flâneur

Misha P

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on the atlas — 34

highlights — 139

  • We got our first big win with the streak-saver notification—a notification that alerts users with streaks if they are about to lose their streak. This late-night notification proved that indeed there was considerable upside to doubling down on streak optimizations.
    How Duolingo reignited user growth - by Jorge Mazal
  • Streaks work for a number of reasons. One of those is that a streak increases user motivation over time; the longer the streak is, the greater the impetus to keep the streak going.
    How Duolingo reignited user growth - by Jorge Mazal
  • To date, the streak feature is one of Duolingo’s most powerful engagement mechanics. When people talk about their Duolingo experience, they often bring up their streak. I recently met one user who told me, “I have a 1,435-day streak!” and added, “with no streak freezes!” His bragging rights were well-earned, as he had been studying his chosen language daily for almost four years.
    How Duolingo reignited user growth - by Jorge Mazal
  • As we started diving into this, there was one principle that became paramount. It came from a cautionary tale from Groupon’s CEO. He explained to Luis von Ahn, our CEO, that for a long time, Groupon stuck to one email notification per day. But their team started wondering whether sending more emails would improve metrics. The CEO eventually gave in and allowed his team to test sending one more email to each user each day. This test resulted in a big increase to their target metrics. Encouraged, Groupon kept experimenting, sending more emails, even as many as five a day. Then, in what felt like…
    How Duolingo reignited user growth - by Jorge Mazal
  • The leaderboards feature had a huge and almost immediate impact on our metrics. Overall learning time increased by 17%, and the number of highly engaged learners (users who spend at least 1 hour a day for 5 days a week) tripled. At this time, we hadn’t yet figured out how to calculate statistical significance for CURR, but we saw that our traditional retention metrics (D1, D7, etc.) improved materially and with statistical significance. Going forward, the leaderboards feature became a vector for improving metrics, and teams continue to optimize the feature to this day. Also importantly, the le…
    How Duolingo reignited user growth - by Jorge Mazal
  • The leaderboards feature had a huge and almost immediate impact on our metrics. Overall learning time increased by 17%, and the number of highly engaged learners (users who spend at least 1 hour a day for 5 days a week) tripled. At this time, we hadn’t yet figured out how to calculate statistical significance for CURR, but we saw that our traditional retention metrics (D1, D7, etc.) improved materially and with statistical significance. Going forward, the leaderboards feature became a vector for improving metrics, and teams continue to optimize the feature to this day. Also importantly, the le…
    How Duolingo reignited user growth - by Jorge Mazal
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    emoji keyboard shortcut on notion - Google Search
  • Jeff has an uncanny ability to read a narrative and consistently arrive at insights that no one else did, even though we were all reading the same narrative. After one meeting, I asked him how he was able to do that. He responded with a simple and useful tip that I have not forgotten: he assumes each sentence he reads is wrong until he can prove otherwise. He’s challenging the content of the sentence, not the motive of the writer. Jeff, by the way, was usually among the last to finish reading.
    Book Tracker by Nikunj Kothari | Sorted by Year Read
  • But I think there’s a core insight here, around how I want the world to work vs. how it actually works (thanks to Michael Waxman for this framing): I wish we all wanted to talk with our team frequently and collaborate closely. But, most people don’t feel a need to talk to their co-workers that often. They value the autonomy and convenience of remote work, even if it can lead to disconnection and loneliness. The companies that value close collaboration have returned to the office or hybrid models. For some companies, Tandem resonates, and it’s beautiful to see it working. But that market is sma…
    What happened to Tandem (virtual office)
  • Doing this for products and features we build is often key - can you add things that delight power users or users that have a very specific need - without getting in the way of everyone else?
    How do you do layers well - appealing to a section of super-fans and not annoying everyone else?
