Improving a Product
Case study: Duolingo
As a product manager, it’s critical to have the ability to analyze a product’s current offering, understand its position in the competitive market, and prioritize improvements based on the organization’s goals and resources.
How would you improve product X? This is a standard product management interview question. Here, I take the case of the popular language-learning application Duolingo to explore an approach toward answering it.
With exponential revenue growth, on target to reach $160 million in 2020, and more than 25 million happy active users, Duolingo has demonstrated how something as complex and crucial as education can be delivered effectively over the internet today. I believe Duolingo exhibits how a forward-thinking tech company, focused on delivering a unique educational experience through their unique culture, can completely redefine a social context. This made me, as a product manager, wonder how it could be enhanced.
Step 1: Understanding the goal of the product
The first step would be to go through the company’s mission/about pages to understand why they are building the product. Then, we cut through the noise to break it down to relevant keywords.
In Duolingo’s case, it’s fairly easy: “personalized education,” “making learning fun” and being “universally accessible.”
Step 2: Figure out the problems the product faces
This phase requires deeper research. Scour through the company’s website, blog and other social media pages to gauge their direction.
In Duolingo’s case, there are two interesting things to look at: their recent marketing campaign with “Angry Birds” and the launch of “Duolingo Push,” where the owl physically comes after you if you haven’t finished your daily lesson.
What I gather from this strong intent to motivate users to complete their daily lessons is their focus on the metric “user retention.”
Step 3: How can this problem be solved?
Start looking at things from the user’s perspective. What are their behaviors? What are the reasons for using the app? Do you have any data to start with?
For Duolingo, I was able to find survey data from a competitor. It answered a key question for Duolingo: “Why do I want to learn a new language?”
Supplement this data with some qualitative analysis, conducting basic interviews with friends/family to start, in order to get additional insights.
Now that we talked to some users and got some data to back it up, it’s time to put to paper the target audience, or in product terms, “user personas.” Draft rudimentary user personas to get a better understanding of our target audience.
Here are Duolingo’s personas:
At this point, inspect the application, putting yourself in the shoes of these users, and brainstorm what additions could be made. Write down whatever comes to mind; there might be opportunities to add to those or combine certain ideas during evaluation.
For Duolingo’s case, I realized there’s a segment of users on the app that could be catered to in a better way. The “Traveler — Learners” or “Aspiring International Student — Learners” need more to come back to the application than just grammar or vocabulary lessons.
Introducing the new feature: “Duo fact of the day”
Above are pop-up “fun facts” on the app home screen that pique users’ interest in the country’s culture and history where the language is majorly spoken. The facts could include information about currency, food, places to visit, famous personalities, music, etc. This additional knowledge can help build the user’s interest in learning more.
Other factors taken into consideration while thinking about the feature include:
- Competition: Duolingo is not just competing for users’ attention with other language learning applications, but also with social media giants, such as Instagram/Snapchat, on their phones. This instant-gratification psychology is targeted through the new feature.
- Company: Duolingo believes in “bite-sized” learnings, and the feature extends that mentality by delivering relevant information in shorts.
Step 4: How would you validate your concept?
To optimize development resources and build only what helps us achieve our goals, we conduct concept validation. This suggests breaking down the feature into smaller elements to validate our assumptions in phases.
My hypothesis for the feature: User retention (selected KPI) and, subsequently, user engagement would increase.
Establishing what metrics would be tracked and what would success mean in the planning stage is essential.
Step 5: Think about how the feature might evolve in the future
Things don’t need to be set in stone for this one. However, having a vision for what the product would look like down the road would go a long way. Potential interactions with other features on the app could also be explored, always keeping in mind the goals.
Building in small increments adds value, per Agile methodologies, providing more flexibility in product development. A/B testing on each increment helps the team move in the right direction, prioritize resources and pivot when necessary.
Step 6: Consider possibilities of failure, and think about potential solutions
No feature/product is perfect. It is only through multiple iterations and improvements that it gets closer to achieving that.
Before building and shipping, considering what could go wrong in the process is important. A particular assumption about a user behavior didn’t hold true, complexities/interactional difficulties arose in development, or a change in market dynamics altered the audience’s reaction to the product.
Preparing for where the project might falter in the future ahead of time helps achieve alignment among the team early on. It also prevents you, as the product manager, from being overwhelmed if things go south.
Building a product is hard. However, if you follow a process that works for you, ask questions along the way, and prepare for any headwinds that might come, success would surely follow.
