that we are capturing with our streak. You know, you come, you do one or two questions on Duolingo, then you leave. We're like the least engaged users imaginable. And so, you know, I think that's something also to think about as you're building your streak is like what is the user that you're solving for? So not only what is the kind of habit that you're building for, but like what is the level of commitment and That was an example where we overindexed on

16:32 A type of user who we honestly just weren't going to keep. Uh, that was a very easy shutdown, uh shutdown decision. That's an awesome story. I just just to comment on that real quick, just like you went Like let's just go to the extreme and make it just like streaks. Yeah, get everyone Go on streaks forever and then I love that it turned out and this

16:50 It's not bringing users that you want. And it's dumbing down experience. Makes me think of Farmville where you have to go and like harvest your crops every whatever hour and just like like that last for a bit and then eventually people are like what the hell am I doing in my life. Exactly. No, we I mean and we test every so we I was looking at the numbers as well. We we've run in the last four years over six hundred experiments on the street. So every other day effective hundred Well. We're running an experiment. And and they range from big like this, like changing how the mechanic works to like

17:21 Let's swap a string with another string and see if that copy is better, you know, for for users. So so we're constantly testing on on everything. I do think that like I'd be more careful running that experiment now. Like at some point your street gets big enough that Again, I got nine million users on the streak. I gotta be really careful. Those are our best retaining users. You know, you gotta gotta be careful, but in the early days of the streak, I'd say like, Test everything. I mean see what Don't get don't get

17:47 super caught up and it has to be like this. Just test a bunch of stuff and see what speaks most to users. 'Cause I I think, you know, again, you will constantly be surprised by the the insights that you get from whether you we we shut down about half of our experiments. So half of our big exper uh of our experiments lose. We still learn a ton by virtue of of running them. So super, super valuable. That's actually a good success rate. Uh a lot of companies have only twenty percent uh experiments be positive. What's your policy on is if it if it's neutral, do you ship it or do you Kill it. It really depends if if we're adding something and it's and it's neutral, we tend to to to shut it down because it's just more cognitive load. It's something that we're gonna have to start building around, a new UI element that we have to figure out how it fits into our system. I'd say when we do ship a neutral experiment is

18:35 Something that that we have real uh conviction around. Okay. Yeah, maybe this was neutral, but it's gonna give us a new platform to then build on top of. So That experience might be neutral, but now we can build these DAU positive experiments. Yeah, my general take there is though In that case.

18:53 build that in as part of your V one so that it, you know, you make sure that it like at least your hypothesis around. this roadmap, you know, has play. You know, should probably be the case, but In general. shutting down a neutral experiment so you don't introduce more complexity to the app is is is the way we tend to go.

19:10 Make sense. All right, what else? What else have you learned along the journey? Well, I mean, maybe I can talk about a few different ways that we structure. You know, I've a few different themes that I think we we we lean on. Um so the first is Focusing on the zero to seven day

19:25 user experience. And I would say this is if you look at the kind of, you know, what our breakdown of experiments are. We run. Definitely more than average number of experiments on getting users to go from a zero to seven day streak. Um and a lot of this is because we've looked at the data for, you know, our retention curves. And what we found is that once you get to seven days, Loss Aversion kicks in. And and and you retain. So

19:47 Going from a one to a two day streak. Huge jump in retention. Two to three day streak. Slightly less, but still huge. And it's up until day seven. Once you hit day seven, it flattens out. And it's not to say that like, you know, if you're a you have a thirty day streak, you're way more attentive than day seven, but Not in the order of magnitude that it is from from day one through seven. So We do a ton of work to

20:08 get users to that point where loss of version kicks in and then they don't want to um They don't want to leave the app. One of the fun ones that we did, and it's it's honestly as much about process as it is about the feature itself, was um we have a feature called Street Goal. And it is Again, the so much of the stuff seems so obvious in retrospect. Um, but you know, it was really novel at the time. You know, we we had this

20:31 idea of like, hey, maybe we'll just go users to hitting a certain streak length. As you can imagine, this is pretty powerful uh, you know, user psychology. Um, and we started with the simplest version of this. And this is how Duolinga does a lot of our testing. You know, rather than design the big complex feature for V1. Just do like the simplest encapsulation of what that feature can be. See if it has legs. And then just add to it iteratively over time. This is partially how we get to, you know, six hundred plus experiments on streaks. They're not all big ones.

21:00 But we started and it was funny, we actually took a learning from our modernization team. So one of the strings that they had, the pieces of copy that they had. worked really, really well was Think it was your Like five point six times more likely to finish the course if you subscribe to plus. Sorry.

21:17 you know, now it's super our our subscription. And it was it was a really good hook that if you if you really cared You'd sign up. Um And so we ran a similar we we we had a similar thought where it's like, oh Let's just tell you how much more likely you are to Finish the course.

21:32 If you get a thirty day streak. And so we started with that and I think it was like you're seven times more likely to finish the course if you have a thirty day streak. And just that message when you started your streak us telling you that. Was Awesome. Huge win.

21:45 Um you know, indicating an outcome. And like Duolingo doesn't have we don't but we have a gem economy, but we don't actually have Like, you know, it's just it's it's all you learning, but being able to actually talk about in terms of the outcomes that a user would think about. In this case, trying to finish the course. was a huge win. So this is where we started and we're like, ah.

22:03 goal setting. All right. We we should go much harder on that. Found some different thing. And now let's just beat the heck out of it. Um so we followed that up with another experiment where we we test at different lengths. So we'll test 14 days and and fifty days. And we found that They were all good, but they They uh uh appeal to different users. And so We started to realize, all right, well

22:26 We probably need to be more thoughtful about who we give, you know, these different options to. And And and so then we followed that experiment up with, All right, let's start with thirty days, and then we're gonna let you opt out. You know, we'll we'll say, No, I don't think I can hit it. And our thinking was And then if you say no, we'll hit you with an easier goal because we just wanted to get you to commit to a goal.

22:45 And this was a fascinating one because It was a good win to give users that easier goal to try to capture capture them before they said no. But It was almost just as big a win to add that opt out button. So we test it separately, and I'm a huge fan of testing like way too many arms for an experiment just to like be able to isolate your hypotheses. But but we captured, you know, just what happens if we add an opt-out button.

23:09 And adding an opt-out button, when you would think like as a PM, oh I'm like You know, now users might not Engage with my feature. That's a bad thing. But it was a huge win to let them do that. And and the learning here was that. This intentionality of saying No.

23:23 I want it previously it was just a continue button. But now it's like no. I want to hit thirty days and and and having that be an intentional decision for them, yes or no. Even though again This had no impact. None of or no impact past the screen. Everything that I'm talking about now was Uh you know, just

23:40 that screen that day and then was all thrown out. So that optionality was was was uh you know, a huge insight. And so because of that, we built a a goal setting feature where you could choose between different goals, giving users that optionality was was uh likewise a huge win. I'll say one one final learning on this. Um again, you talk about like friction and and good and bad friction. We thought once we built uh you know a a goal picker screen where you could pick between different Streak length, we we were like, Oh well

24:12 Let's like recommend that users do a hard, you know, a harder goal. thinking that okay, well, harder goal is gonna be better attention and and we'll pre-select the harder goal for them. And this based on all the learnings that I just shared with you, you probably imagine lost pretty significantly. We realized that like Yes, we could speed users through the screen more by virtue of picking a goal for them.

24:30 But like That act of selecting I think it's thirty days. I think it's fourteen days. was where we were getting so much of the engagement from this feature. 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. It feels like you guys should write a book on human psychology and motivation.

