Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…I know. We were clever, but people didn't use it, and we didn't figure out why. We tried making a Duolingo for Schools platform. We couldn't get it to pick up. I went and launched Duolingo in China, and it got downloaded by a million people in the first day, and then the app got blocked because of the government, and then we couldn't figure out what to do. And then everyone rated the app one star because it didn't work, and so then we had a lot of trouble actually recovering from that. We launched Duolingo in India and didn't realize because we couldn't have unless we went there, which we finally did, that most people set their phone UI in India to English, because typing in Hindi is hard, and of course there's a lot of languages throughout India. And we were making it so that when you downloaded Duolingo, whatever UI your phone was set to, we offered not that language for you to learn. That was your base language. So we were telling people learn French, Spanish, German from English, and they were all trying to learn English, so they didn't find what they were looking for and they left. There were so many mistakes, and luckily I think we were able to bounce back from most of them in terms of how Duolingo is doing today. Man, there's so much there. That was awesome. I like that you're like, "Oh, I don't remember any of my failures." And then like, "Oh, here's all these awesome stories." That was great. Just one thread there that comes up again and again in this podcast is the dogfooding piece, especially I think people don't trust their gut and personal instinct enough. I think a lot of times PMs are just like, "I need to do user research to understand what we should be doing." Versus just use the thing, see what feels wrong and keeps you from being excited and really trust that. I find that more and more. I don't know. When I read a thing and when I'm writing, I'm just like, "Oh, I don't like that. I should change that. I don't need to run this by three people." So I think that's a really good lesson there. Just don't underestimate the power of you just using it and relying on instincts and feelings you have when you're trying to use it. Totally. And that's so hard to do, especially when you're young. And I think I'll add that, especially when you're female as well, or maybe other minorities. It's just really hard to trust your instinct because you're constantly telling yourself, do I really know anything or am I just being lucky? But you have to, and I think that forcing yourself to pretend that you know answers and just finding out what this pretend person who would know all the answers would think is really helpful because it helps you develop your point of view, your voice, and to trust yourself, even when you're working on something that you don't fully understand. As in we're building a banking platform at Latitude, I was looking at it, and they were having trouble understanding why people were having problems with wires. And I told them all about how I'm an idiot when it comes to wires, and I make these mistakes A, B, C, because I don't match the line. It's like, whatever. There's all this information you're supposed to input, and sometimes the information you get is not in the same order. And they're like, "Wow." And I'm like, "This is just me as a user making dumb mistakes." But that is our forte. When you're able to understand that when you don't get something, probably other people don't get it too at scale.…

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