Read the original at Lenny’s Newsletter ↗lennysnewsletter.com · subscriber post
By Lenny Rachitsky · lennysnewsletter.com · @lennysan on X · YouTube · LinkedIn
Lenny Rachitsky interviews Duolingo VP of Product Cem Kansu about how the company builds product. The post covers its co-lead team structure, quarterly and yearly OKR cycles, a tiered product review process, weekly planning cadence, and the company's experimentation-driven, mission-led culture.
Subscriber post — summary only01Key takeaways
- Duolingo runs product teams with co-leads from product and engineering, splitting discovery from delivery responsibilities.
- Teams are either metric-based or feature-based, and feature-based teams rely on blended qualitative and long-term holdout signals.
- OKRs are drafted in a three-step, roughly three-week cycle: teams, then areas, then a company-wide review in the first week of the quarter.
- Product reviews escalate from one-pagers to 1.5-pagers, specs, and prototypes depending on how much alignment a change needs.
- Resource balance between new work and maintenance is treated like an investment portfolio, shifting toward big bets or incremental work based on product maturity.
02Frameworks mentioned
Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.