Albert Cheng

The best AI products use the right technology for the right task: specialized engines for logic/calculation and LLMs for human-friendly communication.

"Behind the scenes, we're running chess engines to basically spit out evaluations for every move that you make. And then we translate that and make that approachable to the user using their native lang..."

Using LLMs for text-to-SQL can democratize data access and reduce the burden on data analysts for ad-hoc questions.

"We're working on training some of these Slack bots to essentially be the first party provider of a lot of these answers [SQL queries], which makes the company as a whole lot more data informed."

AI prototyping tools can dramatically accelerate the 'explore' phase of product development by making ideas clickable and discussable instantly.

"We've invested a bit in at least carving out the main screens of our product experience... and building essentially AI prototypes of those using tools like a V0 or a Lovable. And when you have those f..."

Growth leaders should act as a bridge, taking insights from one team and encouraging other teams to 'exploit' those learnings in their own domains.

"Surfacing those [experiment wins] across the company... the onus is on them to clearly articulate what their hypothesis is, what they found such that then as a growth leader, I can encourage people to..."

A high-performance engineering culture can be built around extreme experimentation frequency and tight, consistent processes.

"The product experience of Duolingo actually changes multiple times per day for each user... they care a lot about the clock speed of the company... they were really, really tight about it."

Identify where users are already organically sharing (e.g., via screenshots) and invest in making those specific moments more delightful and shareable.

"We invested actually in some time to essentially add screenshot tracking... we were able to basically articulate and say, 'Okay, streak milestones is the obvious one.'... we staffed those moments with..."

Interspersing paid features within the free experience (sampling) is more effective for conversion than keeping them hidden behind a hard paywall.

"What if we actually sampled a number of different paid suggestions and interspersed them to free users across their writing? All of a sudden, people were seeing Grammarly as a much more powerful tool..."

A free product should showcase the full potential of the paid version to maximize conversion.

"Try to have your free product be a reflection of everything that your product can offer you... It's basically a reverse free trial but in real time while you're writing as opposed to a time-based one."

Retention is the primary driver of success for consumer subscriptions, as it reduces the pressure for immediate monetization.

"User retention is gold for consumer subscription companies. If you don't retain your users, then a lot of the onus is on getting them to pay on day one."

Positive reinforcement after a failure (like losing a game) can significantly improve engagement and retention compared to highlighting mistakes.

"When you lose a game now as opposed to surfacing your blunders and your horrible stuff that you did, we flip it on its head and so we show you your brilliant moves, your best moves, and we have coach..."

A 30-40% Day 1 retention rate is a healthy benchmark for consumer applications to sustain growth.

"I think when you have your D one retention somewhere around the 30 or 40% mark, that's quite solid I think for a consumer app. If it's much lower than that, then sometimes I might question the intent..."

For mature products, the pool of dormant users is often larger than new users, making resurrection a high-leverage growth lever.

"It's actually worth spending some time making sure that that resurrected, for lack of a better word, experience inside the product is really excellent and that you find novel ways to try to bring them..."

Effective gamification requires a tight core loop, a long-term metagame for motivation, and a profile that reflects user investment.

"Jorge actually had this model of gamification patterns having essentially three pillars to it. You have the core loop, you have the metagame, and then you have the profile."

In fast-moving environments, high agency and 'clock speed' (processing/execution speed) are better predictors of success than deep domain experience.

"I saw some of the highest performers just being people that had very high agency, had that clock speed, had that energy, but they didn't necessarily need to have deep experience on that matter. Someti..."

High agency is often revealed through a candidate's proactive behavior and communication outside of formal interview questions.

"A lot of it actually happens outside of the interview process interestingly. So a lot of it is the types of questions they asked, 'Have they actually tried your product and gone deep into it?' A lot o..."

Avoid premature public launches (PR) before validating core product demand to prevent 'sunk cost' traps.

"PR has its time in place, but I think doing it before you have validation that customers definitely want, the thing is quite risky and it can lead to a lot of sun cost once you get it out because you..."