如何发掘产品中隐藏的增长机会 | Albert Cheng（多邻国、Grammarly、Chess.com）

增长工作的核心是将用户与产品价值连接起来。增长有时会被误解为纯粹的指标操纵。

Growth is the job is to connect users to the value of your product. Growth sometimes gets this reputation that it's just pure metrics hacking.

你曾在全球最成功的三个消费者订阅产品工作过。你认为在打造成功的消费者订阅产品时，人们最常忽视的关键要素是什么？

You worked at three of the most successful consumer subscription products in the world. Where do you think is the biggest missing piece that people don't get about building a successful consumer subscription product?

用户留存率是消费者订阅公司的黄金指标。如果留不住用户，那么很大压力就会转移到如何让他们在第一天就付费上。

User retention is gold for consumer subscription companies. If you don't retain your users, then a lot of the onus is on getting them to pay on day one.

诺姆·莱文斯基说，我需要请教你在Grammarly发现的最大盈利突破点。

Noam Levinsky, he said that I need to ask you about the biggest monetization win that you found at Grammarly.

大多数免费用户对Grammarly的实际体验只是修正拼写和语法的工具，因为这些是免费建议。但当我们抽样展示各类付费建议，并将其穿插在免费用户的写作过程中时，人们突然意识到Grammarly远比他们想象的更强大。

The lived product experience for most of the free users was that Grammarly was just a product to fix your spelling and grammar because those were the free suggestions. What if we actually sampled a number of different paid suggestions and interspersed them to free users across their writing. All of a sudden, people were seeing Grammarly as a much more powerful tool than they were before.

在团队建设方面，你学到最反直觉的经验是什么？

What's the most counterintuitive lesson you've learned about building teams?

我发现最高效的成员往往具备极强的自主性、快速反应能力和充沛精力，但未必需要在该领域有深厚经验。有时经验反而会成为桎梏——尤其在AI导致行业规则急速变化的当下，许多习得的习惯需要主动摒弃。

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 necessarily need to have deep experience on that matter. Sometimes experience could be a crutch, especially in this world where the grounds are shifting so fast with AI. A lot of your learned habits actually need to be intentionally discarded.

今天，我的嘉宾是Albert Chang。Albert被誉为全球顶尖的消费者增长专家之一。他曾主导过全球最成功且深受喜爱的三款消费产品——多邻国、Grammarly和chess.com的增长与变现工作。早年在YouTube任职期间，他开发的流媒体和游戏功能被超过2000万人使用。他独特的增长方法论融合了市场营销、数据分析、战略规划和产品管理。

Today, my guest is Albert Chang. Albert is known as one of the top consumer growth minds in the world. He led growth and monetization at three of the most successful and beloved consumer products in the world, Duolingo, Grammarly, and outchess.com. Earlier in his career at YouTube, he worked on streaming and gaming features used by over 20,000,000 people. His unique approach to growth blends marketing, data, strategy, and product management.

在我们的对话中，我们探讨了许多话题，包括他探索与利用的增长机会框架、在多邻国/Grammarly/chess.com取得的最重大且有趣的增长成果、如何运用AI加速增长工作、对品牌与社区力量的新认知、最佳实验实践、以及为何他在每家公司都设定每年运行1000次实验的目标等。特别感谢Eric Olivest、Noam Levinsky和Jorge Mazal为本次对话推荐话题。若喜欢本播客，请记得在您常用的播客平台或YouTube订阅关注，这对我们帮助巨大。成为我年度通讯订阅用户还可免费获得15款卓越产品的全年使用权，包括Lovable、Replit、Bolt、N and N、Linear、Superhuman、Descript、Whisperflow、Gamma、Perplexity、Warp、Granola、Magic Patterns、Raycast、JBRD和Mobin。

And in our conversation, we cover a lot of ground, including his explore and exploit framework to find growth opportunities, his biggest and most interesting growth wins at Duolingo, Grammarly, chess.com, how he uses AI to accelerate his growth work, what he's come to realize about the power of brand and community in your growth work, his top experimentation best practices, why his goal at every company is to run 1,000 experiments a year, and so much more. A huge thank you to Eric Olivest, Noam Levinsky, and Jorge Mazal for suggesting topics for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get 15 incredible products for free for an entire year, including Lovable, Replit, Bolt, N and N, Linear, Superhuman, Descript, Whisperflow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, JBRD, and Mobin.

请访问lenny'snewsletter.com点击product cast。现在有请Albert Chang。我和播客嘉宾都喜欢探讨工艺、品味、能动性和产品市场契合度。但你知道我们最不想讨论什么吗？SOC2认证。

Head on over to lenny'snewsletter.com and click product cast. With that, I bring you Albert Chang. My podcast guest and I love talking about craft and taste and agency and product market fit. You know what we don't love talking about? SOC two.

这正是Vanta的用武之地。Vanta通过行业领先的AI、自动化与持续监测，帮助各类规模企业快速实现并保持合规。无论您是初创公司首次应对SOC2/ISO27001认证，还是大型企业处理供应商风险，Vanta信任管理平台都能更快速、更便捷、更具扩展性地完成任务。Vanta还能将安全问卷填写速度提升五倍，助您更快赢得大单。效果如何？

That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta helps companies of all sizes get compliant fast and stay that way with industry leading AI, automation, and continuous monitoring. Whether you're a startup tackling your first SOC two or ISO twenty seven zero zero one or an enterprise managing vendor risk, Vanta's trust management platform makes it quicker, easier, and more scalable. Vanta also helps you complete security questionnaires up to five times faster so that you could win bigger deals sooner. The result?

根据IDC最新研究，Vanta客户年均节省超50万美元，效率提升三倍。建立信任非选择题，Vanta让它自动化。登录vanta.com/leni可享1000美元优惠。本期节目由Jira Product Discovery赞助播出。

According to a recent IDC study, Vanta customers slashed over $500,000 a year and are three times more productive. Establishing trust isn't optional. Vanta makes it automatic. Get $1,000 off at vanta.com/leni. This episode is brought to you by Jira Product Discovery.

产品开发最困难的部分其实不是开发本身，而是其他所有事——证明工作价值、协调利益相关方、提前规划。大多数团队把更多时间花在被动响应而非主动学习上，疲于追逐更新、论证路线图、不断疏通阻塞以维持进度。Jira Product Discovery让您重掌主动权。

The hardest part of building products isn't actually building products. It's everything else. It's proving that the work matters, managing stakeholders, trying to plan ahead. Most teams spend more time reacting than learning chasing updates, justifying roadmaps, and constantly unblocking work to keep things moving. Jira Product Discovery puts you back in control.

通过Jira Discovery，您可以收集洞见并优先处理高影响力创意。其灵活性适配团队工作方式，帮助制定促进共识而非质疑的路线图。由于基于Jira构建，您能在同一平台实现从战略到交付的全流程追踪。减少奔波，腾出更多时间思考、学习并构建正确方案。免费获取Jira产品发现工具请访问atlassian.com/lenny。

With Jira, discovery, you can capture insights and prioritize high impact ideas. It's flexible, so it adapts to the way your team works and helps you build a road map that drives 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 product discovery for free at atlassian.com/lenny.

网址是atlassian.com/lenny。阿尔伯特，非常感谢你能来参加，欢迎来到这个播客。

That's atlassian.com/lenny. Albert, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.

谢谢你邀请我，莱尼。很高兴能来到这里。

Thanks for having me, Lenny. Excited to be here.

我更高兴能邀请到你。按照每次播客对话的惯例，我联系了一群与你共事过、了解你的人，想了解应该问你些什么问题，以及该花时间讨论哪些话题。豪尔赫·马扎尔，在我的圈子里很有名，因为他写了一篇很长时间内都是我通讯中最受欢迎的新闻稿文章。实际上现在已经被别人超越了，但它确实占据榜首很久。以下是他写的内容。

I'm even more excited to have you here. So as I do for every podcast conversation, I reached out to a bunch of people that you've worked with that know you well to find out what to ask you about and what topics to spend time on. Jorge Mazal, who is famous in my world for writing what was for the longest time the most popular newsletter post on my newsletter. It's actually people have usurped it now, but it was, like, stuck there for a long time. So here here's what he wrote.

阿尔伯特能做到他所做的事对我来说是个谜。我实际上很期待听这期节目并向他学习。

It is a mystery to me how Albert is able to do what he does. I am actually eager to listen to this episode and learn from him.

这真是太客气了。谢谢你，豪尔赫。我从他那里学到了很多。我是个怪人，喜欢在孩子醒来之前起床，打开一堆浏览器标签页查看各种实验。所以豪尔赫把我带入多邻国的增长领域是再合适不过了，我学到了大量最佳实践，而且他本人也非常棒。

That is super nice. Thank you, Jorge. I've learned so much from him. I'm the type of weird person that likes to wake up before their kids and, like, pull up a bunch of browser tabs and look at experiments. So it was perfect that Jorge brought me into the growth world at Duolingo, learned a ton of, best practices, and he's just a great guy.

谢谢，奥里。

Thanks, Ori.

我们已经开始深入这些策略了。我很喜欢。让我先为这次对话设定一个小框架。我想尝试的是帮助人们学习工具和思维模型，以便为自己的产品找到增长机会，并从根本上学习你在所合作的公司和产品中带来的增长思维。我想从了解你是如何成为现在的你开始。

We're already getting into these tactics. I love it. Let me just give a little framing on what I wanna do with this conversation. What I wanna try to do is to help people learn tools and mental models for finding growth opportunities for their own products and essentially learn the growth mentality that you bring into the companies and products that you work on. What I wanna start with is to give us a little insight into how you became what you became.

我注意到近期多位嘉宾有个有趣的现象，他们很多人年轻时都擅长钢琴并认真学过。比如Ceaciapiti的负责人Nick Trelli，几乎要成为职业爵士钢琴家。你早期在Qur也是位很认真的钢琴演奏者。能否简单说说你是如何从钢琴家转型为世界顶尖增长策略专家的？

There's an interesting pattern I found across a bunch of recent guests, which is many people were very good at piano when they were younger and were very serious piano players. For example, head of Ceaciapiti, Nick Trelli was, like, almost gonna become professional jazz pianist. You were very serious in as a piano player earlier in Qur. How did you go from pianist to one of the top growth minds in the world briefly?

这真是过奖了，不过我很感激。是的，我从小弹了很多钢琴。我父母是从台湾来的移民，我是他们最大的孩子。所以我确实感受到那种强烈的鼓励——要学很多东西、认真对待、努力学习。

Well, that's very flattering, but I appreciate it. Yeah. I I grew up playing a lot of piano. My parents were were immigrants from Taiwan, and I was the oldest kid that they had. And so I definitely felt that strong encouragement, if you will, to learn a bunch of things, take them seriously, study hard.

我也确实这么做了。虽然我父母并不精通音乐，但他们非常热爱古典乐。所以我就是那种听着莫扎特睡觉的典型婴儿。至今我还清晰记得，家里那台直立式雅马哈钢琴上放着个90分钟倒计时器，那简直贯穿了我整个童年。

And so I did. Right? And, like, my parents, even though they weren't musically proficient, they had a, like, deep love for classical music. So I was the stereotypical, like, baby that would listen to Mozart, I guess, when I was sleeping type of thing. And I still vividly remember, like, we had this upright Yamaha piano, and at the very top of the piano, we had this countdown clock from ninety minutes, literally every single day of my childhood.

就是日复一日地坚持练习。起初我特别讨厌那个计时器，但随着年龄增长，我开始真正欣赏音乐。不过真正让我钢琴兴趣和能力突飞猛进的是——我觉得自己中了彩票——我有绝对音感，能快速分辨弹奏是否正确，学曲子也特别快。

Just practice really, really consistently. At first, like, I really was irritated by that thing, but as I grew older, I started to appreciate, like, music quite a bit more. But anyway, like, I think what really accelerated my my interest and abilities in piano was, like, I I feel like I hit the lottery. I had perfect pitch, and so I was able to, you know, quickly understand whether I was, like, playing the right stuff or the wrong stuff and just pick up music pretty pretty rapidly.

绝对音感具体指什么？是指你能准确识别音符吗？比如正在弹的是哪个音？

What does perfect pitch even mean? Is that does that mean you know which note is Exactly. Is playing? Okay.

没错。

Exactly.

哇。

Wow.