24:51 I I feel very much like a amateur armchair psychologist with everything that at least as far as people who want to learn languages on their phone go. I I really understand those folks. So one kind of theme I'm hearing here so far is you guys are basically just like Mining for gold, just like looking for Like a vein in some mine. And once you hit it, you're like, Ooh, this worked. You just go

25:17 Crazy on just Testing all kinds of things to see if you how far you can take that one little light thread. Yeah, and I think You know, I I I shared that that the how this idea came partially from, you know, a modernization

25:30 win that they had. I think there's a lot of You know, because Duolingo runs, uh you know, I don't know what percentile we're in, but it's gotta be a very high percentile of you know, per capita experiments run for a company. you know, based on company size, we're just constantly learning so many things. And there's a really great cross sharing of Modernization say, Hey, this thing worked for us. Is that something you can use? So I'd say it's rare that we go into something where it's just like, let's just let's just try something. Typically we have some insight because of all these experiments that we've run.

26:00 But If we do this. I don't know, it's one here or it's worked here, it's driven this user engagement. If we you know, sort of massage that and make it, you know, try it in this um, you know, scenario or like a different screen.

26:14 You know, we we come in at least with a strong hypothesis of this will work. A lot of times we do look and we're like You know, a lot of the apps that we look at actually are games themselves. So it's like all right, you're playing Royal Match or you know, Monop there's a new Pokemon uh trading card game that I'm spending way too much time on. You know, you you you look at these games and see what they're doing, and it's really good um fodder for what we can do. But a lot of times you're at least going with a strong hypothesis based on what you've seen work elsewhere. Got it. So just to double down on that point, it's not like just random experiments. It's

26:43 Here's a hypothesis we're fairly confident. Or has a chance to be true. Let's try it. It's not just try everything. And I think that like How strongly you feel about the hypothesis directly ties to how hard that experiment is. Like with copy, for instance, we we've actually set up really good infrastructure for copy testing. And I'm of the opinion that Companies should run.

27:03 Long as you have the user base to do it, like copy test constantly. Like the amount of copy test that we've had that is just like That have won and and you I don't know, you just you just try things and you figure out well wins is is definitely legion and do and and have shipped like massive wins from little copy changes. Is there an example of that of just like the impact? Going back to that goal screen, um we used to say continue are like standard CTAs continue.

27:25 Um And we change that to commit to my goal. And it was like A massive win. Even just you know, and again it was like ju Okay. User's tapping on that. What are we asking them to do? Commit to the goal.

27:37 What is that gonna lead them to do commit, not you know, churn. Just that little copy change, that one time right there led to to huge wins. And in copy changes are so cheap. Like it's just Yeah.

27:49 Translate us, you know, for us, you know, we we have a lot of uh you know, users all over the world in the lotta UI languages, so But like just come up with a bunch of ideas, translate some strings. This is one where You know, the the feedback that you'll typically get from Luisa, so all of our changes at Duolingo go through product review that you know are reviewed by Luis. So Luis reviews every single change that, you know, we we propose or every experiment that we run. To believe copy, he's just like

28:13 I don't know, test it. Like there's there's nothing better than be told by Luis I don't think this is gonna win, but Sure. If you want to. And a lot of times, you know, to his credit, he's right. And a lot of times. You know?

28:25 our our intuition was right, but It's just so cheap to do it. I think When the lift is smaller. It's great to have a hypothesis, but You know, you don't need to beat it up too much.

28:36 So on this thread, I didn't realize Luis reviews everything you're planning to change in this Maybe the answer to the question I was gonna ask, which is One of the criticisms of running a product and company This way of just experimenting constantly with all these micro improvements and changes as it can lead to something like a monstrosity of a product and experience that isn't

28:54 Consistent and cohesive and just like That often happens. Uh is the solution to that having the founder basically review all the changes. Is there anything else y'all do to avoid it moving in a becoming farm bill or whatever is a good example of that. Yeah, I I our our product review structure where we've got our head of product design, one of the lead um, you know, the the product management leaders and then Luis and PR. And

29:17 Because they see everything it You know, they have a really high product bar. And so that helps. I think over time we just as PMs have to look at okay where is our feature headed. And so, you know, we do this with the streak, at least on a quarterly basis, to look at okay, well

29:34 What what have we learned? You know, how is our streak developed and How do we imagine this going in your future? I don't think, you know, it's it's easy to do, you know. And end in some sort of awful local maxima. If you're not constantly looking at your roadmap and thinking.

29:49 you know, you don't have a clear strategy. You know, for me it's like If you have a clear strategy for where where your feature's going, hopefully all of those A B tests are not just done. you know, to get some cheap gain, they're done with a long term goal in mind. I do think though, and and we do this every now and then with the streak, eventually you just hit a local maxima. And you say

30:09 Like you talked about lunch and neutral experiments. This is a great example where it's like, all right, cool. Now we need to throw a bunch of this stuff out based on all the learnings. Can we reset this real estate? Can we reset this UI, reset this feature in such a way that is just as good as what we have now, but is way more plain or simple. that we can uh again start to layer on those are hard those are really hard experiments to to get win of, you know, to win, obviously, because they are so optimized, but they're really important to do. Otherwise, yeah, you just end up with a a a kitchen sink of a feature. One other uh tidbit I just wanna

30:41 Mention Something that the advan advantage you all have that other companies don't have is People want to learn. Like They want to learn the language and so getting pushed

30:52 to come back to an app for something that they want to do. It's not an advantage a lot of products have. So anything you want to add there of just like this is why Dualingo might be a little different from what you're working on. I mean that that is definitely a benefit if I had an app that this is this is actually why I think a lot of mobile games do streaks differently, because you know, to say that you played a mobile game and this as somebody who plays a lot of mobile games, uh, you know, that you've done it for three thousand days in a row, like I don't know, maybe that hits a little bit different than you've learned Spanish for three thousand days in a row.

31:25 I think the comparison set is much larger, though, than a lot of companies give them credit for, you know, themselves credit for. And I think that there's mean there's a lot of ways that companies think about their There are very few companies I imagine out there in the world saying, Oh, we don't do some degree of good for our users. Uh, even if it's like a game, it's like, I don't know, you're like making your giving somebody uh uh uh a moment away from the craziness of their lives. And so I do think though, that is contingent on companies who are gonna figure out if a streak works for them to figure out how can you frame the streak in such a way that a user does feel good about it. And it's easier for, you know, a Duolingo, but You know, I think there's creative ways to to phrase this for users. You know, the other thing, maybe just on that that I'll say is

32:06 The streak works really well for Duolingo because with language learning, it's really hard to see day to day progress and becoming more fluent. Like becoming and and and fluency is is is is not even the right word. It's like becoming better at Spanish or whatever. It is a years long process for someone to get better at a language. I mean Duolingo makes it easier, but You still gotta put in thousands of hours if you're gonna reach, you know, C one or C two fluency and and That is really hard to track on a day to day. And so the streak works really well for us because

32:37 We not might not be able to tell you, hey, you now know Zero point zero. you know, one percent more Spanish, but we can show you, hey, like you've gotten your streak a little bit higher. And so I think this works particularly well when you're at app that is doing something that's gonna be sensed or felt over a longer term to help contextualize that progress in a way that

32:58 makes more sense or at least feels more tangible to a user. Great. That was a great context. Empowering to a lot of companies that aren't necessarily doing language learning. Okay, so it took us on a long tangent away from Lessons and experiments you ran along the journey of iterating on

33:14 the streak. So a few things you've shared so far is just like it started being like started with this XP idea and then went to like a lesson. Then you iterate it on ways. uh to make it simpler or maybe harder, you had it's three goals where you commit to like I'm gonna hit A certain goal of streak. Uh what else? What else have you found that has worked, didn't work, lessons learned. You know, again, sticking with this one to seven day streak.

33:35 You know he It it is The the idea of a streak, particularly probably to this audience, is like obvious like oh it's a streak, it you know, goes it just counts how many days. We've realized over time that a lot of users do not understand how a streak works.

33:50 And and it can be as big as you know, as small as, Well, I don't understand how streak freezes work or I don't like my mom the other day was talking to me about. She's like, Oh, my st I like didn't use Dualingo and I come back and my you know streak's still there. So like there's like certain elements of the feature. that you know, we uh can do better at explaining, but Even like What a streak is. It's it's tracking how many days that I've used the app.

