1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes. Explore my new book on realprogressbook.com
How Duolingo Approaches Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery
How Duolingo Approaches Strategy, OKRs, and DiscoveryDear Reader, Many Product Managers were in awe of the ways of working shared in The Duolingo Handbook a few weeks ago. While it’s an inspiring read, I used this as a reason to revisit some of my all-time favorite reads about how this company operates (or at least used to operate) and extract my takeaways with you. Duolingo focuses on “Movable” Metrics for OKRsvia Meaningful metrics: How data sharpened the focus of product teams Duolingo acknowledges the importance of broad strategic directions through lagging Impact metrics like Daily Active Users (DAUs). However, they have also realized this metric is strategically important but out of reach for steering and measuring individual initiatives. After modeling driver metrics of DAU, they landed on Current User Retention Rate (CURR) as a potential driver. In the next step, they staffed a team who started running A/B tests to see whether 1) CURR is a metric they can move and 2) moving CURR actually moves DAU (remember: correlation does not equal causation!). And they were successful! With a team now focused on optimizing a movable metric, growth in DAU kicked off again. Since then, they have utilized the concept to set the quarterly OKRs of teams. A Takeaway for your work: Revisit your team goals from a perspective of how movable (or, as I like to say, influenceable and leading) they are. Duolingo Sometimes Puts Signals over Metricsvia How Duolingo builds product To separate how the progress of metrics-based and feature-based teams are measured, they try to avoid the tyranny of metrics: Obviously it’s harder to measure success with feature-based teams, but we’ve learned to work with that. We use a combination of qualitative and quantitative signals to see if we are tracking toward success, which looks different depending on the feature. For example, to measure how we are “making Duolingo more social,” we would use a few signals to decide if we are making progress:
- User research studies on the features we are building.
- Signals from public forums like Reddit and Twitter to see how our users are reacting to our features.
- Usage of features by Duos (Duolingo employees) and buzz around the features we are building. In other words, we look for how much Duos care about our features.
A Takeaway for your work: Don’t try to bend the success measures of teams whose work is hard to measure into obscurity by forcing them into conventional metrics structures. Acknowledge the importance of their work and focus on signals, not just metrics. Duolingo’s Team Leads lean into their Unfair Advantage to create Space for Discoveryvia How Duolingo builds product Typically, a PM lead and an Engineering lead head up the team, sometimes joined by a Learning and Curriculum lead (experts in learning science, curriculum design, and educational content creation), Biz Ops lead, or Marketing lead, depending on what the team is working on.
Team co-leads are ultimately responsible for their team’s success and deciding its roadmap. They also own the decisions in their domain. For example, the PM co-lead owns more of the product discovery and roadmap decisions, whereas the engineering lead owns more of the product delivery and implementation decisions.
A Takeaway for your work: Even within a Trio, you want to make sure every member can focus on their unfair advantage instead of forcing everyone into the same type of work just for the sake of “equal collaboration.” Did you enjoy the newsletter? Please forward it. It only takes two clicks. Creating this one took two hours. Thank you for Practicing Product, Tim PS.: As I prepared for an in-house training day on adopting the Press Release FAQ format in the last weeks, I truly enjoyed Marcelo Calbucci's book on implementing this concept. As a Product Management Coach, I guide Product Teams to measure the real progress of their evidence-informed decisions. I focus on better practices to connect the dots of Product Strategy, Product OKRs, and Product Discovery. |
Product Practice Newsletter
1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes. Explore my new book on realprogressbook.com
Product Practice #383 When to recognizeYour OKR Planning takes too long READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Nov 6, 2025 READING TIME 5 min & 37 sec Dear Reader, It's week three of Q4 planning. Your team has revised the OKRs five times. Leadership wants one more alignment session. The quarter starts in a week, but you haven't actually begun working toward the goals yet. The moment you're tweaking wording instead of committing to a strategic goal, you've crossed from Real Progress into Alibi Progress....
Product Practice #382 Discovery Activitiesover The Discovery READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Oct 30, 2025 READING TIME 3 min & 52 sec Dear Reader, Most teams treat Discovery like a season: "We'll do Discovery for Q1, then build in Q2." This creates a problem. It separates learning from building, makes stakeholders impatient, and turns Discovery into something you have to defend rather than a practical way to reduce uncertainty. The real question isn't "Are we doing Discovery?" It's "Are we...
Product Practice #381 How to ConnectNorth Star Metrics and OKRs READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Oct 23, 2025 READING TIME 5 min & 25 sec Dear Reader, I once worked with a team whose OKRs read like a best of every company's KPI dashboard: user engagement up 15%, conversion rate improved by 10%, feature adoption increased by 20%. When I asked how these connected to the specific intentions they want to pursue to drive long-term customer and business value, they couldn't link them. Their OKRs looked...