所以我能听一首歌，然后非常、非常清楚地知道应该从哪个音符开始，以及我是否弹错了。这非常有用，简直不公平。真的。总之，我在高中时就已经相当不错了，甚至考虑过就读音乐学院。

So I can listen to a song and then, like, just a very, very clear understanding of which note I'm supposed to start with and if I'm playing something wrong. So it's it's it's very helpful. It's unfair. Definitely. So anyway, yeah, I got I got quite good, like, as a teenager in high school and even considered, like, studying at a music conservatory.

那时我对音乐的内在动力并不那么强烈，所以我决定去读工程学校，那本会是完全不同的职业道路。回到你最初关于音乐与成长关系的观点，我直到最近才真正反思这一点。你知道，我有个四岁的孩子，我开始教他敲击琴键。但有几点很突出：一是音乐和成长都依赖于持续的重复，你会不断犯错。

My intrinsic motivation for music wasn't necessarily as strong at that point, and so I decided to go to engineering school instead, that would have been an incredibly different career. And to your original point around the relationship between, like, music and growth, I didn't really reflect on this until recently. You know, I have a four year old, and I'm, like, starting to teach him how to bang on the keys a little bit, But a couple things stand out. I mean, one is that I think music and growth, they both rely on this just consistent repetition. Like, you're constantly making mistakes.

你有一个极其紧密的反馈循环，必须对频繁犯错变得非常坚韧，并且明白学习正是通过这些错误实现的。这是我早期学到的。其次让我意识到的是，它们都有某种结构性基础。

You have this super tight feedback loop. You have to get really resilient to just making mistakes all the time, and you know that the way of learning is through those mistakes. Right? So that's kind of a thing that I learned very early. And the second thing that occurred to me is that they both have this, like, structural underpinning to them.

在成长领域，你有增长模型、指标、实验和渠道等。但日常工作中同样需要创造力。

With growth, you have a growth model. You have metrics. You have experiments. You have channels, things like that. But you also need on a day to day basis to have creativity.

你需要提出有趣的解决方案、待验证的假设。音乐也是如此，有音阶理论等，但要创作美妙音乐，还需要激情、情感和流动感。

You gotta come up with, like, interesting solutions, a hypothesis to test. And the same is true on the music side. Right? You have music theory of scales and stuff. But to create beautiful music, you need that passion, that emotion, that flow.

所以我认为这就是二者美妙的结合之处。

So I think that's the beautiful combination between the two.

有趣的是，我妻子最近在父亲节给我买了钢琴/声乐课程，我现在非常投入。正在学习基础钢琴演奏，并练习辨识音符和用嗓音唱准音高。

Fun fact, my wife bought me piano slash singing lessons for Father's Day recently, and I've gotten really into this stuff. So I'm learning how to play very basic piano now and and learning to, identify notes and hit notes with my voice.

不错。

Nice.

这名字真奇怪。

What a weird name.

说不定能成为你的下一个表演项目。

Could be your next act.

我也可以反其道而行。我可以成为职业钢琴演奏家。天啊，不行。但这太有趣了。

This could be I could go the reverse. I could become a professional piano player. Oh, man. No. It's so fun.

不过真的很难。我的手指就像在说，你怎么能同时按四个该死的键？

It's so hard, though. I'm just like my fingers are like, how do you how do you do four freaking keys at once?

是啊。

Yeah.

就像在说，这到底是怎么回事？好吧，让我们切入正题。我想聊聊成长。我们聊天时提到的一个具体框架，我觉得对听众会很有启发，也想向你请教。

Just like, what is going on here? Okay. So let's get let's get into the meat of it. I wanna talk about growth. There's a very specific framework that as we were chatting that I think would be really helpful for people to hear and learn from you.

你称之为探索与利用。我认为有多种不同的方式来思考这个问题。谈谈这个框架，以及它如何影响你对增长的理解方式。

You call it explore and exploit. I think there's a different bunch of different ways to think about this. Talk about this framework and how that informs the way you think about growth.

是的。我最初是从Grammarly Normal的工程合伙人那里听说探索与利用这个概念的，我想他实际上参加过一些Reforge课程。所以这个概念的原创者可能是Brian Balfour，我知道他曾上过你的播客。总之，这是个很棒的概念。其核心在于，当你处于探索模式时，可以把它想象成寻找正确的山峰去攀登。

Yeah. I initially came up or heard with heard about Explore and Exploit through my engineering partner at Grammarly Normal, and I think he actually had taken some reforge classes. So maybe the original inventor of it might be Brian Balfour, who I know has been on your pod. But anyway, it's a great concept. The gist of it is that when you're in exploratory mode, think of it as like finding the right mountain to climb.

而当你处于利用模式时，就像是集中资源有效地攀登那座山峰。我认为对某些公司来说，需要注意的就是不要把太多时间花在频谱的一端，对吧？如果过度探索，你的团队可能会感到过于分散，尝试100种不同的随机想法。主线是什么？策略又是什么？

And then when you're in exploitation mode, it's like focusing your resources on climbing that mountain effectively. And certain companies, I think the the warning is to basically spend too much of your time on one end of the spectrum, right? If you do too much exploration, you can have your team feel a little bit too scattershot, just trying a 100 different random ideas. What's the through line? What's the strategy?

你如何在这些尝试中寻找成功的模式？而如果过度利用——这通常是增长团队的惯常做法——可能会导致饱和与停滞，你只是在局部优化某个东西。尽管探索与利用的原则通常被视为宏观层面的东西，但我更喜欢在微观层面、洞察层面上与团队合作。举个具体例子，我在chess.com工作，我们的优先事项之一是鼓励棋手学习进步。

How do you pattern match, you know, successes across them? And if you do too much in exploitation, which is often the MO of growth teams, it can lead to this, like, saturation and stagnation where you're just locally maximizing a thing. And even though this principle of explore and exploit, typically thought of as a macro thing, I like to work with my teams more on the micro, on the insight level. So I'll give you a concrete example. I work at chess.com, and one of our priorities is to encourage chess players to improve, to learn and improve.

我们有一位产品经理Dylan，负责所有学习功能。我们产品中最常用的学习功能叫做对局回顾。你下一盘棋后，会有一个虚拟教练指出你最糟糕的走法、最佳走法等。他的工作是提高用户参与度和留存率。

So one of the PMs that we have, Dylan, he works on all the learning features. The most used learning feature in our product is called game review. So you play a game of chess. After the game's over, we have this virtual coach that teaches you about your worst moves, best moves, etcetera. And his job is to, like, improve user engagement and retention.

所以他正处于探索阶段，试图弄清楚如何推动更多这类活动。他观察到80%的玩家实际上是在获胜后回顾对局。这与我们最初开发功能时的设想完全相反——我们以为人们会在输棋后使用它，查看错误以便改进。事实证明，人类心理和实际数据并非如此。

So And he's in this exploratory phase trying to figure out, like, how do I drive more of that type of activity? And what he observes is that 80% of people that review their games actually do so after a win. And that's really counterintuitive to when we initially built the feature. We thought that people would wanna use it after losses or to see their mistakes such they could, like, work on their mistakes. That turned out not to be the truth when it came to the human psychology and the actual data of it of it.

因此我们对输棋时的产品体验做了一些改变。现在不再展示你的失误和糟糕走法，而是反其道而行——展示你的精彩走法，并让教练说些鼓励的话，比如'失败是学习的一部分，继续努力'之类。仅这一项改变就带来了显著效果：对局回顾增长了25%，订阅量增长20%，用户留存率也大幅提升。

And so we made some changes in the product experience when you lose a game. Now as opposed to surfacing your blunders and your, like, horrible stuff that you did, we flip it on its head. And so we show you your brilliant moves, your best moves, and we have coach say something encouraging, you know, losing just part of learning, like, keep it up, that type of thing. That change alone was pretty dramatic for us. It grew game reviews by 25%, subscriptions by 20%, user retention by a lot as well.

这真是太棒了。但关键在于事情不止于此，对吧？你必须将这一洞察广泛分享给全公司。对吧？

So that was fantastic. But the point is that it doesn't just stop there. Right? You have to take that insight, share it broadly across the company. Right?

现在，相邻产品的经理们，比如负责拼图产品的PM，可以开始思考：如何在我的产品中审核这些消极模式，并设法让它们变得更积极？对吧？我可以调整成功评级，修改一些文案，改变某些按钮的颜色。这样你就能将实验成果扩大十倍应用到整个组织，这就是所谓的开发阶段。

Now adjacent product managers, the PM working on puzzles, can now think about, okay, how do I audit these cold patterns in my product and think about making them more positive? Right? I can change the success rating. I could tweak some copy, change the color of some buttons. And so you now can take this experiment win and expand it out 10 x across your organization, and that's the kind of exploitation phase of it.

所以当操作得当时，你可以在两种模式间切换，直到开发潜力耗尽，然后鼓励团队再次头脑风暴，激发更多创意。

So when done right, right, you can oscillate between the two until you saturate out of exploitation mode, and then you encourage the teams to to brainstorm and get more creative again.

太精彩了。好的，这里有很多后续要点。核心建议是：当你发现某个方法特别有效时，要设法在此基础上深化学习。比如这个洞察可以应用到产品的其他部分。

Amazing. Okay. So there's a lot here to follow-up on. One is is the core piece of advice when you find something that works really well, find ways to build on that learning. One is here's an insight It can apply to other parts of the product.

嘿，各位团队，这是我们意外获得的经验，或许对你们有帮助。同时要继续在相同领域开展更多实验，我想这也是其中的一部分。

Hey, teams. Here's something we learned unexpected. Maybe this can help you. Also, just keep find more like, run more experiments in the same zone, I imagine, as a part of that.

没错。根据我的经验，实验的典型'成功率'——虽然我不喜欢用这个词——通常在30%到50%之间。实际上你在尝试很多假设，但大多会被证伪。要知道，消费类产品就是这样难以预测。

Yeah. Exactly right. I mean, in my experience, the typical win rate, and I hate to use that term for experiments, is is often something like 30 to 50%. Like, usually, you're not actually get like, you're trying a bunch of things, a lot of hypotheses turn out not to be true. You know, consumer products are very unpredictable like that.

但当你真正发现突破性成果时——甚至可能是个惨败的实验——这些也都极具价值。对吧？把这些发现传达给全公司，最初负责实验的PM未必需要成为为整个产品体验制定方案的人。但他们的责任是清晰阐述假设和发现，这样作为增长负责人，我就能鼓励大家围绕这些发现尝试各种想法，从而提高成功率和影响力。这种在两者间来回切换的策略，才是真正的制胜法宝。

But when you do find a thing that breaks through the noise, and it could actually be a hugely losing experiment too, those are also super valuable. Right? Surfacing those across the company, like, the original PM running that experiment doesn't necessarily need to be the person that figures out what you should do for all the other parts of your product experience. But the onus is on them to clearly articulate what their hypothesis is, what they found, such that then as like a growth leader, I can encourage people to kind of swarm around that and try a bunch of different ideas such that the success rate is up and the impact is up. So it's just kind of oscillating back and forth between the two that is, the magic bullet.

我认为这里的另一个启示/我听到你所说的内容时想到的是，在一个领域中往往存在比人们预期更多的胜利，你可以持续在某个事物中发现胜利和增长点很长时间。

I think another takeaway here slash something that I think about when I hear what you're saying is there's often a lot more wins in an area than people expect that you can continue to find wins and growth in something for a long time.

完全正确。是的。好的。归根结底，我认为在公司内部，用户有时会遇到这种孤立的方法，你把产品体验拆分成50种不同的方式，分配给不同的团队，并假设用户以不同的心态与每个不同功能互动。但很多时候实际情况未必如此。

Exactly right. Yes. Okay. At the end of the day, like, users I think within a company, sometimes you can have this siloed approach where you break apart the product experience in, you know, 50 different ways and distribute them across different teams, and you assume that users interact with each of the different features with a different mentality. But oftentimes that's actually not necessarily the case.

因此有时你可以提出一个更基于人类心理学的见解，这种见解能在整个产品体验中引起共鸣。所以我认为当你找到这一点时，就可以加倍投入。

And so sometimes you can surface an insight that's more, you know, human psychology based that can resonate across the entire product experience. And so I think when you can find that, you can double down.

