How to find hidden growth opportunities in your product

Albert Cheng is a consumer growth leader who has led growth and monetization at Duolingo, Grammarly, and Chess.com, and previously worked on streaming and gaming features at YouTube. The conversation covers his explore-and-exploit approach to finding growth opportunities, notable monetization and retention wins, how AI is changing growth work, and practical experimentation and team-building lessons.

01Key learnings

• Alternate between exploring for new insights and exploiting proven wins; when experiments stop reaching significance, return to divergent brainstorming.
• Share experiment learnings across the company so adjacent teams can apply the same human-psychology insight to their own parts of the product.
• Make a free tier a taste of the full product's value rather than a stripped-down version; sampling paid suggestions to free users nearly doubled upgrades at Grammarly.
• In consumer subscriptions, retention is critical; track D1 and D7 retention, and for mature products invest heavily in resurrecting dormant users.
• Use AI tools to speed up first-pass analysis of experiments, text-to-SQL answers to ad hoc data questions, and rapid prototyping of product ideas.
• Start experimenting even if you are small: build a growth model, instrument events properly, and set ambitious experiment-volume goals to shift team culture.
• Make new users win early and reduce self-doubt; hiding ratings for early games or offering guided play can boost retention for beginners.
• When hiring, look for high agency and fast learning over narrow domain experience, since prior experience can become a crutch in fast-changing fields like AI.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.