"growth as the job is to connect users to the value of your product. Growth sometimes gets this reputation that it's just pure metrics hacking. You've worked at three of the most successful consumer su..."

"retain your users, then a lot of the onus is on getting them to pay on day one. Gnome Leavinski, he said that I need to ask you about the biggest monetization win that you found at Grammarly. The live..."

"counterintuitive lesson you've learned about building teams? 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 ne..."

"learned habits actually need to be intentionally discarded. Today, my guest is Albert Chen. Albert is known as one of the top consumer growth minds in the world. He led growth and monetization at thre..."

"including his explore and exploit framework to find growth opportunities, his biggest and most interesting growth wins at Dualingo Grammarly.com, how he uses AI to accelerate his growth work, what he'..."

"year, and so much more. A huge thank you to Eric Alabest, Nom Leavinsky, and Jorge Mazal for suggesting topics for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it..."

"on over to lennisnewsletter.com and click product pass. With that, I bring you Albert Chain. My podcast guests and I love talking about craft and taste and agency and product market fit. You know what..."

"complete security questionnaires up to five times faster so that you can win bigger deals sooner. The result, according to a recent IDC study, Vanta customers slashed over $500,000 a year and are thre..."

"It's proving that the work matters, managing stakeholders, trying to plan ahead. Most teams spend more time reacting than learning, chasing updates, justifying road maps, and constantly unblocking wor..."

"alignment, not questions. And because it's built on Jira, you can track ideas from strategy to delivery, all in one place. Less chasing, more time to think, learn, and build the right thing. Get Jira ..."

"lot more wins in an area than people expect that you can continue to find wins and growth in something for a long time. >> Exactly right. Yes. Um, at the end of the day, like users, I think within a c..."

">> People hearing this might feel like okay yes uh find big wins and then find more. Is there something you find that helps you figure out when to explore versus when to exploit when you've exploited ..."

">> Well, let me follow this thread on AI and how you you're using AI to help you figure this out. That is very cool. Talk about that. >> I think one of the the latest things that we've been tinkering ..."

"I think you see this in chat GBT too, right? It's like just having a thing, right, that you can converse with that you feel uh comfortable in makes a huge difference. >> Okay, this is extremely cool. ..."

"discussable and hopefully testable relatively soon. >> What's in your AI stack along those lines? >> The PMs are mostly using Vzero. The designers love Figma, so they're using Figma make. Uh the engin..."

">> I want to come back to this topic of how things have changed and how you work as a product person, as a growth person across the companies you've been at. But first of all, I want to I want to talk..."

"over 90% of our users are on the free service and the rest of it pay for subscriptions essentially, right? And so one of the teams they work on subscriber conversion PM there is Kyla. Um that team's g..."

"that. So, that really worked well for us there. >> I think this is what converted me to being a paid Grammarly subscriber. Wow, what a what a a genius move. So essentially it's here's uh here's a bunc..."

"and then you layer on kind of a sampling or a taste of some of the premium features that are on top of it. That's usually the sweet spot that I've seen. As to the trials, reverse trials type of thing,..."

"builds that daily habit. So over time especially when companies mature a little bit you actually focus most of your energy on the existing user retention mechanics um you find that that's a much much ..."

">> Yeah, the and the retention piece that's such a good point. It's like my newsletter is very much along these lines. It's just like how many people are joining every day, how many people are leaving..."

">> Can you explain that a little bit more? >> Yes. So after some period of time, you kind of stack up a lot of inactive users in your product, right? And you also stack up sporadic users, right? Peopl..."

"is what I'm trying to say. >> Got it. Like essentially so many of your so many people have already tried in the past that to grow you need to resurrect people that have been there and so thinking thro..."

"company. And they tend to they actually wrote a playbook about this. It's called the green machine. You look it up. That was one of my most successful tweets ever. I just tweeted something about Duali..."

"cycle and they were really really tight about it. >> Okay. So that's Dualingo. >> Yeah, that's Duolingo. Grammarly, you know, this is an interesting company because they started as a paid product orie..."

">> Essentially a B2B business versus a very consumer business. >> Yeah. And a lot more meaningful strategic decisions as well. >> And then the core product team also, you know, I'm used to in growth l..."

"always hired people from around the world. The company's always been globally remote. They just hire people that love chess. They play all day. They watch the streams. Our Slack is always blowing up o..."

"we're always dog fooding the product. There's an just an amazing energy in the company to just use the product all the time, come up with ideas, and I love that environment. I think that's fun for me...."

"this company was really under the radar. Like 800 million people play chess around the world, but most of that is over the board. Until recently, there wasn't actually that much online. But five years..."