听到这些的人可能会觉得，好的，先找到大胜利，然后再找更多。你是否发现有什么方法能帮助你在探索和利用之间做出选择，当你利用过度时，就像任何启发式方法或我不知道的，帮助人们在这个探索和利用过程中引导他们的方式。

People hearing this might feel like, okay, yes, 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 too far, just like any heuristics or, I don't know, ways of helping people guide them along this process of exploring and exploiting.

在我们像chess.com这样规模的公司里，我尝试关注的一件事是，我们每年大约进行250次实验。所以我们不是行业中实验最多的，但我们进行的实验数量相当可观。对吧？因此在这种情况下，我会投资于这些实验探索工具，我们也可以谈谈AI作为另一种发现和提取这些智慧点的方法。但基本上，这些探索工具可以让我查看正在进行的实验范围，尝试找出假设和学习之间是否存在模式。

One one thing that I I try to focus on at a company of our scale of like a chess.com, right, we're running roughly 250 experiments a year. So we're not, like, the highest in the industry, but we run a we run a decent volume. Right? And so when that happens, I invest in these, like, experiment explorer tools, and we can talk about AI as well as another way to kind of uncover and pick out these nuggets of wisdom. But, basically, these explorer tools can allow me to look across the spectrum of experiments that are going on, try to figure out if there are patterns between the the hypotheses and the learnings that are happening.

如果我开始看到越来越多的实验在统计上不显著，这可能是一个信号告诉我，好吧。我们可能有点过度利用了。就像可能没有那么多汁可以挤了。嘿，伙计们。让我们回到桌前，进行头脑风暴，让我们的思维更加发散一些。

And if I'm starting to see, like, more and more experiments that are not statistically significant, that may be a signal to me to say, okay. We might have ex kinda tried to exploit a little bit too far. Like, there might not be as much juice to squeeze. Hey, guys. Let's, like, you know, get back to the table and brainstorm and be a little bit more divergent with our thinking.

好吧，让我继续这个关于AI的线索，以及你们如何使用AI来帮助解决这个问题。这非常酷。谈谈这个吧。

Well, let me follow this thread on AI and how you're using AI to help you figure this out. That is very cool. Talk about that.

我认为我们最近一直在捣鼓的一个新功能就是文本转SQL能力。这实际上相当强大。我们有一个数据请求Slack频道，长期以来——直到现在也是如此——人们会随意抛出各种一次性问题，比如‘我们在南非有多少订阅用户？’或者‘上个月有人玩解谜游戏玩了多久？’之类的。

I think one of the the latest things that we've been tinkering around with is this text to SQL capability. It's actually pretty powerful. We have this data request Slack channel where for the longest time and this is still true today. Like, people will toss in all sorts of just one off questions, you know, how many subscribers do we have in South Africa? Or, like, you know, how long did somebody play puzzles, like, last last month or something?

这些临时性问题往往需要耗费大量人力时间来处理，数据分析师需要优先安排并抽空去运行查询。当然，你可以投资自助工具来改进这一点，但我也发现AI在提供初步答案方面相当出色。所以我们正在训练一些Slack机器人，让它们成为这些答案的一线提供者，这能让整个公司更加数据驱动。还有个有趣的现象是人性使然——当你觉得某个问题可能难以启齿或不想麻烦别人时，你干脆就不问了。

And these ad hoc questions, they often take a lot of, like, human time to just go in and, you know, a data analyst needs to prioritize it and find time to go run the query. And, yes, you can invest in self serve tooling to improve at this, but also I found that AI is quite good at doing that first pass answer as well. And so we're working on, like, kind of training some of these Slack bots to essentially be the the first party provider of a of these answers, which makes the company as a whole a lot more data informed, I guess. And I think what's also kind of interesting is that just human nature is that if you have a question that you feel like, you know, you might be a bit embarrassed to ask or you don't wanna bother someone, you just don't ask the question. Right?

因此通过这类工具，实际上会激发出大量问题的提出。我觉得在ChatGPT上也能看到这种现象。对吧？就是当你有个可以自在对话的对象时，情况就大不相同了。

And so by the nature of having these tools, you get actually a pretty large explosion of questions being asked. And I think you see this in ChatGPT too. Right? It's like just having a thing, right, that you can converse with that you feel comfortable and makes a huge difference.

明白了，这简直太酷了。所以这是你们自己构建的吗？本质上是个能提供SQL查询的Slack机器人？还是说它真的能完成分析工作？

Okay. This is extremely cool. So is this something you build? Basically, it's a Slack bot that gives you the SQL query, or does it actually do the analysis analysis. Yeah.

哇，太厉害了。那你们打算发布这个吗？还是说这就像个通用方案——每家公司都应该自己搭建一个？

Woah, so cool. Okay. Is this something you guys are gonna release or is this just like somebody, you guys should just build this at every company?

我们应该这么做，这是个好主意。

We should, it's a good idea.

好吧，看来这期节目播出后评论区又会刷屏‘开源这个’了。拭目以待吧。确实非常酷。你们还做过或见过其他类似的案例吗？

Okay. Well, there's an episode where everyone in the comments is like open source this. So we'll see if that happens again. That is very cool. Are there other examples of that kind of stuff that you've done or seen?

我是说，身边的例子就是很多产品经理现在都在捣鼓各种不同的原型工具，对吧？所以就像是从一个想法到一个代表性解决方案。如今，从构思到撰写规格说明、进行评审、设计等等，有很多人力参与其中。我相信你采访过很多人，他们都谈到过这个具体问题，对吧？

I mean, adjacent example is a lot of the product managers, like, are tinkering around with all sorts of different prototyping tools right now. Right? So it's like go from an idea to a representative solution. Today, right, there's a lot of humans involved in taking an idea, writing up a spec, doing a review, doing design, etcetera. I'm sure you've interviewed plenty of people that have talked about this specific problem, right?

所以对我们来说，我们至少投入了一些精力来梳理产品体验的主要界面，比如我们的新用户引导流程、主屏幕、以棋盘为例的功能模块，并利用像v0或Lovable这样的工具构建这些功能的AI原型。有了这些基础组件后，就可以与公司其他部门分享，作为他们的起点。然后他们可以尝试在此基础上添加自己的想法，这样讨论起来就更有依据，也希望能更快进入测试阶段。

And so for us, like, we've invested a bit in at least carving out the main screens of our product experience, things like our onboarding flow, our home screen, our chessboard as an example, and building, like, essentially AI prototypes of those using tools like a a v zero or like a lovable. Right? And when you have those foundational pieces, you can then share them with the rest of the company, and they can use that as a starting point. And then they can try to, you know, put their ideas on top of that, and then they become a lot more discussable and hopefully testable relatively soon.

你们在这方面的AI技术栈包含哪些？

What's in your AI stack along those lines?

产品经理主要用v0。设计师偏爱Figma，所以他们用Figma Make。工程师目前混合使用多种工具，比如Cursor、Cloud Code、GitHub Copilot。营销团队使用各类工具处理翻译、字幕、内容适配等。客服团队用Intercom和VIN。

The PMs are mostly using v zero. The designers love Figma, so they're using Figma Make. The engineers are using a a combination of tools right now, so Cursor, Cloud Code, GitHub Copilot. Marketing teams use all sorts of tools for translation, subtitles, you know, content adaptations, etcetera. Customer support uses Intercom, VIN.

公司内部使用的工具相当庞杂。但让我困扰的是，我们还没能像我希望的那样无缝衔接从实验到工作流程的过渡。虽然现在普遍认为AI会消除这些职能头衔，但根据经验，人们确实会倾向于使用特定类型的工具。如果这些工具与你需要传递到生产环节的其他工具缺乏互操作性——至少在我们这个规模下。

So there's quite a lot of tools that are kind of used across the company. I would say though that something that is kind of annoying to me is that we haven't yet figured out the bridging from the tinkering to the workflow quite as seamlessly as I would like. Right? And so each sub function, even though the common, I guess, wisdom now is that AI is going to strip away these these, like, functional titles, it is kind of true that based on your experience, like, you may gravitate to using a type of tool more. And if that tool isn't as interoperable with some of the other tools that you need to pass down the chain to actually ship it into production, at least at our scale.

对吧？对小初创公司来说，产品经理直接推进上线没问题。但我们仍在进行职能交接。我预计这种情况会随时间改变，我们正在投资设计系统组件和MCP等来简化流程。但这需要投入，需要时间来理顺。

Right? I think for smaller startups, sure, PMs should just go ship it. But for us, like, we are still doing some handoffs between functions. I expect that to change over time, and we are investing in some of, like, you know, design system components and MCPs and stuff to make it a little bit easier. But, yeah, it's a it's an investment, and it takes time to to smooth things out.

我想回到关于工作方式变化的话题，聊聊你作为产品负责人、增长负责人在不同公司的经历。但首先，我想讨论另一个关于发现增长点和盈利点的例子。Grammarly首席产品官Noam Levinsky——你在Grammarly时与他共事过——他说我必须问你：你在Grammarly发现的最大盈利点是什么？以及你是如何发现这个机会的？

I wanna 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 wanna I wanna talk about another example of finding growth wins and monetization wins. Noam Levinsky, who is chief product officer at Grammarly, you worked with him for a while while you were at Grammarly. He said that I need to ask you about the biggest monetization win that you found at Grammarly, and how you discovered the opportunity.

我曾有幸与Noam及其在Grammarly的产品团队共事。首先为不熟悉Grammarly的朋友介绍一下背景。Grammarly是一款AI驱动的写作助手，用户通常通过Chrome扩展或可下载的桌面客户端使用。它的核心功能是在用户写作时叠加显示各类

I had the pleasure of working with Noam and his product team at Grammarly. Some context first for those that don't use Grammarly. So Grammarly is an AI powered writing assistant, and so typically, will use it as a Chrome extension or a downloadable desktop client. And basically, what it does is it overlays your writing with a bunch of different

我经常使用，是个忠实用户。

use it. I'm a big fan.

看来你是重度用户。

So you're big fan.

它简直是我的救命稻草。

And it saves my life.

太棒了，很高兴听你这么说。Grammarly采用免费增值商业模式，这意味着超过90%的用户使用免费服务，其余用户则付费订阅。其中有个团队专门负责订阅转化，产品经理是Kyla。

Fantastic. Glad to hear that. The Grammarly is a freemium business model, which means that 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.

那个团队非常出色，他们的职责是设计从免费到付费的转化路径。我们最初意识到的问题是：我们并未有效追踪用户收到的各类建议提示事件，也不清楚用户遇到付费墙的频率等数据。这是第一步要解决的问题。

That team's great. And their job is to figure out the free to paid subscription path. Right? And so one of the realizations, one, is that we weren't actually tracking the events that well for the types of essentially suggestions that people were getting and how often were users seeing paywalls and stuff like that. That's kinda step number one.

我们首先需要部署数据监测系统。第二步发现的问题是——让我先解释下逻辑：免费用户写作时会看到各种下划线提示，如果全部接受这些建议，就会触发付费墙，这是促使他们订阅获取更高级功能的机制。

We had to put that instrumentation in. Step number two is that, hey. We noticed actually, first, let me explain some of the logic. So as a free user, you basically get these underlines across your writing. And if you accept all of them, then you see the paywall, and that encourages you to, like, subscribe for more nuanced features.

作为免费用户，你主要获得的是拼写、语法检查这类基础正确性功能。而付费用户则能获得诸如如何让语气更具同理心、如何提升写作清晰度、如何重写整个句子等进阶建议。

As a free user, the main things you get are spelling, grammar. They're basically correctness things. And as a paid user, you get the, like, how do you improve your tone to be more empathetic? How do you improve your writing to be more clear? How can you rewrite entire sentences?

通过数据追踪我们发现，实际上只有极少数免费用户会选择接受所有修改建议。他们更像是边写边选择性采纳，不知道你们是否也有类似体验。

That type of thing. And so the observed behavior from all that tracking and and data was that actually a very small percentage of our free users was deciding to accept all of their suggestions. They were more kind of picking and choosing as they go, and I wonder if your experience is kind of similar too.

确实如此。因为我总是想，为什么我们要全盘修改呢？就像这部分有问题，我就只修正这部分。我完全是个选择性采纳的人。

Definitely. Because, yeah, I'm always like, why do we stop rewriting everything. Just like this part is wrong. I will fix yeah. I'm very much a pick and choose

没错。

That's right.

有明确方向的人。

Direction person.