34:13 Yeah, the more that we can make the feature easily comprehensible to users. the more retentive it is. And it in and we've run a number of experiments to do this, you know, as simple you talked about, you asked about early easy copy changes that we made. Actually, this is my first win. uh experiment when when I joined Duolingo was When you start a streak, we use we have little copy.

34:35 at the bottom of the screen that just I don't know, it's kind of like flavor copy. We use it to celebrate you or give you context and I ran some tests that just like tried to and Eight words explain what a streak was. That was it. And it was a massive win because it really required like it really dumbed down here is exactly how the streak worked.

34:53 And it really helped users um just understand what they needed to do. And I think this is something that's like you kinda constantly got to remind yourself, particularly if you work in tech and you're building cool tech features, but Your user base is not. A bunch of tech workers. Uh to like think about all right, who is my audience and

35:13 For us, it's not just like tech workers and I people in America, people all over the world, of all ages, of all cultures. Um and so Making sure that your sh your your feature is Uh, even something as simple as the streak is understandable is critical. What was the actual copy? Do you remember? It was it's still I think it's still on the app. Uh like Start a day to extend your streak, but miss a day and it resets.

35:37 Something like that. Very clear. Yeah. I love that. Okay, and then when you say massive win, by the way, just to give people a reference point, what do you think what does that look like? What is a massive win in this scale? Well, and it's and it's funny. I mean, this was and this was four years ago, but I think it was like in the order of magnitude of Over ten thousand DAUs for us. And actually maybe this uh Small bit of context. So Doolingo really cares about the metric current.

36:02 um current user retention rate. And actually our first ever Duolingo post uh with Lenny uh was the newsletter that our former head of product wrote, Jorge. The still the single most popular newsletter post of all time in my newsletter across three hundred. I would highly recommend that if you are interested in this, give it a read. Um, you know, to to summarize basically what we found is that If we wanted to drive and Duolingo cares, you know, our growth North Star is DAUs, the metric that is most uh uh effective, you know, where a percentage change in that metric is is most effective at driving DAUs is current user retention rate. And this is just users who are not new or resurrected. Getting them to come back tomorrow. And so most of the work that our teams do, uh our retention based teams do, is focused on current.

36:47 Um and so the retention team that I lead Focused on cur. It just so happens to streak is the best feature at at driving cur. And so This was this experiment was the biggest curwin that we had Had That was like a top three curin, anyway, for us. Just this little copy, right? And that's what I say, like death copy a thousand different ways. Sometimes it's not.

37:08 The big beautiful feature, you know, that's gonna drive the huge games huge gains sometimes is just something simple as A few words. I love this. Uh okay, so when you s you said ten thousand DUs. I think that references you guys measure im incremental impact and absolute numbers of new daily users you're gonna drive with

37:26 Attributed to that experiment. Yeah, and we we we do both. I mean, we'll also look at like a lot of times I'll look at you know, for retention day one versus day seven versus day fourteen, a lot of what I'm looking for is For us to have a better day fourteen. Excuse me, better day fourteen impact than better day day one impact, because it means that users are retaining better over time. This is particularly for users that would see a feature multiple times. I just like absolute DAU numbers because

37:54 Yeah, as long as you're controlling for, you know, different biases like a recency bias or a novelty bias, it's a really easy way to just have an absolute comparison. You know, you start to look at percentage changes and then it's influenced by who your treatment, you know, how many users saw the experiment and But at least, you know, uh an absolute number is is easier in my mind to start comparing again, there are down you know, there are pitfalls with it, but um we find that that's a pretty useful way. That uh lesson comes up a lot on this podcast than that. Approached to

38:24 Sherman. So yeah, you're in good you're in good company. Uh quick tangent. If there's not an answer to this, no problem. going back to the idea of just like experimenting like crazy and not.

38:35 creating a product that nobody wants to use anymore long term. Is there an example of an experiment that was positive that you all decided no, we don't actually think This is what we want in the product they ended up not shipping. You know, retention doesn't only work on the streak, although you know, you would you would think we most of our work is the streak. We've touched a lot of different surfaces over the years. And there was one experiment that we launched that, you know, we talked about XP earlier. In the lesson.

39:00 the only UI elements are a progress bar at the top. And then how many hearts you have, right? So we keep it really simple. And this very much speaks to the design, you know, philosophy of Duolingo, which is Simpler UI is better. And we decided Hey, let's add XP in there. And so let's show your XP ticking up as you're going, you know, through a lesson. That's gonna make the user feel good. It's gonna give, you know, show you what you've earned, you're gonna be less likely to quit, all these good reasons to do it.

39:26 And then you finish the lesson and then we'll show you've collected all this XP. And it and it won. I mean the hypothesis was a good one. Um But we realized and I remember having this conversation with Luis is like Cool. This is our most important screen in the app. It is our lesson. It is where users learn. And the focus here is on learning. And now you've added this other.

39:45 thing up there to to distract, you know, that could be distracting for users. And I think the question, you know, we talked about roadmaps and strategy here, the question that he had for me and I didn't have a good answer for at the time was like, So what else are you gonna do with us? Like What's your iteration ideas? Where's this going to go? Is this gonna make the, you know, lesson experience more gamified or And and and and what we realized is that like

40:08 Honestly, it was kind of just a you know an easy engagement win idea, but we had touched our most uh, you know, sacred space in the app to to do that. And so That was a case where it's like, Yeah, it was a nice win, but We had added that UI element and You know, at least at the time it was less clear. what we would do with then we realized that like long term it was just gonna get in the way and

40:31 We'd rather for simplicity's sake. Pause that. you know, shut it down and keep the lesson, you know, to be the a little bit of a learning sham sanctuary it was. Now it's funny, nowadays I think we actually have enough X P based mechanics and fun things that we can do that like I think actually a lot of our um

40:48 Yeah, you know, the the the beliefs about the unless experience have changed. So something like that could work, but at the time You know, didn't it feel good to keep that around. This is an awesome example. Uh Hopefully we have time to talk about how the team operates.

41:01 Where my mind goes as like, Oh, but you have all these PMs and teams that want to show impact and the performance reviews and all that stuff, and you're shipping something, you're not shipping something, they're like, Oh, look, we did a win. So I want to chat about that later. But let's keep going on things you've learned and things that didn't work along the journey. The the other thing that that I'll call out with the the the streak uh you know, it's like we have the the the image of the streak is this flame.

41:24 Right. And you know, we have the streak flame and and it's it's very much corridor iconography. It's important to acknowledge that that's a metaphor. for a retention mechanic, like the idea of keeping a flame lit. And again, if you've I think we've we've established the flame as, you know, for a lot of users as sort of their understanding of a streak, which is great, but there's a lot of people you know, in different cultural context and different, you know, uh uh stages of life where the idea of like keeping a flame lit

41:49 To show your commitment to something makes less sense. Um, we did some UXR in India many years ago, and this was something that just like did not resonate at all um there, which was which was a really interesting learning. And that's something it's like again, depending upon what your user base is, like. the more global UXR you can do to understand how users are actually understanding and experience your feature the better because you just again encounter insights like this. And so Even our screen design, you know, we used to have a flame.

42:16 It was just it was mostly this flame that would like light up every day. But again, it was like an indication of a metaphor for a mechanic. And when we redesigned it, we did this, Kurt, our one of our animators Did this awesome odometer animation where it's like your number would tick every day. It like kind of like look good, but from a product perspective, what was cool is We actually focus the design on the screen. to to show your number going up. And then it would say, you know, like seven.

42:43 Day streak, eight day streak. And I think that as you're thinking about designing around a streak, don't get too bought up You know, or or or caught up into like What is this You know, like the beautiful story that you're trying to tell at the expense of it being a really comprehensible feature. And so as you're thinking about product design,

43:00 Making that product design a clear distillation. Oh, it was This is what we're actually tracking. you know, form should follow function here. You know was a

43:09 was it was a learning for us and you'll see that Now in a lot of places where we're showing streak, we're really leading with the number. Not necessarily the the flame. That's all that's a theme that I'm hearing again and again is Clarity.

