Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

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

October 5, 2025

AI Summary

5 min read

Albert Cheng, growth leader at Duolingo, Grammarly, and Chess.com, shares mental models for uncovering product growth opportunities. Drawing from consumer subscription successes, he emphasizes connecting users to product value through experimentation, retention focus, and psychological insights like positive reinforcement over expected behaviors.

Explore and Exploit Framework

Cheng uses the explore-exploit framework to balance discovery and scaling: explore identifies promising "mountains" via broad experiments, while exploit directs resources to climb them deeply. At Chess.com, exploration revealed users reviewed games 80% more after wins than losses—contrary to assumptions about learning from mistakes. They exploited this by post-loss prompts highlighting "brilliant moves" and encouragement ("Losing is just part of learning"), boosting game reviews 25%, subscriptions 20%, and retention. Insights then spread organization-wide, e.g., to puzzles, amplifying impact. Signals like non-significant experiment results prompt shifting back to exploration; AI tools like text-to-SQL bots and prototypes (V0, Figma Make) accelerate both phases by speeding data analysis and ideation.

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What you'll learn

1 *(00:04:33) **Guest intro and growth mindset framing**
2 *(00:06:18) **Piano background and parallels to growth**
3 *(00:09:42) **Explore/Exploit framework**
4 *(00:16:34) **AI acceleration for growth**
5 *(00:21:10) **Grammarly monetization win**
6 *(00:26:00) **Freemium strategies and retention heuristics**
7 *(00:34:35) **Company differences and growth levers**

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Albert Cheng has led growth at three of the world’s most successful consumer subscription companies: Duolingo, Grammarly, and Chess.com. A former Google product manager (and serious pianist!), Albert developed a unique approach to finding and scaling growth opportunities through rapid experimentation and deep user psychology. His teams run 1,000 experiments a year, discovering counterintuitive insights that have driven tens of millions in revenue.

What you’ll learn:

1. How to use the explore-exploit framework to find new growth opportunities

2. How showing premium features to free users doubled Grammarly’s upgrades to paid plans

3. What good retention looks like for a consumer subscription app

4. Why resurrected users drive 80% of mature product growth

5. Why “reverse trials” work better than time-based trials

6. The three pillars of successful gamification: core loop, metagame, and profile

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Where to find Albert Cheng:

• X: https://x.com/albertc248

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/albertcheng1/

• Chess.com: https://www.chess.com/member/Goniners

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Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

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Referenced:

• How Duolingo reignited user growth: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-duolingo-reignited-user-growth

• Inside ChatGPT: The fastest-growing product in history | Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/inside-chatgpt-nick-turley

• Explore vs. Exploit: https://brianbalfour.com/quick-takes/explo