第二点我认为同样——甚至更加有趣的是，我亲历了公司生成式AI转型期（当然现在仍在进行）。坦白说，无论是品牌形象还是免费用户的实际体验，Grammarly都被视为仅能修正拼写语法的工具，因为我们只向用户展示这些免费建议。于是我们决定彻底颠覆这个认知。

And then the second thing, which is I think equally, if not more interesting, is that, you know, I was at this company during this generative AI transformation, which is obviously still going on. Right? And quite frankly, both the company brand as well as the, like, lived product experience for most of the free users was that Grammarly was just a product to fix your spelling and grammar because those were the free suggestions we were showing people. Right? And so we decided to flip that on its head entirely, and we said, okay.

我们尝试将部分付费建议随机插入免费用户的写作过程中，让他们有限度体验付费功能。表面上看这很合理，但担忧在于：如果免费开放过多功能，是否会影响订阅转化？结果完全相反——用户突然意识到Grammarly远比想象更强大，仅通过这个改动，我们的升级转化率就几乎翻倍。

What if we actually sampled a number of different paid suggestions and interspersed them to free users, right, across their writing, such that they were intermingled and we would provide a limited taste of what the paid offering had to provide. And on the surface, like, even though it's rational, the the the concern is that if we give too much of this away, then will people wanna subscribe? We found completely, like, that was not the case. Right? All of a sudden, were seeing Grammarly as a much more powerful tool than they were before, and our upgrade rates, like, nearly doubled just through this change.

因此我认为这种变现模式很有趣——特别是如果你开发的是免费增值产品，尽量让你的免费版能全面展示产品的所有功能。当然，某些付费功能会涉及成本，但如果你能充分展现产品优势，通常这些投入都能回本。这个策略对我们非常有效。

And so I think this is interesting just monetization learning that especially if you work on a freemium product, try to have your free product be a reflection of, like, everything that your product can offer you. Obviously, to an extent, there's some costs involved with some of the paid features and things like that, but it generally will pay its for itself if you're able to put your best foot forward, and go do that. So that really worked well for us there.

这就是让我转为Grammarly付费用户的原因。哇，真是天才的策略。本质上就是先给你展示一堆改进建议，但最多只能免费使用三个，然后就会提示你升级。

I think this is what converted me to being a paid Grammarly subscriber. Wow. What an what a a genius move. So essentially, it's here's a, here's a bunch of improvements, but you're, you get like three, I think max, and then it's like, okay, now you get upgrade.

这就像实时版的反向免费试用——不是限时试用，而是在你写作时即时体验。我们借鉴了行业通用模式，但根据Grammarly的特殊使用场景做了调整。

It's basically like a reverse free trial, but in real time, like while you're writing as opposed to a time based one. So we kind of adopted some, you know, patterns that are in the industry, but molded it to Grammarly's specific use case.

对，我正想问。这不是完整试用版，而是有使用次数限制的试用，用完额度后好像每天会重置一次？至少我是这么发现的。

Right. I was gonna ask. So it's not like a full trial. It's like a capped trial where you get a certain number of things and then you run out, and then they get refreshed I think once a day or something like that is what I found.

没错，你说对了。

Yeah, you got it.

Grammarly的升级推销手段简直高明到狡猾。每次我都觉得：该死！改进建议近在咫尺，只要升级就能看到——光标悬停的位置就在升级按钮上啊！

Yeah, Grammarly is the bestmost devious at their upsells. I'm always just like, God damn it, I'm so close to seeing an improvement. I just I just have to upgrade. It's just like right there. It's right there where my mouse is.

是啊...虽然我不以这种狡猾手段为荣，但...

Yeah. Well, I'm not proud of being devious, but

手段高明，真的让我想买这个东西。干得好。是谁，凯拉吗？好的。做得好，凯拉。

Devious and really getting me to buy the thing. Good job. Who is it, Kyla? Okay. Nice job, Kyla.

这非常有效。我很喜欢。那么，关于免费试用的问题，我不确定，是否有什么可以提供的，总是存在这个关于免费增值模式的问题，先免费提供一些东西，然后有专业账户，你可以得到它。有试用与时间的对比。有些功能是受限的。

It's it's very effective. I love that. And so, okay, so in terms of the free trial, I don't know, is there anything there of just, there's always this question of freemium, give things away, and then there's pro account, you get it. There's like trial versus time. Some features are limited.

我不知道。你们有没有针对消费者订阅产品的建议，比如应该怎么做？

I don't know. Do you have like a for consumer subscription products, like here's the way to go?

是的。我认为首先，为什么要做免费增值订阅是一个常见的问题，你知道，就像我加入过所有这些采用免费增值订阅模式的公司，我想我喜欢它的什么呢？首先，我认为它与很多这些公司的使命导向非常契合。通常，你想尽可能广泛地推广产品，因为这就是创始人打造它的原因。对吧？

Yeah. I think first of all, why do freemium subscription in the first place is a common question that, you know, like I've joined all these companies that are freemium subscription, like what do I like about it, I guess? Well, one, I think it ties really nicely to, like, mission orientation of a lot of these companies. It's often, like, you wanna spread the product as wide as possible because that's why the founders built the thing. Right?

你试图通过像Duolingo、Grammarly或chess.com这样的产品来改善教育。这些产品旨在成为具有广泛价值主张的全球性产品。对吧？显然，实现这一目标的最低摩擦就是提供免费产品。所以这本身就是原因之一。

You're you're trying to, like, improve education with, like, Duolingo or, you know, Grammarly or chess.com. Like, these are meant to be widespread products with a really wide value proposition that fits globally. Right? And so obviously, the lowest friction to that is going to be a free product. So that alone is part of it.

另一个原因是，很多这些产品主要通过口碑传播增长。特别是如果你能在产品中建立网络效应，比如Duolingo有一系列社交功能，或者像Grammarly那样，它们也有一些从B到C再到B的策略。所以你会看到Grammarly被团队和公司使用等等。对吧？即使用户使用的是免费计划，他们仍然在确保Grammarly能被同事或团队成员购买方面提供了很多价值。

Another part of it is that a lot of these products primarily grow through word-of-mouth. And especially if you can build, you know, network effects in the product, like Duolingo has a bunch of social features, or with Grammarly, like, they have a bit of a b to c to b play as well. So you see Grammarly being used by teams and by companies and whatnot. Right? And even if users are on the free plan, they still provide quite a lot of value in making sure that Grammarly can be purchased by a coworker or by a team member or whatever.

对吧？所以我认为这些通常是我倾向于确保你为用户提供的核心价值主张是免费的，并且是永久免费的原因，然后在此基础上叠加一些高级功能的体验或尝试。这通常是我看到的甜蜜点。至于试用、反向试用这类事情，我认为很大程度上取决于具体情况。特别是如果你有一些B2B功能，可能会有一些锁定效应，反向试用可能会非常强大。

Right? So I think these things are are usually why I lean toward make sure that the core value proposition that you're providing users is free and is sort of permanently free, 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, I think it largely depends. I think if you have, especially a b to b feature where you may have some lock in, reverse trials can be super powerful.

你只是想吸引人们进来。你不需要向他们索要信用卡信息，因为他们已经在使用你的客户关系管理系统，或者投入了大量时间来构建内容和素材。等到试用期结束那一刻，他们实际上会感觉，哎呀，或许我应该保留这个服务并开始付费。我认为对于许多消费类产品来说，这种方式要见效会稍微困难些。

You just wanna get people in there. You don't need to ask for their credit card because they're using your CRM or they're investing quite a lot of time in, like, building out, you know, material and content. And so by the time that window drops, you actually, like, feel, oh, man. I probably should keep this and and start paying. I think for a lot of consumer products, it's a little bit harder for that to work.

因此，我通常看到更常见的做法还是采用普通的免费试用模式。

And so I've typically seen more just normal free trials be be the norm.

让我顺着这个关于消费类订阅产品的思路继续。我觉得这是每个独立开发者梦寐以求的创业领域，因为它看似容易搭建。酷，我开发个应用，加个付费墙就行。

Let me follow this thread of just consumer subscription products. I feel like this is the category that every indie developer dreams of building a product in because it's easy to build. Cool. I'll build an app. I'll add a paywall.

然后他们才发现，从分销渠道、客户获取成本到增长策略等角度来看，这远比想象中困难。这是不是人们对于打造成功消费订阅产品最大的认知盲区？

And then they realize this is a lot harder than I thought from a perspective of distribution and CACs and growth like that. Is that the biggest missing piece that people don't get about building a successful consumer subscription product?

没错。用户留存率对消费类订阅公司而言就是黄金指标。如果留不住用户，那么很大压力就转嫁到让用户首日付费上，这极其困难对吧？

Yeah. I mean, user retention is gold for consumer subscription companies. If you don't retain your users, then a lot of the onus is on getting them to pay on, like, day one. That's super hard. Right?

这时你面对的是完全不同的商业模式：既要为用户流量付费，又要在他们形成产品使用习惯前激进地追加销售。很多应用天然采用这种方式，因为这是它们打破常规获取首批用户的手段。但就我个人而言，我很幸运加入的都是已度过初创期的公司，比如多邻国和chess.com这类靠有机口碑传播驱动的企业。它们都是从更小的市场起步，逐步培育整个市场。

Then you're dealing with totally different business models where you're paying for users, you're trying to, like, aggressively upsell them before they, you know, hit any sort of habitual usage patterns with your product. A lot of apps naturally do that because that's how they break the mold and get their first users to do it. But I don't know. I've been fortunate to join companies sort of after that initial phase, but especially like Duolingo and chess.com, these are organic word-of-mouth kind of driven businesses. And in in kind of both ways, like, they grew the market, right, from a much smaller market.

而不是身处需要从竞争对手那里抢夺市场份额、竞标更高条款的激烈竞争领域。所以我觉得，这其中确实有些门道。

And as opposed to it being a a very competitive space where you're kind of competing and taking market share from others and bidding for higher terms and stuff like that. So I don't know. That there's something to that.

那么我理解的是，你们需要通过口碑传播来实现增长，这样才有成功的可能，同时用户留存率也必须非常高。你们是否有一个经验法则，知道留存率需要达到多少才能有机会建立一个成功的消费者订阅业务？

So what I'm hearing here is you need to find a way to grow through word-of-mouth for this to have any chance of success, And also retention needs to be very high. Do you have a heuristic of what retention needs to be for you to have a chance building a successful consumer subscription business?

我认为消费者公司通常会追踪两种主要的用户留存类型。一种是新用户留存，比如第一天（D1）、第七天（D7）等等。我觉得当你的D1留存率在30%到40%左右时，对于一个消费者应用来说已经相当不错了。如果远低于这个水平，我可能会质疑用户的意图，或者从数学角度来说，你们是否有能力获取足够多的用户来建立一个足够大的日活跃用户群体。

I think consumer companies tend to track, like, essentially two main types of, like, user retention. There's more of, like, the new user one, kinda d one, d seven, etcetera. I think when you have your d one retention somewhere around, like, the 30 or 40% mark, like, that's quite solid, I think, for for a consumer app. If it's much lower than that, then sometimes I might question, like, the intent of the user or this the ability for that, you to, I guess, acquire just mathematically acquire enough users such that you can grow a a big enough daily active user base.

这个数字出乎意料地低。听起来是可以实现的。

That's surprisingly low. Yeah. So it feels achievable.

理论上是可行的。但市场上选择太多了，人们普遍感到应用和产品过于泛滥。

It's achievable. It's achievable in theory, but there are so many options out there in the market, and people are feeling a lot of, like, app and product bloat.

所以明确一下，你是说20%到30%的人会在第二天回来使用？

And so just to be clear, you're saying twenty to 30% of people come back the next day.

是的，30%到40%。如果能达到40%，我认为情况就不错了。

Yeah. Thirty to 40. 30 to 40. 40%. I think you're in an okay place.