43:22 Don't obsess with making it too. Like clever and Don't ever think it just like clarity has a big impact. Clarity also doesn't have to come at the expense of delight. And this is something where You know, you hit a milestone and duo gets the you know, it becomes we call him a Phoenix duo and he becomes awesome and you know, lights on fire. And I think there are things that you can do to still make the experience really exciting and delightful and celebratory and and

43:49 I would I would not lose that, but just don't do it at the expense. And and I think it's also about figuring out for what you you know. You can get away with doing more of this for users who are deeper into their streak experience. than users who are starting where it's like your goal for the one day streak user is just to make sure Do they understand how this feature works? I mean, even something again, just like another random experiment. At the bottom of the streak screen, we have a calendar.

44:12 And Over the years, it just looks more and more calendar like. And that is simply because we find that the more we make it look like a calendar, Days on top. you know, little circles that check like the more we make it look like calendar, the more that people realize, hey, this is a day, a daily mechanic. And so

44:28 Think about the screen, but every single thing that you're doing on the screen, how can you use it to communicate? What is the point of this feature? How does it work? This episode is brought to you by Koda. I use Coda every day to coordinate my podcasting and newsletter workflows. From collecting questions for guests, to storing all my research, to managing my newsletter content calendar.

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45:43 I imagine one of the biggest wins was just giving people flexibility flexibility along the journey, like streak freezes and all these things. Is that is that a big vein of opportunity discovery? It is it is great. Actually I'm gonna show you the one of the most thoughtful gifts that anybody has ever given to me. This is our uh Duolingo Serenity or Streak Serenity Prayer, my my co lead Antonia. It's like knitted, right? It's like Luis, grant me the serenity to accept the flexibility I need, the courage to reach perfection when I can, and the wisdom to celebrate regardless. And that actually is like kind of our strategy with the streaks. I love the show and tell, by the way. That was great.

46:20 Yeah, I will we'll I guess for you know podcast listeners we'll have to, you know, get an image somewhere. Um But the uh this idea of like flexibility versus perfection and then regardless celebration is core to how we think about the streak. Cause you know, I think for the streak for us it's very much a bend not break. Uh you know, I I You're gonna miss a day.

46:40 I'd rather you come back, you know, having not you know having missed that day to an intact streak. But if you don't have to miss a day, I'd much rather you don't. I'd much rather you come back uh and and use the app every day. So That that that thing on flexibility though, that's almost certainly been the biggest, you know, from a mechanic perspective, the biggest DAU driver. You know, one of the earliest experiments we ran was going from used to only be able to have one streak freeze And then we let you have

47:06 Either two or three. So we tested two different arms. Um, it was an un again another huge DAU win. This actually is funny. It was something that this is again kind of a haul uh a callback to that growth model post from from Jorge. It actually was really bad for Ker. Because we were basically saying, Hey, you can take a day off. You know, that's okay, but it was really good for

47:27 This is gonna be like uh Alphabet Soup IWAR, an active weekly active user retention return rate. So basically users who had taken a day off. We were getting them to come back more at higher rates. And so it made up for our losses in cur. But Effectively what this meant is that, you know, why two streak freezes work better than one was I don't know, sometimes people just need a little bit more flexibility than one day. But one of the again, the really interesting inside of this experiment was that three streak freezes.

47:54 was actually no better than two streak freezes. And there were two competing things here. And I think this is important if you're going to build a streak. You know, to figure out what your flexibility mechanic is. We are getting more users to return after longer times away to an inact you know, to an attacked streak. But if you start Taking three days off from any habit.

48:12 It's just gonna be less likely that you return even four days later. And so we had these competing things where Users might more users might be returning to a streak, but a lot of users were also just not coming back. We're training them to, you know take more time off. So That flexibility, what's the right amount of fli I mean, we've again, this is another area we've run. hundreds of experiments on what is the right number of flexibility what is the right amount of flexibility. And we

48:37 We are constantly surprised here. We we don't. I I still don't have the answer for at every point in your streak journey how much flexibility you need. One thing that I can say with certainty though. Is Give more flexibility when a user is starting their streak.

48:51 Again. One of our biggest streak freeze experiment when I feel like I'm Constantly saying this. One of our biggest wins, but they all were were really, really big. One of our biggest streak freeze wins was when you start a new streak, we give you two streak freezes. And again, it's so funny to think back. It's like, how are we not doing this to begin with? But at the time

49:09 The streak freeze was kind of an overly gamified mechanic. Yeah, the buy them with gems that's our inhab currency, you know,'cause we wanted the whole idea of You know this To feel like you, yeah, like it was really, you know, something you earned that, you know, there was a little bit of pain to getting that streak freeze.

49:25 And so we test it though. Uh what if we just give users when they start off their streak two streak uh streak freezes? And holy smokes did that win. It's sort of obvious now, you know, in retrospect, but If you have a one or a two or a three day streak, it's really easy just to

49:40 Let it die and restart. you know, again, you need to get to seven days, uh what we've seen in the data for it to really lock in. And so Giving users more flexibility so it's harder to lose their streak initially. And then conversely, and this is what we keep learning. Eventually once people get on long streaks.

49:56 You kinda don't want to give them as much flexibility. You know, because There's a lot of times where Yeah, users don't and I'm I'm like this. I've got like a four hundred day streak. Note that That is a lot less time than I've been at Duolingo. I have lost and restarted streaks a lot of times in my time at Duolingo. Um, but you start getting a lot of streaks and

50:16 You really care about this feature. You really care about your streak. And most people As long as you're not like backpacking through I don't know, you know, the the backcountry of uh Utah. You know. You'll you'll be in a place where you can get service and so figuring out

50:32 Where's the u you know, who is the user that actually could use Duolingo and not conditioning them to start Taking days off that they didn't otherwise need to do. is um is important to figure out sort of where that line is for for your future. This is fascinating. You can also buy a streak, right? Like with money.

50:49 Is that that's a feature right? Yeah, you can buy and it's funny, this is this is also something that we wrestle. Yeah, you can buy uh or freeze, sorry, not a streak freeze. Yeah, so you can you can buy a streak freeze and the way it works is you can buy gems and then you can use those gems um to to buy a streak. And and this is something we wrestle with a lot we're actively working on an experiment right now that's having a small hit uh revenue, but it's a really nice one for retention. And I think it's actually worth thinking about from day one as you're building a streak. Do you see this more as a monetization feature? And do you see this more as a retention feature? What's the role of monetization in this? What's the role of retention? And I think.

51:23 For us, it's started out much more organically. And so we have a lot of like modernization hooks that again, as the retention PM, I would love to get rid of. Um, but again, it's sort of part of how the streak works right now. And so we always have this tension of Hey If we start to make it harder to buy streak freezes than fewer people buy them, you know, buy gems to buy them. And so there's this more convoluted, you know, series of impacts that happen. Uh no, I love that I love that

51:49 Uh, people wanting to buy streak freeze is like the ultimate sign of how much streaks matter. Yeah, it's it's streak streak freeze is the other big one that we've that we've recently demonetized or or introduced a free option for is getting back a um a lost streak. So used to lose the streak, we had a feature um in the day, you know, back in the day called streak repair. We give you your streak back, you had to pay gems. But what we found that worked way better was a feature called Earnback.

52:19 And this is basically where You would have to do a certain number of lessons as long as you came back with an you know a a a window soon after losing your streak. Do a few lessons and we just give it your streak back. And it was such a retention winner. And again, what we thought about was

52:35 It feels like you've earned it so much more. when you've done like you deserve to have your streak back. We haven't cheapened the streak. Uh, because you've done something. And in this sense, this idea of cheapening the streak is something like from a philosophical The philosophy of the street. From a philosophical level, we wrestle with All the time of

52:55 Cool, we're giving out more streak freezes. At what point do we cross the line and users start to realize their streak means nothing? Um, everything that we've seen, users are totally cool with using streak freezes and still thinking about the streak as this meaningful thing, but my co lead Antonio, who made that awesome cross stitch uh for me. She is sort of the keeper for us of the sanctity of the streak. And a lot of times as we and I think this is a this is really important to have as you're thinking about building your streak. You can almost always get engagement wins up to a certain point by just cheapening the streak, making it easier to extend.