  • Define success metrics So far, the most noticeable way data has impacted our planning process and product roadmap is in how we define our goals. Data can be an incredibly powerful communication tool, but even the most informed product teams can skew or misunderstand the purpose of a new feature because of a miscommunication. For example, we have a project titled Search Improvements on our product roadmap. That seems straightforward enough, but it actually has a few different interpretations: “Make search results more accurate.” “Make search syntax more flexible.” “Make the search engine return…
    What you can learn from Front's approach to product roadmaps
  • Questions that go into making a choice such as this - what should be the positions of ads - what should be the frequency in a list - how many consecutive ads should be shown - is this fixed rule for all users or do the weights change basis cohorts - should these weights be static for every session or basis engagement levels increase/decrease weights But more important than these choices are guiding principles which help make good choices - The first N set of results will always be organic relevant results so that customers keep trusting our search results. - No more than M consecutive ads in a…
    Post | Feed | LinkedIn
  • So what’s the problem? Travelers often use Tripadvisor intermediated by Google. Rather than coming directly to Tripadvisor, they search on Google, end up at Tripadvisor, then go back to Google for their next query — sometimes dozens of times over the course of planning a trip. In 2016, Tripadvisor formed a team, led by Adam Rosenberg and Christine Varrieur, to understand this problem better and create a vision for how to make Tripadvisor the hub for a person’s travel planning activity. The vision proposed fundamental changes to the app experience that required alignment across the entire organ…
    Travel Hub Product Strategy at Tripadvisor — Reforge
  • This broad set of offerings underpinned Tripadvisor’s SEO strategy. Powered by user reviews, Tripadvisor’s offerings show up in the top 3-5 results across millions of Google searches. As a result, hundreds of millions of travelers come to Tripadvisor every month.
    Travel Hub Product Strategy at Tripadvisor — Reforge
  • 4. The Focusing Illusion for products When we talk to customers about the problem that our product solves, we overestimate its severity and get surprised when the customer doesn’t end up buying or using our product. Any problem will feel more critical while you’re talking about it.
    Why Products Don't Succeed: The 7 Biases of Product Teams | LinkedIn
  • As a student of human nature, I feel the common thread is perception. Perception is about how we make meaning. When something is abstract, invisible and intangible, we struggle with our perception. This is why, I believe we struggle with concepts like spirituality, god and ideas. But when we go past the discomfort of not knowing & uncertainty and explore deeper, we travel farther and we understand through experience that life is a lot more than our survival instincts.
    Spirituality & Philosophy
  • 17. The fact that an analysis appears in print has no relationship to the likelihood of its being correct.
    Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design
  • Like a wifi signal, we circle our comparison in our little bubble. Our immediate society, our classmates, our peers at work, our kitty parties and more. Our giving is two steps below us and getting is two steps above us. We dare to go twenty steps above or below. This is why our peer groups matter. That is for another day!
    Spirituality & Philosophy
  • The third level of thinking becomes accessible when the first two levels—survival and emotional needs—are met. This explains why philosophy, which requires high-level thinking, can be challenging for many. Often, our cognitive bias may dismiss it as unimportant to conserve energy.
    3Ps of Human Nature
  • The concept of social proof suggests that "it is not only the actions of others that mislead, but also their inaction. When in doubt, others' inaction is taken as social proof that inaction is the correct course."
    Psychology of Human Misjudgement
  • If you are a designer and you are trying to understand your customer, the first step is to acknowledge that both you and your customer are human. Your critical filters may affect how you interpret data, possibly causing you to perceive things differently than they actually are.
    Self-Mechanic
  • If I have a big goal, I will generally procrastinate on tackling it unless I immediately choose the first steps. If I want to create a new product roadmap, my first steps may include finding all the various Google Docs and Asana projects where we’ve done roadmapping in the past. Next, I will read them. Next, I’ll make a list of potential features, then group those features into themes. Then, I’ll ensure there’s a specific deliverable and audience for the proposals.
    5 ways to think big, any day of the week
  • Big questions are worth asking but they should be framed in a way that doesn’t feel burdensome or insurmountable. If they do, decompose them into smaller pieces until each one feels doable.
    5 ways to think big, any day of the week
  • For example, if a user tries to use @channel to message a large number of teammates across multiple time zones in Slack, they’ll see a cartoon rooster (below) asking them to think twice about notifying these people. It’s a detail that wasn’t built to move metrics but rather to prevent anxiety for people who would otherwise receive work notifications at odd hours. The rooster icon was chosen to keep the tone playful so that the message sender doesn’t feel ashamed or guilty when they read the warning.