我认为更重要的是，正如你提到豪尔赫时所说的，他写过那篇非常流行的关于增长模式的文章，对吧？其中提到当前用户留存率对他们来说是最关键的指标。特别是如果你的产品需要每日使用频率，那么现有用户群体中形成使用习惯的留存率才是最重要的——你的产品有多强的粘性？正是这个留存率会不断累积，最终形成每日使用习惯。所以随着公司逐渐成熟，你会发现实际上应该把大部分精力放在优化现有用户的留存机制上，这才是更强大的增长杠杆。

I think even more importantly, and, you know, you mentioned Jorge to kick this off, but, like, you know, he wrote that very, very popular article about the growth model, right, and how, like, current user retention rate was the biggest thing for them. I think especially if you have a product that has daily frequency, like, that's actually the retention that matters the most is that, like, of your existing user base that has developed a habitual pattern, how sticky is your product? And it's that retention rate that really compounds and build that 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. You find that that's a much, much bigger lever.

一个例外是Grammarly属于不同类型的产品，你安装后并不需要每天主动打开它。这让我觉得很有意思，因为我原本以为应该始终专注于现有用户的留存。但对于像Grammarly这样的产品，真正关键的是激活和安装的时刻，这个瞬间将长期维系用户。

One exception is that Grammarly was a different type of product in that you install it, and you don't proactively open it every day. So that was kind of interesting to me because I assumed that you should always just focus on existing user retention. But for a product like Grammarly, it's actually the activation, installation, moment that's really, really critical and will carry the user for a very, very long time.

有道理。比如统计数据会显示某人是个日活用户，因为他们正在输入内容，但这对Grammarly来说并不准确。我注意到的另一个成功消费类订阅产品的趋势是，它们最初都非常精简且成本效益极高，因为找到可行的模式需要很长时间，它们本质上靠留存与增长成本之间的差额生存。

That makes sense. Like, yeah, the stats would show someone's a daily active user because they're typing things, and that's not an accurate stat for Grammarly. The other interesting trend I've noticed across successful consumer subscription products is they always start very scrappy and very cost efficient and spend efficient because I think it's because it takes them a long time to find something that's working, and they're surviving on that margin of retention to growth cost essentially.

是的，没错。

Yeah, that's right.

对，关于留存这部分说得太到位了。就像我的新闻简报也是类似情况——每天有多少人加入？多少人离开？这是个艰难的循环，因为人们总想省钱。

Yeah, 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? And it's a difficult treadmill to be on because people, you know, they wanna save money.

他们更愿意把钱花在Netflix这类服务上。所以即便你很出色，用户流失也在所难免。关键在于如何让新增用户多于流失用户？

They wanna spend that on Netflix and things like that. So as amazing as you are, people are always gonna leave. So the trick is how do you find more people coming than going?

没错。以chess.com为例，我们约80%的日活或周活用户——具体数字我需要确认——属于现有用户。而新增用户与重新激活用户的数量，对我们这种规模的公司来说其实差不多。尽管新用户体验备受关注，但有趣的是，当公司发展到一定阶段后，活跃用户的构成中新用户占比并不大。

Yeah. And I think just to take chess.com as example, like, I think probably 80 ish percent of our daily or weekly active users I mean, I'll check the numbers, but something like that would be like a current a current user or an existing user. And then a new and a, like, reactivated or resurrected user, those are actually about similar size for a company of our our sale. So even though there's a lot of attention on that new user experience, it's actually, like, pretty interesting that the components of your active user base are actually not heavily weighed in the new user set after you mature to a certain degree.

能再详细解释一下吗？

Can you explain that a little bit more?

是的。经过一段时间后，你的产品中会积累大量不活跃用户，对吧？同时也会积累一些偶尔使用的用户，对吧？

Yes. So after some period of time, you kinda stack up a lot of inactive users in your product. Right? And you also stack up sporadic users. Right?

这些人可能没有每天使用的习惯，但每周或每月会使用一两次。最终这些数字累积起来，你可能会拥有数亿休眠用户，他们偶尔会回来使用。因此值得花些精力确保这种——姑且称之为'复活'的用户体验足够出色，并寻找新颖方式吸引他们回归。以多邻国为例，他们通过社交通知做得很好——比如用户启用通讯录同步后，可能会收到推送通知说'你最好的朋友刚开始使用多邻国'，这会促使你重新打开应用。而当用户回归时，可能面临语言能力退化的情况——比如三年前学的法语现在基本忘了。

People that may not have a daily habit, but they will use it once or twice a week or once or twice a month type of thing. And so eventually, that math sort of adds up where you have, let's say, hundreds of millions of kind of dormant users that are coming back, and it's actually worth spending some time making sure that that kind of resurrected, for lack of a better word, experience inside the product is really excellent and that you find novel ways to try to bring them back. Duolingo, as an example, they did a good job of using social notifications. And so if people would use, like, contact sync or something, you might get a push notification that one of your, like, best friends just started using Duolingo, and that might encourage you to come back and resurrect into the product. And whether you resurrect it in the product, it might be the case that your proficiency of the language you were learning, like you were learning French three years ago, but now you, like, forgot most of it.

对吧？所以当用户再次打开应用时，系统会鼓励他们重新进行水平测试，将其安排到合适的学习阶段。对于较成熟的企业来说，这类机制能带来不错的投资回报率，我想表达的就是这个意思。

Right? And so when you open the app again, it encourages you to essentially replace yourself, like, do another placement test and put you in the right spot. And so some of these types of mechanics for a more more mature company can lead to pretty good ROI, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.

明白了。本质上因为过去已有大量用户尝试过产品，要实现增长就需要唤醒这些存量用户。所以这几乎是为'复活用户'专门设计的用户体验流程。

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 through, it's almost like a user experience for resurrected users.

完全正确。

Exactly.

好的。我们稍微宏观些来看——你曾在全球最成功的三个消费级订阅产品工作过，它们运营模式的主要差异是什么？成功路径应该有很多种。

Okay. Let's zoom zoom out a little bit. You've worked at three of the most successful consumer subscription products in the world. What is what is the difference between how these three operate? I think there's many ways to be successful.

感觉这些公司风格迥异，能否简述它们各自的运营精髓？

It feels like these companies are very different. What's kind of the gist of what each of these how they operate?

首先，显然两者有很多相似之处，但我会重点谈谈差异。在Duolingo工作时最让我印象深刻的是他们非常注重细节。他们有一套贯穿全公司的产品开发方法论，甚至为此专门编写了手册，叫做《绿色机器》。

Well, first of all, like, there's obviously a lot of similarities, but I'll just focus my answer on the the differences. So I think Duolingo, what struck me most working there is they're very particular. They have a pro an approach of product development that is infused across, like, everyone in the company. And they tend to they actually wrote a playbook about this. It's called the green machine.

你还发推文了是吧。那确实是我最成功的推文之一。我就发了条'Duolingo刚发布了他们的操作手册'，然后截了那个猫头鹰屁股界面的图，大概有5000点赞。

You tweet it out. Yeah. That was one of my most successful tweets ever. I just tweeted something about Duolingo just released their playbook, and I screenshotted, like, the the owl's butt screen, like, page, and it was, like, 5,000 likes.

太搞笑了。

That's hilarious.

对啊。继续说吧。

Yeah. So yeah. Keep going.

这家公司的核心理念是，他们直接从大学招聘大量聪明有活力的毕业生，提供强大的实验工具，特别注重公司的迭代速度。整个产品每天都会为用户更新多次，这很惊人。

But yeah. I mean, the ethos of the company, I mean, they they hire a lot of intelligent, energetic people out of college, basically, and they give them a lot of amazing experimentation tooling, and they care a lot about, like, the clock speed of the company. Right? So it's a lot of creativity, a lot of ideation. The product experience of Duolingo actually, like, changes multiple times per day for each user, which is pretty shocking.

我之前从没在这种环境工作过，但公司运作的连贯性让我震撼。他们对产品开发每个环节都有详细规范和流程，执行得非常严格。

And so I'd never worked in a place like that before, but it's really struck me about how consistently the company operated, and they had specs and processes for doing, like, each of those steps in their product development cycle, and they were really, really tight about it.

明白了，这就是Duolingo的特点？

Okay. So that's Duolingo?

是的，那就是多邻国。至于Grammarly，这家公司很有意思，他们最初是面向学生的付费产品，后来扩展到面向所有人的免费增值模式，逐渐更专注于专业用户群体。随着积累了大量专业人士后，他们发现，嘿，这里面有规律可循。

Yeah. That's Duolingo. Grammarly, you know, this is an interesting company because they started as a paid product oriented at students, then they expanded into more of a freemium model tailored to everyone, gradually focusing more on the professional base. And then as they accumulate a lot more professionals, they realize, hey. There's patterns.

对吧？我们发现很多营销团队、销售团队或客服团队等等。特定公司在特定职能中大规模采用Grammarly。因此他们能够在此基础上叠加更多企业级管理功能。

Right? We're seeing that a bunch of marketing teams or a bunch of sales teams or a bunch of customer support teams or whatever. Right? Particular functions within particular companies were really adopting Grammarly at scale. And so they were able to then layer on much more of a managed kind of enterprise y motion.

我在职期间主要负责消费者自助服务业务，但这些业务并非孤立存在。它们彼此交融。所以我工作的重点不仅是增长自助服务收入和活跃用户，还包括如何为需求生成和销售团队挖掘合适的团队、职能和公司目标。这是种很有趣的产品导向销售工作。

And while I was there, I was focused on the consumer self serve motion, but they weren't siloed. Right? They were they were intermixed with each other. And so a big part of my job was not just to grow, like, the self serve revenue and self serve active users, but it was also how do you uncover kind of the right teams, the right functions, the right companies for, like, demand gen and sales to go reach out to. So that was a very interesting it's kind of product led sales work.

对吧？这对我来说是非常宝贵的学习经历。再加上生成式AI带来的变革，最近他们收购了Coda和Superhuman，更像在打造生产力套件，公司发展非常迅速。能参与其中并旁观这些变化令人兴奋。但这确实使其核心增长工作与多邻国有本质不同。

Right? And it's really fascinating thing for me to learn. And then on top of that, with all the transformation going on with generative AI, and even recently with them acquiring, Coda and Superhuman and becoming more of a productivity suite, like, the company is just evolving pretty rapidly. It's a really exciting, thing for me to be a part of and to see from the sidelines. But that just made it at its core kind of a different growth job than, than Duolingo for sure.

本质上是to B业务与纯消费级业务的区别。

Essentially a b to b business versus a very consumer business.

没错。还有更多重大战略决策。嗯。核心产品团队也...在增长部门时，我习惯规划用户全旅程——获客、激活、参与等等。

Yeah. And a lot more meaningful strategic decisions as well. Mhmm. And then the core product team also you know, I'm used to in growth, like, laying out the entire user journey that a user go through, you know, acquisition, activation, engagement, so on and so forth. Right?

通常资源充足的增长团队能推动每个增长杠杆，关键在于执行顺序和优先级。但Grammarly独特之处在于，核心产品体验本身就能驱动重复使用。对吧？

And typically, growth teams, if they're well resourced, they can do enough to move each one of these various levers. Right? And it's just a matter of, like, the sequencing of them and what you wanna prioritize first. But Grammarly was kind of unique in that the core product experience itself was what drove repeated activity. Right?

我之前提到过当前用户留存的问题。最关键的影响因素是你每天收到的建议的频率和质量，对吧？所以这是个有趣的发现：我组建了一个增长团队试图提升这个指标，后来意识到其实我反而在碍事——这本质上是由核心产品团队主导的领域。

It's that I I previously mentioned that current user retention thing. What most drives that is the frequency and the quality of the suggestions that you get every day. Right? And so it was an interesting learning in that I staffed up a growth team, tried to work on this metric, and then I realized, actually, like, I'm kinda just getting in the way. Like, this is really a thing that the core product team, most influences.

让我先和核心产品负责人沟通下，然后把这事移交给他们。嗯，确实是段非常有意思的经历。

Let me have a conversation with the core product leader and then shift that over to them. So, yeah, just a super interesting experience.

然后是chess.com。

And then chess.com.

chess.com最独特之处在于他们对国际象棋的狂热痴迷，非常棒。

The thing that's most unique about chess.com is that they are super fanatical, like, about chess. Great.

有道理，很不错。

Makes sense. Very nice.

疯狂吧？其实不该意外，毕竟公司名就摆在那儿。但他们一直从全球招募人才，公司始终实行远程办公，只雇佣真正热爱国际象棋的人。

Crazy. I mean, you shouldn't be surprised. Obviously, the name of the company is like this, but they've always hired people from around the world. The company's always been globally remote. They just hire people that love chess.

