Duolingo is one of the few consumer apps where the habit is the product, which makes the Senior Product Manager, Growth role the kind of problem I most want to work on. For the past five years I've worked on new-user activation and retention at Spotify, most recently leading the onboarding team.
The project I'd point to first started with a retention curve we couldn't explain. New users who skipped the taste picker in onboarding were retaining better than those who completed it. I ran interviews with over 40 of them and found the picker felt like homework before any music played. We cut it down to a single step, moved the rest into the first week of listening, and dropped two features the roadmap had promised to make room. The A/B test ran across about 2M new users and lifted activation 17%.
I've also shipped work closer to revenue: a referral program that now brings in about $9M a year, and at Squarespace a pricing-page redesign that moved trial-to-paid conversion by 8%. I write my own SQL, instrument features before launch rather than after, and I'm used to working with a small engineering and design group where the PM is also the person who says no.
I'd be glad to talk about how I'd approach early retention for learners, and to hear which metric your growth team cares about most this year.