53:25 Letting users have more flexibility. But you kinda got to hold the line at some point. It's not clear where that line is. And once you Like You talk about one way doors or two way doors. There's a point where you go too far and it's a one way door. And all of a sudden those users, those nine million users on one year streaks don't care about their streak anymore. And that is

53:46 I don't know, again, retention PM perspective. That'd be an extinction level event for us. I don't I don't want all these users to stop caring about their streak. So to have somebody Who is invested in the the sanctity of the streak. And you know, for us it's uh Antonia and and Luis. He's very good about this. Um is really important just so you make sure you don't go too far.

54:06 That's an awesome insight. Uh So to protect and push notifications, I think, are another example of this in general for companies like how much is too much, because everyone's just like, Let's just hit another push. It's fine, just one more. Uh and I l so the your solution to that is uh a person is like the keeper. And the gate almost the gatekeeper plus the founder of how far is too far. That it's yeah, it's it's good if you can if you can have that. Um I think push notifications are also easier'cause you know, there's a lot of things you can do around all right, we'll set a budget cap for how many notifications we'll send. You know, you can you can create a policy.

54:38 Yeah, policies, but I think with a lot of things, it's it's hard, at least for the streak, it's harder to create policies for in the same way. A lot of it has to be done based on feel. And so you kinda just gotta use your best judgment at times. Sweet. Okay. Any other maybe like a one or two more lessons from this journey of w what Streaks has become today? I mean, I can you mentioned notifications. I've I've mentioned this a few times. One, it's funny, you you you tend to think of no like exactly as you say, uh you can just always send another notification. It's gonna be some win and at some point, you know, it'll it'll be a bad experience, but it's tough to see that. There's actually a notification that we so we send two notifications related to your shore streak each day. The first is a practice reminder. We send it this is actually an interesting insight, twenty three and a half hours after you practice the day before.

55:20 Well Twenty three and a half, okay. So basically if you practice at noon today We'll send you an eleven thirty. Uh AM tomorrow.

55:30 And we have because it's like assuming they are free in that time the day before, maybe they'll be free the same time. And we actually moved, we used to let users set this practice reminder time and you know, our thinking was cool, you're gonna say. Seven PM, that's when I really want to extend my streak each day. And then you know what? I said this is somebody with two kids. Life gets in the way. Life always gets in the way. And when you think you're gonna practice, will change, your life will change, whatever.

55:56 And what we realize is the best indicator of when you should practice was when did you practice the day before. We can almost certainly get more detailed. We have tried a bunch of ways to have much more complex logic, and what always wins is twenty three and a half hours. So interesting reveal behavior versus Yeah, exactly. Um so so we again we send this practice miter twenty three and a half hours later. The other thing that we'll do though is we'll send it what we call a streak saver. And this is at ten o'clock. At night if you have not extended your streak. We'll send you a message saying

56:24 Hey, you know, like it's it's your last chance. This is this is it if you don't extend your streak. And you would think that like That's kinda spammy. Uh that's that's kind of annoying to get a notification from an app at at ten PM. But what we found is because people care about their streak. Their streak is this good thing that they attach positive emotions to that they don't really want to lose. That notification reminding them

56:46 Hey, come back and like people see this uh uh by and large as a positive notification and not a negative notification. Obviously it serves our purpose as well of getting users to come back and not lose their streaks, but Again, I think if you can think about your notification strategy related to what is the feature that it's tied to, how do users perceive that, you can Almost certainly get a w uh not get away with more, but you know. You can be thoughtful about notification load, um, and when to send notifications. And again, for us, this like late night message that's Also highly impactful. Super good.

57:18 You know, is actually something that Could be perceived as spammy, but A lot of our users. Really do. I' somebody who It's

57:25 Often late at night and I work here and I'm like, oh. Forgot to do my you know, you know I was thinking about dualing all day. You know, here it is, eleven fifteen, and I saw it done at that message is um really powerful. Yeah, it has saved me many times. I totally know that message. And uh I love that it's like at late night Message.

57:44 uh from an app. very rarely do you actually are happy about that. And I love that this actually is a good example where like it's really It's really funny all of the stories that you hear about people extending their streak. You know, if you look around a Duolingo party, uh, you know, when it's like ten th uh eleven thirty, eleven forty five, all the Duolingo employees that are like doing their lesson at the last minute, uh you always see these like pictures of people in the club doing or like at a concert doing Duolingo and yeah,'cause Otherwise that You're gonna use a streak freezer, God forbid.

58:13 You will lose your streak. So funny. Okay. Anything else? And if there's like more than one more Definitely. But any other Really interesting. Less in the wrong turns or

58:22 insights. You know, I talked about streak freezes and we've done a lot with streak freeze, but I think if you're gonna make flexibility a thing, it's probably also useful thinking about how do you celebrate perfection. Um and so we have a feature that we have It is the simplest thing in the world. It's called perfect streak. And it's just if you don't use the street freeze for a few days. We make your streak look gold. And we make your little progress bar on the calendar.

58:45 um just look a little bit nicer. There's no reward for doing it. You don't get anything other than this nice little indication. And it is awesome. It is. It is the it is it is is a simple feature. It is ultra not complex. And It is really powerful, not only for getting users to you know, as as a bit of a reward, they'd be hey, you know, get to seven days, you know, without using a streak freeze and you know, your streak becomes perfect.

59:10 But it's also a really nice indication of users who aren't using streak freezes. Here is the thing that If you uh you know, if you don't use a streak freeze, which again, Candily, I would love for you never to use a streak freeze. If you don't use a streak freeze, Your streak will stay. you know, perfect. It's funny, we we actually just we know, we're constantly

59:28 you know, responding to bug reports uh about the streak. You know, it is I swear to God we we have that. we have the best infrastructure around this feature because it is so important. Um, we had an employee who lost her Like a four month perfect streak. Uh and you know, it was a big deal for her because she

59:46 You know, and'cause she like did her lesson as she was crossing international dateline. There was like a bunch of stuff going on that was like it was just kind of weird in her back end, but like People start to care about perfection as much as they do their streak and you know, for that person it was It was it was a big when they lost their perfect streak and so Yeah, this is just an example of look if you're gonna if you're gonna go after flexibility. Um, which is good finding a way to pull users back into perfection.

1:00:11 is a really important counterweight to have. What I'm imagining is you guys need like a Amazon style chat bot that Just gives you the streak back. It's just like, Okay, here you go. Well we have very much so we we have if people lose their streak, you know, there there's ways to get in contact with us, but we've actually thought about that where it's like Okay, we should just like build a self service feature and if you're

1:00:31 If we think that your excuse is good enough, whatever, we'll just yeah, yeah, back to it. I'd much rather you be on, you know, be on a streak than you know have lost it, particularly if it's. Yeah. But it also can't feel that easy. Uh I love this. I also love this point about just the power of the

1:00:48 animation and user experience having impact. That's really interesting. Is that something you find often just like make like celebrating and making it feel really Amazing without like copy or you know, or like any feature. It's just like holy. You're awesome. This is another thing where it's like when users care about the feature

1:01:05 Using Not only Uh uh animation haptics. sound effects using and it's funny, we don't have sound effects on the streak. I this will probably something we'll look at in the not too distant future, but like haptics are like something we have done a lot of testing. Like the phone vibrating in the phone, you know, like there being a really cool haptic pattern as you extend your streak, um

1:01:26 All of this stuff wins. And it's cool because I think it wins Th there's a few reasons. One is it just makes you feel good, right? You know, you You get some cool moment in your streak and And and we celebrate you and we celebrate you in this visual way and your phone's buzzing, it just like feels awesome. But the other thing it does is it like Causes you to pause on that screen and I think

1:01:44 There's this desire as you think through a lot of, you know, as as PMs think through like, Oh, how can I get users through this funnel as painlessly as possible? And you know, I talked about good and fortune earlier. There's a lot of times where I don't, I want you to stop. We should just stop and like land on the screen. You gotta be careful not to do this for too many screens, right? But like But the one big ones.