他们整天对弈，观看赛事直播，我们的Slack总被大家的棋局动态刷屏。这么说可能有点微妙——即便是提供语言学习产品的多邻国，我认为其创业初衷更多是围绕学习动机展开的，对吧？

They play all day. They watch the streams. Our Slack is always blowing up with people's chess moves and games and whatnot. You know, I think I wanna say this a little bit delicately, but, like, Duolingo, even though the product they're providing is around language learning, I think the original ethos of how to start the company was really around motivation. Right?

最难的是养成习惯，对吧？关键在于如何建立日常习惯。实际上，我在很多方面将语言学习视为他们的第一载体，而他们的超能力在于动机、习惯等方面。这就是多邻国的核心理念。

The hardest thing to it's habits. Right? It's how do you build that daily habit? And I actually, in many ways, see language learning as like their first vehicle, and what they have a superpower in is that, again, the motivation, the habits, etcetera. So that's kind of Duolingo.

Grammarly其实也类似。人们熟知它的拼写和语法修正功能，但真正独特之处在于它能集成到海量应用程序中。很少有产品能做到这种程度，这非常特别。

And Grammarly actually kinda similarly. Right? Like, people know them for the spelling and grammar corrections, but what's really unique about them is they they're integrated across tons and tons and tons of applications. There's not many many products that work like that. That's really unique.

现在如果你听他们的新CEO Shashira谈论AI超级高速公路之类的概念就会明白。他们已能运用该技术提供远超语法检查的服务。我的意思是，国际象棋就纯粹关乎象棋，这是刻在基因里的。

And so now if you hear, like, Shashira, their new CEO talk about, like, the AI superhighway and all that type of stuff. Right? They can now use that technology to provide a lot more than just grammar writing. And so my point is just that, like, chess is about chess, 100%. It's in the ethos.

人们狂热地热爱这项运动。这意味着我们始终在内部使用自家产品，公司里洋溢着持续使用产品、迸发创意的惊人活力，我太喜欢这种氛围了。

People are crazy passionate. That just means we're always dogfooding the product. There's 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.

这太酷了！你所说的最棒之处在于没有标准答案。这些公司都极其成功——多邻国估值约100亿美元且持续增长（待会查证），Grammarly价值不菲，chess.com也发展迅猛。关键启示是成功路径可以多元。

That is so cool. And what I love about what you're saying is there's no right or wrong answer. All of these companies are killing it. I think Duolingo is worth like $10,000,000,000 something like that and keeps growing. I'll look it up in a second.

听着你讲述时我突然想到：多邻国这种高度结构化、系统化的构建方式效果惊人，这很有趣。有人可能觉得'这种刻板方式不适合我'，但它的巨大成功恰恰证明了这种模式的有效性。

Grammarly is worth a ton, and then chess.com is doing super well. So I think that's a really interesting takeaway here is you can succeed in a lot of different ways. What's really cool about Duolingo, was just thinking as you were talking is, yeah, it's just interesting that this very structured, methodical way of building is working so so well. Because you could listen to that and be like, oh, that's I don't wanna work like this is a rigid way. But the fact that it is killing it tells us this actually works really well.

找到有效的方法，就全力投入。

If you find something that works, lead into it.

没错。是的。结构是僵化的，但创意却尽可能远离僵化。对吧？比如，你见过他们的超级碗广告、网络迷因和游戏化策略。

That's right. Yeah. The the structure is rigid, but the ideas are the farthest away from rigid as possible. Right? Like, you have seen their, I don't know, Super Bowl commercials, their memes, their gamification tactics.

那里是个超级有趣的创意环境。所以'僵化'是最不合适的词，但我想说的是他们非常一致。他们有各种模板，产品评测大概就十到十五分钟，人们进进出出。这种高效且稳定的工作节奏让人感觉有点超现实。

Like, it's a super fun creative environment. So, like, rigid is the the farthest possible word to use, but what I just mean is they're they're consistent. They have templates for everything, and, like, their product reviews are, like, ten or fifteen minutes as people go in and out. So it's just it's kind of a surreal environment about how rapidly and consistently they work.

太棒了。他们估值120亿美元，不久前其实更高些，现在略有回落。说到多邻国，人们会想到它的品牌形象、猫头鹰标志，以及在TikTok上的成功。

Awesome. Yeah. They're worth $12,000,000,000, and they were much higher actually not too long ago. They're coming down a little bit. So speaking of Duolingo, when people think Duolingo, they think of the brand and the owl and the success they had on TikTok and things like that.

我很好奇，作为专注增长的人，你如何看待增长实验数据与病毒式TikTok视频、品牌吉祥物这类营销手段的关系？

I'm curious to get your take on as a very growth oriented person watching that work and your take on growth experimentation data versus marketing viral TikTok videos, mascots, things like that.

是的。我以前觉得这是对立关系，但现在发现它们能完美结合，成为增长的火箭燃料。作为产品人，我加入这些公司是因为它们就在我手机主屏上——我喜欢用它们，而且我自认不容易被广告左右。

Yeah. I mean, used to think it was Versus, but now I realize that they combine really well. It could be rocket fuel for for your growth. Yeah. Being a product person, you know, I joined a lot of these companies because they're literally on the home screen of my phone, and I like I like using them, and I consider myself someone that's not easily swayed by, you know, ads or TV commercials telling me what to buy.

所以我的职业生涯中对营销一直持怀疑态度。但在多邻国，你会看到猫头鹰Duo通过推送通知和产品体验形成个性，营销团队又在TikTok、YouTube等平台放大这种个性，形成迷因传播。我们在产品里设置'如何知道我们'的追踪渠道，有时发现这些内容能带来30%的新用户。

So I always, like, had an element of skepticism on the marketing side for much of my career. But then, yeah, you you join a place like like Duolingo, and you see how Duo the Owl has developed a personality through the push notifications and the product experience, and then seeing the marketing team leverage that personality in their TikTok and in their YouTube and all throughout social media and just feed into those, like, memes. And then we would track back in the product experience, like, how did you hear about us and put all those channels in there. And some days, it would be like, holy shit. Like, it's bringing in 30% of, like, our new users in any given day.

这两者其实是相辅相成的。国际象棋网站chess.com过去五年的发展更强化了我的认知。这家公司前几年很低调——全球有8亿棋手，但主要在现实对弈。直到五年前，线上象棋才真正爆发。

So those two things really go hand in hand, and that feeling has only been reinforced by chess.com, you know, over the last five years. Like, the first years of this company was really under the radar. Like, 800,000,000 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 ago, everything changed.

先是疫情爆发，然后是《后翼弃兵》热播，还有大量YouTube和Twitch主播的推广，学校里一群孩子也开始玩，等等。正是这些因素的结合让它真正火了起来。

You had the pandemic. You had Queen's Gambit. You had a lot of, like, YouTube and Twitch streamers. You had a bunch of kids playing it in school, etcetera. And so it's really the combination of those two things that that make it take off.

增长实验更像是缓慢而稳健——或者说快速而稳健——的方式，你需要持续迭代改进产品体验。但时不时地，会迎来一波大浪潮。可能一夜之间注册量翻四倍，这时候不抓住机会就太傻了。

And it's like the growth experimentation is more the the the slow and steady or fast and steady, I should say, approach where you're just continually iterating. You're making the product experience better. But then every so often, right, there's a big wave that comes in. You can quadruple your, you know, registrations overnights, and, yeah, you'd be a fool not to take advantage of that.

我其实在chess.com和... 啊，国际象棋！这周末我在咖啡馆看到温馨一幕：一家三口点单时，那位爸爸坐在桌边偷偷用手机打开chess.com下棋等着。天啊。

I was actually speaking at chess.com and blank. Chess, I was at a coffee shop this weekend. There's a little like, a family, a dad and mom and a daughter ordering, and the dad's sitting at the table, and he's just, like, on his phone just, like, opened up chess.com secretly and just playing while he's waiting. Oh, man.

我既不承认也不否认自己干过这种事。

I will not admit or deny that I've done that before.

但你知道吗？这简直是最治愈的画面了，我想不出更美好的场景了。在等待时做这个太棒了

But it's you know, it's like that is if I could think of anything more wholesome, I I can't. Like, that's an amazing thing to be doing while you're just

我四岁的孩子已经会摆棋子了，特别棒。他现在可喜欢下棋了。

You know, my four year old can actually set up the pieces, which is pretty great. So he he enjoys the game quite a bit.

天啊，四岁就会弹钢琴还会下棋的神童啊。

Oh, man. This four year old, already a pianist playing chess.

没错。

That's right.

真是个厉害角色。本集由Miro赞助播出。每天，新头条都在用各种AI取代人类工作的消息吓唬我们，引发大量焦虑和恐惧。但Miro的最新调查揭示了不同故事——76%的人认为AI能助力他们的工作，但超50%的人苦于不知何时使用它。

What a stud. This episode is brought to you by Miro. 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 believe that AI can benefit their role, but over 50% people struggle to know when to use it.

来看看Miro的创新工作空间：这个智能平台让人工智能与人类在共享空间协作，高效完成工作。十余年来，Miro持续赋能团队将大胆想法转化为重大成果。如今，他们通过释放AI与人类潜能的联合力量，正引领着产品更快面市的潮流。本期播客嘉宾常分享Miro模板，我自己也总用它和团队头脑风暴。

Enter Miro's innovation workspace, an intelligent platform that brings people and AI together in a shared space to get great work done. Miro has been empowering teams to transform bold ideas into the next big thing for over a decade. Today, they're at the forefront of bringing products to market even faster by unleashing the combined power of AI and human potential. Guests of this podcast often share Miro templates. I use it all the time to brainstorm ideas with my team.

团队可利用Miro AI将便签、截图等非结构化数据，在几分钟内转化为可用图表、产品简报、数据表和原型。你无需成为AI专家或切换工具——在Miro画布上的现有工作就是最佳指令。助力团队高效创作，尽在miro.com/lenny。

Teams can work with Miro AI turn unstructured data, like sticky notes or screenshots, into usable diagrams, product briefs, data tables, and prototypes in minutes. You don't have to be an AI master or to toggle yet another tool. The work you're already doing in Miro's Canvas is the prompt. Help your teams get great work done with Miro. Check it out at miro.com/lenny.

网址是mir0.com/lenny。好的，你刚才零星提到了AI，我想顺着聊。作为增长负责人，假设AI从多维度影响着chess.com...

That's mir0.com/lenny. Okay. You talked about AI a little bit here and there. Wanna follow that thread. As a growth person, imagine AI informs chess.com in a lot of ways.

确实如此。

It does.

这里大致有两个方向：AI如何改变国际象棋等产品的形态？以及AI如何影响你作为增长负责人的工作？选一个或两个方向展开...

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

好的，我会按顺序处理这些问题。先从国际象棋这个话题开始，因为我对它可能有些独特的见解。国际象棋与人工智能的渊源可追溯至近一个世纪前。早期的计算机先驱们就认为，象棋是个有趣的游戏。

Yeah. I'll I'll tackle them in sequence. Start with the the chess one, just because I have maybe a slightly unique take on that one. So chess and AI, they've been intertwined for almost a century. Like, some of the early computing pioneers, like, they just figured, yeah, chess is an interesting game.

我们可以借此测试机器智能并编写算法。后来到了1997年，IBM的深蓝程序击败了当时的世界冠军加里·卡斯帕罗夫，那一刻引发了巨大震撼——天啊，人工智能要取代人类了吗？我们的工作怎么办？要知道，那可是三十年前的事了。值得庆幸的是，如今我们依然存在，而且下棋的人比以往任何时候都多。对吧？

We can test machine intelligence and write some algorithms. We're not. And then fast forward to, like, 1997, and you had IBM. They had their Deep Blue application who actually, beat the the world champion back then, which was Gary Kasparov. That was, like, a huge moment of, like, of shock and reckoning of, oh, man.

特别是国际象棋和chess.com平台，它们已经学会如何利用象棋引擎的力量来增强人类的下棋体验。这些引擎无疑是强大的人工智能形式（虽然不同于现在的语言模型），比如如今的Stockfish引擎就远超世界顶级特级大师的水平。

Is AI gonna take over humans? Are we gonna have jobs and, like, all this stuff? This is, you know, thirty years ago. And, thankfully, we're all still here, and more people are playing chess than ever. Right?