    How to develop product sense - by Jules Walter
  • Make sure the goal of your product and possible actions are clear to users. At Slack, we often heard from users that they didn’t know what Slack was really about and what they could do with the app. We experimented with various onboarding experiences to address that issue, and one early experiment on mobile increased user retention just by telling new users what Slack is and linking to a video showing people how a work team might use it on desktop and mobile.
    How to develop product sense - by Jules Walter
  • Gross refers to the total amount of something, while net refers to the amount remaining after deductions are made.
    diff between gross and net - Google Search
  • First, it’s worth noting that you should spend far more time deciding whether you think the startup you’re joining will eventually grow to be 10X/20X/100X in revenue or valuation than it is today, rather than optimizing for compensation.
    Joining a startup: How to think about equity compensation — Cristina Cordova
  • When time-to-value is slow, and cost-to-serve is low, freemium is an excellent choice. If time-to-value is fast but cost-to-serve is high, options like a free trial or reverse trial make more sense.
    The 7 Building Blocks for Monetization: Part 1
  • As a general rule, though, our view is that planning should take up no more than 10% of the execution time period. So if you’re planning for a quarter, your planning period should be slightly less than nine days.
    How Coda builds product - by Lenny Rachitsky
  • Like all customer relationships, the one you have with your employees is a trade. It’s like when you’re on a plane and the flight attendant says: “we know you have many choices when you fly, and we thank you for choosing us.” I feel similarly about the people I work with.
    Why this person is your most important customer
  • Then, we presented the fifth product concept, and he said “Wait, so you’re saying you can do X? Wow hmmm… that’d be huge for us. That’s something we haven’t been able to pull off and we’re considering spinning up a team to focus on that. [Turns to another teammate in the room.] Can you set a followup meeting with so-and-so, and make sure this gets presented to other-so-and-so, we should fast-track this and get a full demo rundown and technical details of this ASAP.” Ah. 🚨🚨🚨 that’s product market fit.
    Judging Product Market Fit by Peter Reinhardt
  • Part I covers some of our learnings in accounting: accurately recording the past. Accounting is rigorously pedantic to record exactly what’s happened. Then, in Part II I’ll talk about some adventures in strategic finance. Strategic finance is exactly the opposite of accounting. It looks to the future, attempts to guesstimate the fuzzy unknowns, and searches for ways to mitigate risk and increase growth.
    Startup Finance for Founders — Part I, Accounting by Peter Reinhardt
  • Here are the three ideas I pushed us to build, all the while convincing ourselves that these were real problems people had: Bookxor was a tool for students to read and annotate lecture notes. In return, professors could see usage and readership analytics on their course notes. Six months went by at MIT before we realized that professors didn’t really care whether people read the notes. ClassMetric was a tool for students to press a button to anonymously say “I’m confused!” The professor would get a graph of how confused their students were over time. We spent ~6 months at MIT and at Y Combinat…
    Finding Product Market Fit by Peter Reinhardt
  • Given that safety will be the metric that matters most for self-driving car fleets, which company in the mix will win? Who is going to build the safest self-driving car?
    Driving Data as a Defensible Moat for Self-driving Cars by Peter Reinhardt
  • After a couple years (maybe just one!), you can start looking at acquisition metrics (prospecting traffic, keyword rankings, click-through rates). As Google begins to pick up the traffic from your UGC that has been generated by your existing users, your content will rank higher for key terms. At that point, you’ll be able to measure the success of this project by the acquisition it brings, not just the engagement or activation it drives.
    How to get started with User-Generated Content
  • While the goal of UGC is often acquisition, and it would be great if prospects landed on your templates page and thought, “This is amazing, I need to sign up for this product right away,” that's unlikely to happen. These pages won’t be discoverable by Google right away because they lack traffic. So, your first focus should be distributing this content to your existing user base.
    How to get started with User-Generated Content
  • If your current customers don't find value in user-generated content, prospects definitely won't.