1:02:01 Sometimes I just want you to pause there and enjoy the moment. Um, because if I can get you to enjoy the moment more, you're gonna care more about your streak and you're gonna be coming back tomorrow. And so animations that are cool and that cause you to like really soak it in, haptics, you know, that feel good. All of that comes together to make you really focus on that moment. Um, all of that just gets users more connected to their streak. So Animation in the right times.

1:02:25 Works well. Uh, but it's something we've had when Quite a lot. Who designs the haptic stuff? Is there like a haptic designer? For the longest time it would be a product designer. Where I it initially started as like the engineer would be like

1:02:39 All right. You know, would cobble together haptic, um, based on what they felt good. Then it became a product design. Um role where they would kind of use their best judgment. We actually just recently acquired an animation studio uh Hobbs in in Detroit. And how they are the sort of keepers of you know, they're do a lot of motion design work, haptic's very close to that. And so they do a lot of that.

1:03:01 I do remember trying to hire for a while a haptics. like contractor like haptics design. And it was the saddest hiring I've ever done'cause it was just like I don't know, like it was such a specific Like I I just went through a lot of people who uh You know, it's it's just a really tricky space of like kinda sound effects, kinda motion design, sort of technical.

1:03:22 Yeah. Um such a unique role. Very unique specific skill set. Right, and there's very few apps that really need this this deeply. So you're almost creating this person. Yeah. That is fa fascinating. Uh I don't want I'm gonna that's like a whole podcast on its own. By the way, I was gonna say as you're talking about this, I love that

1:03:40 Uh, it's a win to celebrate people that don't lose their streak. Like you introduce this way to make it flexible, and that's a big win. And then you could go the opposite direction of if you don't use this feature, you also feel even better. Well, and it's funny, you Like you talked about the the danger of feature bloat. We sort of talked about the danger of feature bloat. This is actually something I'm constantly thinking about with this. Like we have the streak, but then we also have the perfect streak, and we can count how many we count how many weeks you've had a perfect streak. Well, all of a sudden we have two streak numbers that are kind of competing with each other.

1:04:09 It's funny, we actually don't introduce the concept of a perfect streak until after you've hit seven days. And some of this is just because The cognitive load of additional streak features. A lot of our like cooler streak features. You gotta get on a long enough streak. And

1:04:25 Not to say we haven't tested it, because we have because we test everything, introducing these features earlier, but what we've found is that pretty universally they lose when we introduce too many things, too many concepts to users too early in the experience. It's just Hard for them to manage. Okay, sweet. I know that we can go down this track for uh hours and hours. There's endless learnings about all the things you all have done along the journey.

1:04:48 I'm gonna shift to talking about How your team operates. So there's a lot of uh threads you touch on have just How a team can do this so well.

1:04:58 Ship six hundred experiments, as you said. Uh continue to find opportunity. What are some maybe lessons or advice you'd have for folks that are like, Oh wow, I wanna Work more like this.

1:05:09 from your team's experience. How do you use your team operate that folks can learn from? Yeah, maybe just a little bit of context. So we're Duolingo cares a lot about metric. So most of our teams are metric based teams. So we do the most work with Streak, um, but you know, are the metric what we really care about at the end of the day is current. And and DAUs because we see that DAUs hit cur. And so When you can be really laser focused on

1:05:33 My goal each quarter is to make this metric go up. I think it's much easier to make sure that you're working on the highest ROI thing. I think when you think more about like Oh, I wanna make this feature better. I think it's easier to get lost in what better means and how you think about better. And so I do think that like having a really strong degree of focus, you know, as as a team on you know, what is the metric that I'm caring about and how is that directing my efforts is versus feature oriented. So basically your teams are structured around

1:06:02 A metric slash a goal. Slash outcome. versus we own this feature. Or the so we retention owns Streak, I guess, but that's only because we've seen Streak. Drive

1:06:14 curve better than any feature. But We are not I mean, we have this m you know IAP uh hook with our street freeze purchases. There are other teams that work on, you know, are that that can and have worked on the streak because It's not ours to say, No, no, we do all the iterations here. We just know that it drives our metric better in the same way that like leaderboards. Um, you know, we have a team that focuses on how much time you've spent. We want users to spend more time on Duolingo, so they're learning more.

1:06:40 leaderboards is the best vector for doing it. So that team does a lot of leaderboards work, but every now and then I have an idea that I think will be highly retentive. And I will go in and I will pitch to them and then we'll do some change to the leaderboard to make it more retentive. Um And so but I but I do think having that clear metric of We're trying to drive cur, not we're trying to just make this feature better. Helps at least. make sure that you know give the team clear marching orders and that focus I think is really good for prioritizing backlog.

1:07:07 Cool. This is a really important point. This is the same way Airbnb worked when I worked there for a long time is it's Here's a a goal that we want your team to be responsible for. You can work on any product. You need to hit this goal. As you said, often

1:07:21 Like various products are most Connected to what you're doing. But what you're describing is like Even though teams kind of Like I imagine you own it from a bug perspective and you're kind of like are the shepherd of this part of the feature because it hits your goal.

1:07:33 Helps your girl most, but Any other team can come in and be like Jackson we need to work on some streak stuff to help with learning. Like go for it. Does that Just a tangent there. Uh

1:07:43 Yeah. Do they like work really closely with your team if they want to do some work in the code? Is it like how does that work? Yeah, if if if you're again, this is where I say there's soft ownership, we're not against teams doing things to the streak, but if we're gonna do something given, you know, we probably have multiple quarters worth of a roadmap around the street. I say probably we do. uh multiple quarters of roadmap uh for what we can do to the streak. If other teams wanna come and mess with it, okay, we gotta just figure out how is that going to work with You know, what what our plans for the streak were

1:08:13 How do we make sure a lot of times when teams are coming in thinking, hey, let's do this to the streak, they're like in context that we might have. And so there's as much of like a much simpler version of what we're doing now, a bit of a knowledge sharing of saying, All right, well, this is what we think about the streak. This is what we've seen work hasn't worked. How does that influence some of the hypothesis that you have? And so I think getting that really Um making sure the juice is worth the squeeze. Good old fashioned product management work right there. Uh, cool. What else is interesting about how y'all operate and how y'all work to achieve this sort of success?

1:08:41 Again, my my team lead runs is Antonio runs like the most effec you know, the a really process if you're gonna run this many experience, you have to be really process oriented and really thoughtful about Which experiments am I gonna run when? How is that gonna set up the next one? We Uh, you know, uh there's there's heavy Jira automation. I think sometimes the Atlassian suite makes my eyes bleed, but like there's a lot of times where that degree of process helps the team unblocineers and make them move really fast. And so Making sure that you have really good process around how are you gonna run so many experiments. It's

1:09:15 it you know, it's it's it's worth investing in. Can you follow that thread actually? Just what do you when you say that, what does that look like? What are some elements of that process to make this work efficiently. All the way down to like really detailed roadmaps around all right. We're running this experiment is based on the results of this experiment or my, you know, uh uh uh hook into an element of this feature. How do we make sure that we're lining up? implementation on this so that as soon as this thing runs and we're ready to go.

1:09:42 we can start rolling out the next one. You know, I hate features just sitting around and us not again continuing that thread. So It's not just thinking about what's our engineering bandwidth, but also what's the design bandwidth to make sure that we have the next iteration of this feature ready to go. You know, we're planning Month out. As we think about these feature iterations, even small ones, um, you know, feature iterations.

1:10:04 Because Again, you just you you lose when you lose cycles, you know, not pushing on a feature, it's just sort of lost opportunity. And so everything from manage, you know, being thoughtful about engineering roadmaps to design roadmaps to product roadmaps. Um all of that needs to come together in a system. So essentially mapping dependencies. A cross function.