戏剧性地超越了人类。

And so the gameofchess and chess.com 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 engines like Stockfish these days that are just dramatically better than the top grandmasters in the world. Like

已经到这种程度了吗？我记得它刚战胜人类时就很震撼，现在居然遥遥领先了？

Is that where we're at? It's just like, I remember when it beat humans, and now it's just dramatically better.

确实是遥遥领先。

It's dramatically better.

哇。

Wow.

是的。我觉得有个评分系统可以比较相对技能水平，比如普通国际象棋选手大概在1000分左右，高一点的可能是1500分。顶级大师像马格努斯·卡尔森大概是2800分，而Stockfish这类引擎能达到3600分。

Yeah. I think there's a rating system that compares, like, relative skill level, and an average chess player somewhere, like, a thousand, maybe a 1,500 on the high end. A top grandmaster, like, Magnus Carlsen is, like, a 2,800, and then Stockfish and similar engines are, like, 3,600.

哇。

Wow.

所以这样对比来看。没错。

And so to put that in comparison. Yeah.

至少不是1万或100万分。我甚至不知道那是否可能。

Like, at least it's not 10,000 or a million. I don't even know if that's possible.

不是1万分，但类似于如果国际象棋引擎少一个主要棋子，比如车之类的，它们依然能跟顶尖选手抗衡。

It's not 10,000, but it's similar to, like, if the chess engine was playing without a major piece, like a rook or something. They would still be competitive against the best players.

这就是Elo分数吗？

And this is the Elo score?

对。Elo分数。Elo评级。

Yeah. The Elo score. Elo rating.

马格努斯，你刚才说的是2800左右吧。嗯。然后鳕鱼股的价位，你会说是在3600到3800吗？

Magnus is is what you said about 2,800. Yeah. And then the stock fish is, would you say, 3,600, 38?

没错。实际上，这是因为计算能力太惊人了，而且有那么多技术可以对特定棋路进行深度评估。它们每秒能计算数千万步棋。所以人类与之抗衡是不现实的。但观察这些象棋引擎的对弈，确实激发了许多创意，新策略、新棋路，也让人们对棋局有了新的欣赏角度。

Yeah. And and really, it's like it's because computing power is so amazing, and there's so many techniques for how to do, like, deep evaluation on specific chess lines. They can calculate tens of millions per second. So it's not realistic for for a human to compete against that. But yet, like, watching some of these chess engines played has opened up a lot of creativity, new strategies, new lines, new appreciation for the game.

我们chess.com的理念是将这项技术带给每位用户，哪怕是从未动过棋子的人。之前提到的棋局回顾功能正是如此。幕后我们运行象棋引擎，对用户的每一步棋进行评估，然后用用户母语以通俗易懂的方式呈现出来，明白吗？

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 what this does. So behind the scenes, we're running chess engines to to basically spit out evaluations for every move that you make, and then we translate that and make that approachable to the user using, you know, their native language in plain, approachable style. Right?

甚至还包括语音反馈等功能。这部分个性化和语音交互是由大语言模型实现的。我想强调的是，虽然国际象棋与AI早已密不可分，但对我们而言，最重要的是始终以用户需求为核心。我们不是为了赶时髦而滥用大模型，而是要为特定功能选择合适技术，真正为用户创造价值。

And even with audio and things like that as well. And that part of it, like the personality, the speech back to the user, that part is LLMs. And so I guess my point is that, again, Chess and AI have been intertwined forever, but for us, what's most important is that we keep the customer at the north star of it. We're not just applying LLMs just because it's the new hot thing. You've got to apply the right technology for the right, you know, feature to provide value to the user.

因此我们始终警惕，避免被炒作冲昏头脑。

And so we try not to ever lose sight of that and get let let hype get us too carried away.

这确实令人惊讶。我想人们不会料到AI现在能击败所有现存人类棋手，而国际象棋的热度却达到历史新高。人们反而比以往更热衷下棋，参与度持续攀升。虽出乎意料，却也合理。

It's just really surprising. I think people would not have expected AI can now beat every human alive ever, and we and chess is at an all time high. People want to keep playing and or playing more and more than ever played. Yeah. Not unexpected.

有趣的是，大语言模型本身下棋水平其实很差。它们会产生幻觉着法，依赖模式识别。虽然擅长发现模式，但在深入分析特定棋局方面表现欠佳。

You know, interestingly, LLMs 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, but not so good at going super, super, super deep on a specific chess thing.

如果你尝试过在ChatGPT上创建或查看棋盘图像，会发现很多棋盘的格子数量都不对，布局也不规范。我不想过于武断，相信它在推理能力上会大幅提升。实际上，谷歌最近赞助了一场锦标赛，让顶级语言模型相互对战。

And if you've even tried to, like, create or look at chessboard images on ChatGPT, a lot of them have the wrong number of squares. They're not set up properly. And so, you know, I don't wanna be too dismissive. I'm sure it's gonna get much stronger at at reasoning. And, actually, Google recently sponsored a tournament where all the top LMs played a tournament against each other.

那场比赛看起来很有趣。它们确实在进步，但国际象棋这种游戏，拥有经过深度训练的专用计算引擎，其威力远超语言模型。

So that was pretty fun to watch. They're improving, but, you know, this chess is specifically a game that having a a trained, you know, deep, deep computing engine is just gonna be much, much, much more powerful than LLMs.

虽然不想离题太远，但AlphaZero曾因击败顶尖围棋选手而闻名。我猜它是专门为围棋训练的？显然不是语言模型，而是专攻围棋的模型。

And not to go down this track too far, but, AlphaZero famous for beating the top Go player. I imagine that all is that was that trained specifically for Go? Obviously, not an LM, but that was a Go specific model.

是的。据我所知——顺便说那部纪录片《AlphaGo》非常精彩，不知道你看过没有——他们能把如此技术深奥的东西拍得如此富有情感和人性，实在令人惊叹。

Yeah. My understanding is that the one that the documentary is incredible, by the way. Don't know if you've watched AlphaGo. Yeah. It's it's amazing how they took something so technically deep and made it, like, you know, so it's so emotional and human.

但我想这正是我们对AI及所开发产品的感受核心。回到你的观点，据我理解，AlphaZero主要通过自我对弈进行训练。

But I think that's the that's the crux of how we feel, right, I guess, about about AIs and the products that we build, actually. But to your point, I my understanding is that the way AlphaZero is primarily trained is that it just plays a bunch of games against itself.

没错。

Right.

通过神经网络，它每次都会变得更聪明。由于能重复数十亿甚至数万亿次——具体数字我不清楚——最终会变得极其强大。

And so through the neural network, it just gets smarter every time. And because it can, you know, have that repetition times, you know, a billion or a trillion, I don't know exactly what number, but it's gonna get pretty damn good.

好的，让我们回到正题。刚才我们谈到AI如何影响chess.com。那么AI是如何改变增长岗位的工作方式的？

Okay. Let's go back back on track to where we were going. So this was how AI is impacting chess.com. How is AI changing the just the work of a growth person?

我喜欢将增长工作描述为连接用户与产品价值的桥梁。为此，我会重新审视用户旅程，并围绕旅程的每个环节组建专门团队。这些团队有具体的指标目标、路线图等，然后他们就会去执行。这就是大致的结构。

I like to describe growth as the the job is to connect users to the value of your product. And in order to do that, what I like to do is think about that user journey again, and essentially staff teams that are oriented around each element of that user journey. And those teams have specific metric goals. They have road maps, etcetera, and then they go run against them. So that's, like, how it's structured.

我认为AI可以加速这个过程中的某些环节，特别是实验周期。比如在产品发现阶段，与需要长期投入、进行深入用户调研或市场调研的核心产品不同——那些更基础、更需要第一性原理——增长工作则不太一样。

AI, I think, can be applied to speed up some elements of that, essentially, experiment cycle that 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 know, it's more it's more foundational, more for first principles, etcetera. Growth is a little bit less like that.

增长更像是进行大量实验，每个实验的输出会成为下一个实验的输入。就在几个月前——虽然说起来好像很久远——我们还在用传统方式运作。

It's like you're running a lot of experiments, and you're the output of any given experiment is the input, like, to your next idea. Right? And so historically, I don't even I don't even mean historically, but just a few months ago, right, like, we were operating in a it's got kinda history, I I suppose.

嗯。

Yeah.

以前需要手动撰写大量分析文档，阅读理解后提取洞见，再撰写新方案来转化这些想法。虽然现在仍部分存在这种情况，但像ChatGPT这样的工具就非常有用。

But, you know, there would be a lot of manual writing of these, like, analyses docs. You'd have to read them. You'd have to understand what insight you wanna kinda grab from them and then write another spec to to translate that idea. That's still happening to some degree, but I think that's a spot where even tools like ChatGPT are super helpful. Right?

你可以直接输入别人写的分析报告，让它帮你总结并给出可尝试的建议。这样创意生成和研究周期就快多了。原型制作也比以前快很多。虽然产品经理还没到能直接向生产环境推送代码的程度，但从构思到实现的时间——特别是大胆想法——已大幅缩短。正如我之前说的探索与开发，过去探索更难实现，现在则容易多了。

You can just plug in, like, an analysis that another person wrote and just have it summarized for you and give you advice on, you know, ideas to go try. And so that ideation, that research cycle is much, much faster. I talked a little bit about prototyping also just becoming much, much faster than before. We have not yet gotten to the point where, like, product managers themselves are actually shipping the code into production, but it's dramatically shortened the amount of time it takes to conceive of, especially, like, a bolder idea that you might have. And so when I talked earlier about explore and exploit, right, a lot of the explore was harder to do, but now it's a little bit easier to do.

你可以将一个更广泛的概念具象化。当你能够将其可视化后，分享给团队，让大家点击查看，这会带来天壤之别。以上只是我想到的几个例子。

You can take a a broader concept and visualize it. And when you can visualize it, send it around the team, get people to click around it, that makes a world of difference. So those are just a couple examples that come to mind.

太棒了。我想回到你回答开头提到的那个观点——你认为增长的本质就是将用户与产品价值连接起来——我觉得这非常有启发性。

Awesome. I wanna go back to this phrase right at the beginning of this answer that you shared that I think is really helpful, that you see growth as simply your job is to connect users to the value of your product.

是的。

Yeah.

能详细说说吗？因为我觉得这个定义非常清晰地阐明了增长工作的角色。

Can you speak more to that? Because I think that's such a nice way of clarifying what is growth's role.

没错。这个观点让我深有共鸣，因为我觉得增长工作常被误解为纯粹的数据投机——仿佛我们是一群冷酷的人，只为提升某个指标不择手段，设置各种障碍和付费墙，处处增加摩擦。虽然从微观层面看，这些手段可能对某个功能或指标有效，但对企业长期健康发展而言——毕竟我们都希望任职于有生命力的公司——我们需要整体性思考用户需求，对吧？

Yeah. I it resonates deeply with me because I I feel like growth sometimes gets this reputation, I guess, that it's just pure, like, metrics hacking. Like, we're cold cold people that just are trying to move a particular metric up, and we're gonna do whatever it can to, like, you know, throw walls and pay walls and add friction in all all these spots. And even though that could theoretically work in at, like, a micro level on a specific feature or a specific metric, I think what's most healthy for a company, and, you know, I wanna work at durable companies, right, is to think about the user holistically. Right?

当你采用'连接用户与产品价值'这个框架时，这种价值会随时间变化，也与用户旅程完美契合。比如，潜在用户需要理解的价值主张，与三年以上老用户的认知需求截然不同。因此团队应该从这个视角出发，进而拆解出具体待解决的问题和假设等等。

And when you take that framing of connecting users to the value of your product, that value can change for a user over time, and that also lines up really nicely to the journey. Right? Like, what a someone that's not even a user yet needs to understand about the value proposition is super different than what a habitual user of three plus years, might need. Right? And so the teams working on them should think from that perspective, and then from there, right, they ladder into, like, specific problems to solve hypotheses, etcetera.

顺着这个思路，听众们可能在想：如何提升实验能力？如何开展更多实验？怎样做得更好？关于团队提升实验水平，你认为有哪些两三个大家可能尚未完全意识到的重要建议或最佳实践？

Following that thread a little bit more, people listening to this are imagining, how do I get better at experimentation? How do I run more experiments? How do we do this better? What are two or three tips and best practices that you think people need to hear or maybe are not totally aware of when they think about getting better experimentation on their teams?