    How to get started with User-Generated Content
  • To keep creators motivated, we used to manually send them their engagement stats. No one wants to submit something into a void without knowing if it's getting attention or not :)
    How to get started with User-Generated Content
  • Real-Life Example: When we first launched Miroverse, it started as a marketing effort. Our PMM, Kristin, spearheaded the effort, manually finding users and curating content. She created a Typeform for submissions and scoured LinkedIn and X for potential contributors. She worked with a brand designer to polish templates and enlisted an editor for copy improvements. We also hired a contractor to handle the CMS logistics. She was able to drive ~30 templates/month that were added to our marketing site.
    How to get started with User-Generated Content
  • The mistake many companies make is trying to “boil the ocean” from day one. Don’t. Your end goal might be to have a Canva-like system where everything is automated, but in the beginning there are only two things you need to focus on: finding users willing to contribute content and ensuring that content is of high quality.
    How to get started with User-Generated Content
  • Not only does it help them build their own personal brand, but there’s also the reciprocation factor—they’ll share your posts about them with their networks, creating a positive word-of-mouth loop. Think about how many times you can get content from the same user vs. needing new users for fresh content. For example, I assume Canva is able to get multiple templates out of the same user. And with Miro, we definitely did just that, regularly asking the same users to share their work, which lowered the pressure on us to continuously acquire new creators.
    How to get started with User-Generated Content
  • To convince them to contribute, appeal to their intrinsic motivation. You can let them know that, by contributing, they will get visibility: you will use your brand and distribution to amplify their name. This is powerful!
    How to get started with User-Generated Content
  • Tip: Reach out on social media to anyone who has publicly praised your product! They’ll be delighted that you’ve noticed them, will likely collaborate, and will likely become even more loyal to your product.
    How to get started with User-Generated Content
  • "Life is like a recycling center, where all the concerns and dramas of human kind get recycled back and forth across the universe. But what you have to offer is your own sensibility, maybe your own sense of humour or insider pathos or meaning. All of us can sing the same song, and there will still be four billion different renditions. Everything we need in order to tell our stories in a reasonable and exciting way already exists in each of us."
    L o o s e W o r d s
  • When assessing profitability of ad campaigns you should take into account variable expenses the business has. For example, Dropbox has significant expenses to cover the costs of transferring and storing users’ data on its servers. In fact, some reports suggest that Dropbox spent 67% of its revenue to provide services to users (file storage, internet traffic costs, commissions to payment systems, and so on). In this case, calculating LTV based on Revenue would mislead the team.
    ᐈ Role of a product manager | Free skills test — GoPractice
  • Showing our product to people and asking them to compare it to their current solution is a bad idea. First, they will judge the product without having experienced it in real life, which means their assessment will be imprecise. Second, many people find it difficult to say negative things about a product when they’re sitting across the person who is building it. Third, even if they do find the product useful, it is often impossible to understand this without real experience.
    ᐈ Role of a product manager | Free skills test — GoPractice
  • When people run A/B tests, they often forget that one of the important prerequisites is determining the sample size for the experiment.
    ᐈ Role of a product manager | Free skills test — GoPractice
  • But why should PMs care about system design? There are three reasons in particular: Any system design will involve trade-offs since it has time, money, and resources constraints. A PM knowledgeable enough to have a conversation with engineers around these trade-offs can add value to the decision-making. This is the major reason why PMs should understand system design. System design determines the user experience. For example, the time taken to load a page increases as the number of requests increases beyond a point. A PM who understands the relationship between system variables and UX can anti…
    How to Crack the Technical Round of PM Interviews
  • A system is a set of things working together to achieve the objective of the system. Depending on the objective, the system can be designed in multiple ways. For example, we design the railway system to help people travel via trains from one place to another. The railway system designed for maximum revenue from stations A to B will differ from the one optimized for minimum journey time from stations A to B
    How to Crack the Technical Round of PM Interviews
  • The term "return" in the context of an income tax return refers to the act of reporting information to the government. By filing an income tax return, the taxpayer is "returning" or reporting their taxable income and tax liabilities to the government.26 Jan 2015
    why is it called income tax return - Google Search