1:10:22 And you're saying in Jira you can do this. You can do a lot of it in Jira. There's a uh there is a non zero amount of Google Docs that we have that sometimes does things. Yep. A little bit. I don't know. Sometimes it just looks a little bit nicer. It's a little bit more flexible. Um but Jira is our. It is where the mother load of Process is. Great. Okay. What else?

1:10:43 Like another thing that I'll just say is like We really resist the urge to do the big V one. Um and I think this is, you know, I I shared the the the street goal example where A lot of times we'll s when we're exploring something, we will say, Okay, well like that's cool. How do we strip away a bunch of stuff and figure out what our core hypothesis is and then

1:11:06 Just ship that thing first as a V1. Cause it's it's easy, and I've found this time and time again. It's easy to add things to features that make them win. Like I've worked. in retention engagement long enough. I can like Add I know enough like things to pull and bells to add and whistles and to you know to make something win. But

1:11:24 Yeah. There's a lot of times where it's like cool, well then one'cause of all the whistles you added, not because of what your core hypothesis was. And A lot of times if you can just really simplify what the feature is. It's also much easier to ship. It's easier to design. You're not designing for a whole system. You're designing for you know, something something much simpler. Um, and so getting everybody to think that way.

1:11:44 ends up allow you know allows us to end up shipping faster. Shipping simpler. you know, designing faster, getting faster approval. getting insight and then doing what what I talked about with street goal. being able to run iteration after iteration after iteration, add these things iteratively. Um

1:12:01 And then No, you you you not only by doing this are you able to move faster, but you get confidence at each step of the way that Hey, my series of hypotheses, you know, is actually born out. Or if it's not. Cool. Well then we're gonna drop that part of the feature and then just ship what actually matters. If I can try to summarize kind of uh the broad lesson so far that I'm hearing and maybe you

1:12:24 You would have shared this, but I'm just thinking, like, if I were to try to design a company to operate the way you all operate. You essentially map. All the lovers That drive the business.

1:12:34 So you have kind of this mapping of all the metrics that drive up the growth and ret and daily active users. Yeah. Kerr ended up being the biggest specific metric to move.

1:12:45 to drive growth long term. So there's like imaging a tree of all the opportunities you could work on. You found like this is what is most uh connected to our growth long term. You basically just start

1:12:58 Mining. Uh, I don't know if mining is the right metaphor, but just like looking for Things that move that specific metric. You just like Look and poke and explore. And then once you find one, you just go real deep on trying a lot of different you I you could come up with a hypothesis and a

1:13:12 strategy of here's how we think we can do this. And how we can move this and then you just try a bunch of stuff. There's also this element of uh there the rest of the development quote, there's always money in the banana stand. comes to mind where it's just like keep working on see there's more, there's gonna be more opportunity. And

1:13:28 Yeah. When I joined Duelingo. Um the PM that I took over for Anton, who used to lead the retention team. I remember saying Dude. The streak like

1:13:39 It just counts up. You guys have been testing on for years. How much more work can we do on the streak? And he was like, Jackson, you child. He didn't say that. Exactly this, but this is how I felt it, like Jackson U Child. There is so we're not even thirty percent of the way optimized and Four years later. I say that with like such conviction. We are so far away from what I mean.

1:13:59 We've made a ton of strides, but we are still so far away. And every quarter where we ship a ton of, you know, wins and you know, improvements to the streak, it just continues to prove to me that like there is so much more to be done. So I I think your framing of it is and I would say there's a lot of thought that goes into, you know, again, you know, I talk about the strength of the hypothesis that you have, you know, you have to have as you start to build out larger, you know, future strategy. I I do think it's really important to not just Do a bunch of random stuff, but do it. with intent. you know, with a goal in mind.

1:14:31 Otherwise you do end up in these local you know, m uh local maxima's, but Yeah, I mean, there's still a bunch of stuff that we haven't tried that, you know, I think we have high confidence in, you know, working out. And so we'll we'll keep doing that. Are there any other say lasting lessons from this journey that If someone were to try to operate this way, build streaks.

1:14:52 into their product, anything you'd recommend. Yeah, I really do think it starts with You know, uh streaks are an engagement hack. Uh you know, it you can You can make your app

1:15:03 More retentive. I'm almost positive almost every app out there can make it more retentive. What it is loss aversion. That is, you know, again, armchair psychologist Jackson, like It's just a human The thing that works on humans. Um But

1:15:18 If it if your if your app is not Something that users want to use every day or whatever. you know, cadence you want your app to be, uh, you know, to work on. It's gonna be You're only gonna get so much from that streak. And honestly, it's probably gonna distract you from what really should matter, which is making your app something that people want to use every day. And so if you start Focusing on the streak, but you haven't made that a

1:15:39 enjoyable experiment experience. you're just gonna waste a lot of time, honestly. And so I think making sure that you have your core loop of your app figured out that that it is giving value to users. It is something that they want to come back to every day. That really sets the stage for something to layer. uh a streak on. So resist the temptation if you haven't, you know, if you don't think you've reached that point to

1:16:00 go too hard down the you know the path of streak. That's a really good point. Just like a streak is not gonna solve your problems if people don't actually Care about the core value you're providing. No, and honestly it'll probably cause more problems if if what you end up focus on is how do I make this street highly engaging, but your app isn't I mean, you're just

1:16:17 You're you're you're wasting time that could otherwise be you know, better spent on solving more more critical problems. So That's that's one learning. You know, the other thing that I'll say is And we we met with one of our board members, um, Bing. been Gordon a few weeks or uh uh a a few months ago rather. And he had this comment where he was just like

1:16:38 The reason why users care about your streak so much Is because you care about your streak so much, you being Duolingo. Like the reason why users care about our streak so much, because Duolingo cares about the streak so much. We're like, What do you mean? Well, he's like, Well, After every session, you see a big streak screen and it's animated cooler than almost any other screen in the app. And then sometimes you see some other screens and there's all these other feet like you don't let a user forget it. You talk about them in messages and And so I think it's worth thinking about. Look, if you're gonna build a streak and then you're gonna seconded off into the corner of your app, uh, you know, where users aren't gonna see it.

1:17:10 Like they're probably not gonna care about it as much. And Which might be fine'cause there might be other levers that you think are more important to pull on, but There's a reason why you know, we focus as much on the streak, you know, as as as we do. And that's because we want it to be top of mind for for users. And

1:17:26 It's not by accident then that users start to care about. And so I think just As you're thinking about building the streak. making sure that you're giving it the visibility it deserves if you want it to have the kind of impact that Dualingo has. Um You know, it's it's it's sort of an uh Important hierarchy principle to to think about as you design things.

1:17:42 That's such a good point. Like you look for cues to the app of tell me what I should pay attention to, what's important. If you're just like fire explosions, you made a streak. Oh maybe I should pay attention to this feature. And then the push notifications obviously encourage you there too. Uh anything else along those lines? Maybe final thing is Look, we ran so many tests on our Duolingo streak.

1:18:04 to figure out what work. I mean we have ver we have a we have a philosophy of Dualingo of test at first. You know, we are m a lot of times willing to test things. I really think that if you're gonna if you're gonna try to introduce a streak or you want to improve on the streak you have, like, Don't get too caught up in the the the philosophy of of everything. I mean make sure your hypotheses feel like they're good, but my recommendation is just try things. And this is again, you you said it earlier. It's like this is much human psychology as anything. And As soon as that becomes the case, like

1:18:36 You kinda just gotta understand what users respond to. And the easiest way to do that is to stop spending time, you know, batting around ideas in a in a conference room and just Try some stuff. Um, so huge recommendation to like if you're gonna invest in a streak. Try and figure out what works through testing with users, um rather than trying to get it perfect on the first try. Say someone's listening and they're like, Should we do streak'cause it's worth doing. What's your take on just like w the chances that a streak feature would be helpful to another consumer?

