Finding hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com)
Albert Cheng, who has led growth at Duolingo, Grammarly, and Chess.com, shares his framework for finding and scaling growth opportunities. He discusses the explore-exploit model, the keys to consumer subscription success like retention and resurrected users, and how AI is accelerating the experimentation cycle.
Growth is the job of connecting users to the value of your product. It’s not just about hacking metrics, but about holistically understanding the user journey and how the value they need changes over time.
The Explore-Exploit Framework for Growth
A powerful mental model for growth is to oscillate between exploration and exploitation.
- Explore: This is the process of finding the right “mountain to climb.” It involves divergent thinking, brainstorming, and running creative experiments to uncover new, foundational user insights.
- Exploit: Once you find a mountain, this is the process of climbing it effectively. It involves taking a key insight and systematically applying it across the product to maximize its impact.
A concrete example from Chess.com illustrates this framework. The team worked on “Game Review,” a feature that analyzes a user’s game.
- Exploration: The team discovered a counterintuitive insight: 80% of users who reviewed their games did so after a win, not a loss. The initial hypothesis was that users would want to learn from their mistakes. The reality was that human psychology favored positive reinforcement.
- Exploitation: Based on this insight, the team redesigned the post-loss experience. Instead of highlighting blunders, the product now shows brilliant moves and offers encouragement. This single change increased game reviews by 25% and subscriptions by 20%. The insight was then shared broadly, encouraging other teams, like the one working on puzzles, to audit their features for “cold patterns” and inject more positivity.
You know it’s time to shift from exploitation back to exploration when experiment win rates start to decline and you see more statistically insignificant results, suggesting you’ve maximized the potential of a given insight.
Monetization: The Power of a “Reverse Trial”
At Grammarly, the biggest monetization win came from rethinking the freemium experience.
- The Problem: The free version of Grammarly only offered spelling and grammar corrections. Consequently, over 90% of free users perceived the product only as a correctness tool and rarely encountered the full suite of premium features (e.g., tone, clarity, sentence rewrites). A very small percentage of users ever accepted all free suggestions to even see a paywall.
- The Solution: The team experimented with a “reverse trial” model. They interspersed a limited number of premium suggestions directly into the free writing experience. Users could taste the full power of Grammarly in their natural workflow.
- The Result: This change nearly doubled upgrade rates. The key learning is that your free product should be a reflection of the entire value proposition. By putting your best foot forward, you educate users on the full value you offer, making the decision to upgrade much easier.
Keys to a Successful Consumer Subscription Product
- Retention is Gold: For consumer subscription companies, user retention is the most critical metric. If you can’t retain users, the entire burden falls on converting them on day one, which is extremely difficult and expensive. A solid benchmark for a consumer app is a Day 1 retention rate of 30-40%.
- Focus on Resurrected Users: For a mature product, growth doesn’t just come from new users. At a company like Chess.com, reactivated or “resurrected” users form a cohort roughly the same size as new users. These dormant users can drive up to 80% of growth. It is critical to design an excellent experience for returning users, such as Duolingo’s placement tests that re-situate a user who has forgotten a language.
- Grow through Word of Mouth: The most successful subscription businesses, like Duolingo and Chess.com, grew organically by expanding the market rather than competing for existing users in a crowded space.
Pillars of Successful Gamification
Effective gamification, as seen at Duolingo, can be broken down into three pillars:
- Core Loop: The fundamental, repeatable habit. For Duolingo, this is completing a lesson, earning rewards, and extending your daily streak.
- Metagame: The long-term motivational systems built around the core loop. This includes leaderboards, achievements, and the user’s progression along a learning path.
- Profile: The user’s profile, which serves as a reflection of their time and investment in the product, building a sense of ownership.
Experimentation and the Role of AI
The goal at Chess.com is to scale from 50 experiments in 2023 to a target of 1,000 per year. The number itself isn’t the point; the goal forces the necessary conversations about building the systems and culture to enable that velocity. This includes enabling no-code experimentation on key screens (pricing, home screen) and empowering marketing teams to run their own tests.
AI is accelerating this entire cycle:
- Ideation & Analysis: AI tools can instantly summarize experiment analyses and suggest new hypotheses, drastically shortening the research cycle.
- Prototyping: Tools like v0 and Lovable allow teams to build AI-powered prototypes of core screens (onboarding, home screen), making it easier to visualize and test bolder, exploratory ideas.
- Data Analysis: A custom Slack bot built at Chess.com uses text-to-SQL to answer ad-hoc data questions, democratizing data access and encouraging more questions to be asked.
Building High-Agency Teams
The most counterintuitive lesson in team building is that deep experience can sometimes be a crutch, especially in a rapidly shifting landscape like AI. Many learned habits need to be intentionally discarded. Instead of focusing solely on experience, it’s more effective to hire for:
- High Agency & Clock Speed: People who think, move, and learn quickly.
- Energy & Beginner’s Mind: Individuals who are curious and not held back by preconceived notions.
These traits are often revealed in soft signals during the hiring process: the quality of questions they ask, their energy, and how they communicate.