">> I was actually speaking at chess.com and playing chess. I was at a coffee shop this weekend. There's a like a family, a dad and mom and a daughter ordering and the dad's sitting at the table and he..."

"Every day, new headlines are scaring us about all the ways that AI is coming for our jobs, creating a lot of anxiety and fear. But a recent survey for Miro tells a different story. 76% of people belie..."

"there's kind of like two buckets here. >> How is AI changing the product, say chess and other places you worked? And then how's AI impacting your work as a growth person? So pick one or both buckets. ..."

"specifically have learned how to augment I guess the human playing experience with the power of chess engines which you know are definitely a powerful form of AI. It's not LMS to be clear but there's ..."

"game. And our chess.com approach is that we can bring this technology for every user, even people that have never moved a piece before. I talked earlier about that game review product. That's exactly ..."

">> Not unexpected. You know, interestingly, LM themselves are quite bad at playing chess. Like, they hallucinate moves. They look at patterns, right? They're they're very good at pattern recognition, ..."

"Um but to your point, I my understanding is that the way Alpha Zero is primarily trained is that it just plays a bunch of games against itself, >> right? And so through the neural network, it just get..."

"you get through. So one example is in product discovery as opposed to core product which tends to have longer time frames and you might do like you know thorough user research or market research you k..."

"those are just a couple examples that come to mind. >> Awesome. I want to go back to this phrase right at the beginning of this answer that you shared that I think is really helpful that you see growt..."

"should think from that perspective and then from there right they ladder into like specific problems to solve hypotheses etc. Following the thread a little bit more people listening to this are imagin..."

">> Do you have a favorite tool by the way just to throw out? Is there like a go-to tool for you? We used uh Stat Sig at Grammarly and I saw that they recently got acquired. So that was exciting news. ..."

"is that you can have conversations about what would need to be true to actually hit that goal. And so that leads to um insights like actually we need not just product management or or engineering to b..."

"their intuitive way of thinking about growing companies, but their mental flexibility and encouragement, right, to to evolve and add this as a as a tool for the company has been awesome. and they've b..."

">> What was the first experiment you guys ran? Do you remember? >> I don't know. Before my time, actually. Okay. Okay. Got it. So they already going down this track before they brought you in. >> They..."

">> Oh my god. On the flip side of horror stories, you've shared a bunch of cool examples of experiment wins. Is there another that comes to mind? If one you're really proud of or that was really traje..."

">> You got it. >> Speaking of that, you mentioned this with Duolingo is just very good at habit formation and motivation behavior. Feels like chess is good at this too. >> You've worked at both these ..."

"to the chess.com side, like what we see is that over 75% of our new users, they classify themselves as like, I'm completely new to chess or I'm a beginner. And unfortunately, if you're new to chess an..."

"then here's like tr here's where you should move. Just like here here's we're going to help you win >> like a hint in real time. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> Well, I don't I don't want to be playing you th..."

"end up uh surviving and thriving. >> So just to double click on this this idea of high agency is very uh trending these days of just like hire high agency people to unpack that a little bit you mentio..."

"right? As opposed to monthly and quarterly. >> And when you say medium, what size of company is that roughly? >> Yeah. So um these companies that we've talked about in the podcast are about 500 to a,0..."

"an Uber andyft. Um so I was there for some time. I led product there and you know the the core service was was really loved by its users like it was you know reliable and fast and you know affordable ..."

"lesson is like this was kind of a solution searching for a problem. Like you never just purely want to chase a like, you know, wouldn't it be nice if we did this as opposed to you know this is our our..."

">> Yeah. Feels like you went to the complete other end. Run experiments of everything before you tell anyone about it. >> That's right. >> Yeah. I remember the chariot bus showing up at the Airbnb off..."

"know, do I have enough deep, you know, independent frameworks that I need to come up with? But just being authentic to my actual experience at these companies, you know, a lot of my lessons learned ha..."

"that this is the excuse to make you think through what have I learned concretely that I can share. >> That's right. Thank you for that. >> Yeah. Yeah. And I actually so at the beginning of this podcas..."

"There's a book called Snuggle Puppy >> that that has a song in it that just makes my daughter crack up. So, >> that is heartwarming for me. But um no, like a book that I recommended recently at work i..."

"as a as an interesting recommendation. >> Is there a movie or TV show? Sorry, were you going to share another book? >> Uh, yeah, actually. So, >> oh, yes, please. >> My our co-founder at chess.com, uh..."

"ritual that I go and get coffee and it starts my day right. Two years ago, I bought a house and for the first time ever in my life, I'm like not by a coffee shop and I was so depressed about this for ..."