1:19:06 I'm I am uh well known for saying in the company that I think every streak, every team, every app could could benefit from a streak. Now how you implement it is very different. And I think you gotta like, what is your user's use case? Like If they're gonna come use I don't know. Tax software. Okay. You know, you know, now that I say this, tax software would be a hard one, but maybe it's all about, you know, you know, you need users to come back every day during the tax season, uh, or how many times? I don't know, you know, now that I say this out loud. Times you upload your uh your hard yeah, that is a hard use case. But I the the vast majority of

1:19:40 Of of of companies, I think have a good idea of like, all right, here is my ideal use case. I want users to come here. Three times a month. That that would be ideal, you know, or four times a month. You can build a streak to work. I mean, Peloton has has weekly streaks because the idea of doing a Peloton, you know, uh workout every single day is hard for a lot of them was hard for this user during COVID. You know, it's just like every now and then you get on the Peloton, that was great. But the idea of a weekly streak was something that I could keep up. And so I think figure out what your usage pattern is as a user and then build your streak around it. But You know, as long as you're not uh you know, the like a really sh again, the the tax example is probably a a a good counterfactual, but

1:20:23 As long as you have some degree of frequency in your in your use. Um I think almost anything can have a Can have a streak. So Doolingo it's again a fourteen billion dollar company. This feature

1:20:34 possibly the most contributing factor other than the core, you know, product. to that level of success and market cap. And it's hard to imagine another just feature of a product that has had this much impact.

1:20:47 On on growth and revenue and building this sort of business. So I love that we spent this much time on it. The mother load. The mother load of advice and insights. So thank you again.

1:20:58 For putting it. Very fun. With that we reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? I'm I'm I'm ready. First question.

1:21:07 What are two or three books you've recommended most to other people? All right, I'll start with uh a guide to Midwest conversation. So I'm based in Kansas City, I'm a proud Midwesterner. And us Midwesterners talk in a certain way. I think, you know, you hear about Minnesota nice, um, but we tend not to say what we mean. And it is a very funny primer in two. What Midwesterners actually mean when they say what they say.

1:21:31 Um so highly recommend reading that. I like that that you give that to people just like here's what I might be telling you, which you may not read. But my my wife is German and I gave it to her so she could play around German. The opposite of that. Very different. I guess. Another book. Uh, this is a good one. Uh, Fate is the hunters. This is a really cool book. It it's a memoir of one of the early commercial airline pilots. And

1:21:55 It is wild to hear the stories about what flying was back in the day. I'm former management consultant. I flew every week for uh almost six years. And I never once had to worry about am I going to make it to the other end of this flight alive. That was not the case back then. And so some of the stories about what it used to be like to to be a pilot on some of these planes, um, before modern aviation technology is Fascinating. It makes you really appreciate what we have. It's uh it feels good to read a book like that being a software.

1:22:24 PM. Or engineer or whatever, like how different that life is. Hardw Hardware is hard. Oh man. It's not happening design. Okay. Next uh uh unless there's any other books you're gonna share. No, okay, great. What's uh favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed? Uh so I have two kids. I watch a lot of Bluey. Um, it's really good, I swear. It's it it brings me no shortage of joy. Um but adult.

1:22:49 Show that I hear Show not meant for four year olds that I have watched. I just finished the latest season of Emily in Paris. Man. Wonderful. Mm.

1:22:57 I realise that's not the highest brow of television, but just like Beautiful people in beautiful cities solving problems that are not, you know, earth scattering. Sometimes it is nice to just Tune out. Also I'm learning French on Duolingo. uh slight plug for the app, I can understand a lot of the French that is being spoken and there is no better joy than having invested as much time as I have in French and actually being able to use it. Um so

1:23:22 Huge fan of it more. That is so funny. What a fun Venn diagram. Uh my mother in law loves Emily in Paris. Uh I saw someone tweeting about like what what visa is she on? How is she still in Paris? Yeah, you best just not ask questions. There's a lot there's a lot of questions for the show that are unanswered or unassed. Do you have a favorite product you recently discovered that you really like?

1:23:42 Other than doing it. Last week I went to Home Depot and I bought a new ladder. And Ladder innovations, you don't think, you know, uh uh of often, but you can make one of the legs go a little bit further than the other leg. And as somebody like myself who has a house that is built on a slight slope. Uh every time I go up on my ladder, I take my life in my hands.

1:24:02 But with this ladder, I'm always even. I cleaned my gutters twice last week. Just'cause of how awesome this ladder. uh has has how how much this ladder has changed my life. So Ladder innovation. I don't think it gets talked enough about and so I'm happy to give it the spotlight it deserves. I appreciate you doing that. And it's the first latter recommendation we've had on the podcast. Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you really find useful in work or in life that you share with folks?

1:24:26 This probably will not be much of a surprise based on how I've talked about our willingness to test things, but you miss a hundred percent of the shots that you don't take. Um, I'm a big fan of just trying things, even if you're Uh Possibility of success is not hundred, uh,'cause you learn a lot among the uh along the way. So Final question.

1:24:46 Do you have any fun traditions at Duolingo amongst either the PM team or the company in general that might be delightful to share? We have way too many traditions to count. Um I will share the weird tradition that we do at every retention stand up. And this started during the pandemic. You know, we obviously used to stand up in person and then um when we went remote.

1:25:08 We did this thing where whoever's the last person to go would count down three, two, one. And then we'd all try to clap at the same time. Which was kind of fun and dorky, but We fell in love with it and four years later we're still doing it. Recently we've added

1:25:23 We all say yeah. In unison. Afterwards. I can't tell you why. Um

1:25:30 But Trying to synchronize a clap via Zoom and then all shouting Yeehaw. I did this in a phone booth the other day and after I came out someone told me You know that those aren't as uh soundproof as you think, but you know? When you get a good opportunity to give a Yeehaw, you kinda can't pass up on it, so

1:25:47 I love these little things. Like they're so you know, they sound so minor, but they're such important elements of team culture and tradition and so important for PMs to Find ways to just have fun and Do something ridiculous. I will say it took a while to get people Behind

1:26:02 Shouting Yeehaw. Um, but now that we have people doing it. You can't you can't take it away from that. We all we all love it. Oh man. I uh I called our all hands for a while y'all hands. Feel free to steal that. You get it. You get it, Lenny. Yeah. I get it.

1:26:16 Jackson, this is incredible. I feel like people are gonna listen to this with notebooks and just like, Okay, here's a bunch of ideas we should try with whatever we're working on, whether it's streaks or not. Thank you so much for being here. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out, learn more, learn more about Duolingo? I know you're hiring product managers, so share more there. And finally, how can listeners be useful to you?

1:26:37 Yes, uh you can find me on on on LinkedIn. That is where most of my uh online social media is, so Jackson Shuttleworth. Um, and then how people can be useful to me, yes, as you said, we are hiring, we're actually hiring for my team. Are you interested in thinking about streaks as much as we do? Uh, you know, we might be the right home for you. So please. Uh, you know, you can apply on our website. We're also hiring from a number of other product uh management roles and they are all as as as thrilling as this work is. And then you know.

1:27:07 I'm always interested about how other companies have implemented Streaks and what they've learned. And so What I'd say is if you're a company who's implemented a streak, uh, maybe in a different way than Duolingo has, or you know, you've found a whole ton of success and you know another vector, another element to the feature that we didn't talk about today. I would love to know more. I used to catalog basically every streak I found out there. Um, and as it's become more of a a a popular feature, it's just been hard to keep up on. So You know, if you have interesting streak insights to to to send my way, I would love to hear them.

1:27:41 I love that. The collection of all the best ways of doing streaks. Uh Jackson, I was just I wanna say congrats to your team and and you for ha having so much impact. This is like the dream of a lot of PMs and teams is to see this much impact and continue to sh ship wins. And so congrats. Nice work.

1:27:57 Thank you for your attention. And with that, Jackson, thanks so much for being here. Yeah, thank you, Lenny. This was uh this was a lot of fun. Same. Bye, everyone.

1:28:07 Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show. at Lenny's podcast dot com. See you in the next episode.

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