我认为首要之事就是先行动起来。你知道吗？我刚读了Atlassian的产品现状报告，发现约40%的产品团队基本完全不进行实验。这其中可能有合理原因，比如理念差异，或者更偏向B2B业务等等。

I think the first thing is just start somewhere. You know? I I just read this Atlassian state of product report, and it was like 40% of product teams, like, basically don't run experimentation at all. And there may be some good reasons for it. I mean, it could be philosophical or maybe you're more, you know, b two b oriented or whatever.

所以我完全理解。但对于许多消费品产品而言——特别是那些具有一定用户规模和产品使用频率的——你们完全可以收集足够数据。而且我发现，尽管我可以整天做模式匹配（毕竟我在很多公司工作过），

So I I get it. But I think for a lot of especially if you work on a consumer product that has some degree of scale, some degree of frequency with your product, you can collect enough data. And, also, I have found you know, I can pattern match all day long. I've worked a lot of companies. Right?

但我经常判断错误。消费者行为往往难以捉摸，尤其当你在某家公司工作时，会自然成为高级用户，有时就会忘记真正新用户的体验是怎样的。如果不尝试实验，就会错失很多机会。所以我鼓励大家先迈出第一步。

But I'm wrong all the time, and I think consumer behavior can be very fickle. And especially when you work at a company, you become a power user naturally. So sometimes you you may forget, like, what the actual user experience is for a brand new user. And so you leave a lot of opportunities on the table if you don't even try to experiment. So I just encourage taking that first step.

先跑个A/B测试。找个能快速集成的第三方工具，或者让工程师临时搭建个系统也行。关键是要养成这种循序渐进（爬行-走路-跑步）的实践习惯。

Just run an AB test. Find a third party tool or something that you can integrate quickly and or or even just work with your engineers to spin something up. Just get in the practice of, you know, crawled and walked and run type of thing.

顺便问下，你有特别推荐的工具吗？就是那种你会首选的工具？

Do you have a favorite tool, by the way, just to throw out? Is there, like, a go to tool for you?

我们在Grammarly用的是StatSeg，最近看到他们被收购了，这是个令人兴奋的消息。Duolingo和国际象棋网站都采用内部自建的实验方案。

We used StatSeg at Grammarly, and I saw that they recently got acquired, so that was exciting news. Duolingo and chess.com both have an in house experimentation approach.

很棒。

Sweet.

两者各有利弊。显然，Duolingo是一台实验机器，因此拥有专门为优化实验而量身定制的自有系统是巨大的加速器。但我通常不建议公司从第一天起就自行搭建实验体系。要知道，达到一定规模后这样做才有意义。有些公司十五年前初创时市面上还没有这些工具，他们当时只能靠自己构建。

Pros and cons to either. Obviously, Duolingo is an experimentation machine, and so it's been a huge accelerant to have our own thing specifically tailored to to be excellent at that. But, no, I I typically don't encourage companies to build experimentation in house from day one. You know, at a certain scale, it can make sense. And some of these companies, right, they were started fifteen years ago when these tools weren't out, so it was just something they had to do.

你曾在chess.com提到过，你们的目标是每年进行一千次实验。你说目前完成了250次。请谈谈这个目标作为北极星指标的意义。

Something that you mentioned to me at chess.com, your goal is to run a thousand experiments a year. You said you're at 250. Talk about just that as a as a north star.

没错。团队里有狂热的国际象棋爱好者有个好处——公司只需为这个社群服务就能走得很远，而不必过分依赖实验和数据驱动。但这样做的弊端是增长可能不够平稳。所以我加入公司的部分使命就是引入实验思维来改善这种情况。

Yeah. So part of having team members that are fanatical about chess is that the company can get pretty damn far just like building for themselves, building for the community, and not actually being very experimentation and data oriented. The problem with that is that you can have relatively lumpy growth. Right? And so part of the the kind of excitement of me joining the company was to help smooth that out and bring in that experimentation mindset.

2023年之前公司几乎不做实验。去年进行了约50次，今年预计能达到250次，明年我们定下了千次实验的宏伟目标。这个数字是我随口编的吗？

So prior to 2023, the company practically didn't experiment at all. Last year, they did about 50. This year, they're on pace for about 250. And then next year, we have that ambitious target of a thousand. Did I make it up?

是的，完全是我编的。但这依然是个值得团队努力的目标。不过如果只追求数量却不从中学习、不产生实际影响，那千次实验也只是浪费时间。

Yes. Absolutely. I made it up. But but it's still a target and, a thing for the teams to to think about. And a thousand experiments by itself, like, if you just did that, but you didn't learn, you didn't make an impact, and that's kind of a waste of time.

设定目标的意义在于引发讨论：要实现这个目标需要哪些条件？这会带来洞见——比如不仅需要产品或工程部门做实验，我们还可以在生命周期营销、推送通知和邮件的文案修改等方面进行尝试。

Right? The whole point of setting a goal is that you can have conversations about what would need to be true to actually hit that goal. And so that leads to insights. Like, actually, we need not just product management or or engineering to be running these experiments. We can experiment with life cycle marketing, changing copy of push notifications and emails.

应用商店截图、关键词等都可以实验。我们还有各种内容营销团队。工程团队可以为特定页面（比如首页或定价页）开发无需编码支持的测试配置功能，方便进行大量实验。

We can experiment with App Store screenshots and, you know, keywords and stuff like that. That we have all sorts of content marketing teams, etcetera. Right? We could have engineering enable no code for specific screens. Think about our home screen or our pricing screen where we might wanna do a lot of tests that are configurable without engineering support.

我们或许应该定期追踪进度并审视，确保我们具备正确的、可观测性机制。总之，这些才是真正重要的事情，而非单纯达成那个目标本身。所以别告诉团队——其实我并不太在意是否真能达到一千。但如果我们能接近目标并完成其中部分事项，局面就会非常乐观。

We might wanna just, like, track our progress and and look at it from time to time and make sure that we have the right, you know, observability around this. So anyway, that's the stuff that really matters as opposed to the, you know, hitting that goal itself. So don't tell the team, but I don't actually care that much if we actually hit a thousand. But I think if we get pretty close and we accomplish some of these things, we'll be in really good shape.

明白。我们会确保没人看到这段对话。chess.com这个案例太棒了——它展示了文化如何从零实验在两年内剧变为一千次实验，相当于每天三个。虽然有多支团队在并行实验，但这数量依然惊人。推动这种文化转变最关键的因素是什么？是CEO直接定调说要走这条路吗？

K. We'll make sure none of them watch this. I think chess.com is and this this is just a such a cool example of a culture shifting dramatically from zero experiments to sounds like two years later, a thousand, which is like three a day, like, you know, that's, you know, there's many teams running experiments in parallel, but that's a lot. What has helped you most shift that culture? Is it just the CEO being like, this is the way we're going to go?

在推动文化从'不做实验'转变为'每年千次实验'的过程中，你学到了哪些经验？

What have you learned about helping shift a culture from no, we're not doing experiments to a thousand experiments a year?

确实。首先要归功于CEO和联合创始人Eric、Danny。他们虽不习惯这种公司成长思路，但展现出的思维弹性和鼓励态度——推动公司进化并将实验作为工具——实在太棒了。他们和我一样站在前线倡导产品驱动增长和实验文化。

Yeah. I mean, definitely a lot of credit to the the CEO and co founders like Eric and Danny. They're amazing. It's not 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 been on the front lines preaching product led growth and experimentation just as much as as I have.

很高兴你提到这点，因为对我加入公司而言，不与联合创始人及现有方针冲突至关重要。这绝对是关键中的关键。就像我在播客开头用游戏评测和正向反馈举例——正是这类实践案例才能真正激励团队，对吧？

So I'm glad that you brought that up because I think that is critically important for me joining a company to not be at odds with, you know, the the cofounders and the existing approach of the company. I think that's absolutely, absolutely critical. I think the you know, I started this podcast with the example of the game review and the positivity and how that was shared. I mean, I think those types of things are really what motivate people. Right?

人们需要亲眼见证实践成果。胜利——没错，你们需要胜仗，而且要庆祝这些胜利。

They need to see this working in practice. Wins. You can yeah. You need wins. You gotta celebrate them.

当学习成果被全面应用时，大家自然会感到振奋。这种情况下谁能不充满干劲呢？所以目标不能脱离实际凭空设定，更不能只靠高层指挥。

People feel good about the learning. It's applied across the board. Like, who's not gonna be energized by that, I think. Right? So, you can't just set goals in a vacuum and, you know, create it from from top.

对吧？人们必须看到它实际运作起来，当它有效时，指标会变化，你学得更快，交付也更快，那是一个很棒的工作环境。

Right? People have to see it working, and and when it works, like, metrics move, and you learn faster, and you ship faster, and that that's a that's a great environment to be part

你们团队跑的第一个实验是什么？还记得吗？

What was the first experiment you guys ran? Do you remember?

我不清楚，其实那是在我来之前的事了。

I don't know. Before my time, actually.

好的，明白了。所以他们招你进来之前就已经在走这条路了？

Okay. Okay. Got it. So they're already going down this track before they brought you in?

他们之前跑过...跑过一些实验。

They had run they had run a they had run some.

好的，很棒。你觉得要在大规模实验中取得成功，还有哪些关键经验是必须掌握的？

Okay. Sweet. Are there any other key lessons that you think people need to know to be successful running experiments at scale?

实验系统本身和单个实验同样重要，甚至可能更重要。首先建立增长模型很关键，这样你才能理解公司如何增长以及要利用哪些渠道。必须确保产品内外都配置完善，否则实验结果会乱七八糟。

The system matters just as much as any given experiment, probably even more. Right? I think starting with a growth model so you have an understanding of how your company grows in the first place and which channels you're going to leverage is critical. You need to make sure that you are instrumenting your product in and out. Otherwise, you're gonna run experiments and have wonky results.

我不会具体点名哪家公司，但我曾在一家拥有内部实验工具的公司工作。大约入职三个月时，我们正在运行一些实验，结果发现用户留存率的配置实际上是反的。所有正向结果都显示为负向结果。天啊。

I won't name which company, but I I was I was part of a company that had an in house experimentation tool. It's about three months into the company. We're running, like, some experiments, and we realized that user retention was actually configured backwards. So all positive results were negative results. Oh, jeez.

所以这有点尴尬。然后你只能重新回到应用里。

So that was kind of embarrassing. And You just go to app. Again.

撤销所有这些实验然后

Undo all those experiments and just

是啊。我当时还想提升留存率呢。这挺奇怪的。明明我们看到用户更频繁地使用那些功能，为什么用户留存率反而在下降？

Yeah. I was like Drive up retention. It's kinda weird. Like, we're seeing people use the the features a lot more. Why is user retention going going negative?

所以关于这类事情我有一大堆恐怖故事。不过

So I have plenty of horror stories around that type of stuff. But

哦天哪。除了恐怖故事，你也分享过不少实验成功的精彩案例。有没有另一个让你特别自豪、或者真正改变轨迹的例子？无论是在Duolingo、Grammarly还是国际象棋项目？

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 trajectory changing either at Duolingo or Grammarly or or Chess?

其实我已经分享了chess.com和Grammarly各一个案例。关于Duolingo我也可以聊聊。嗯。

The so I already shared one at chess.com and one of Grammarly. I mean, I could talk a bit about about Duolingo as well. Mhmm.

是的。

Yeah.

多邻国，你们还邀请了杰克逊上播客对吧？就是讨论连续打卡那期？

Duolingo, and you had Jackson on the podcast. Right? When you talked about the streak?

对，正在聊

Yes. Talking

连续打卡的话题。他抢了我的风头，因为我本来也想谈这个。但通过坚持打卡日历记录学习时长来帮助用户入门——而非直接达成重大里程碑——这理念太棒了。我们做了件有趣的事：成立了病毒传播团队。说实话，'病毒性'这个概念对我来说一直很模糊。

about the streak. His thunder because I was gonna think about that. But the amount of learning through, commitment and putting streaks on a calendar and just getting people started, right, as opposed to achieving some large milestone, that was huge. I think we we did something interesting. We spun up a virality team, and virality is this, like, really amorphous thing to me.

我认为在产品中制造病毒式传播非常困难，但多邻国确实是个常被分享的产品。为此我们专门投入时间，在应用内短暂添加了截图追踪功能，只为找出用户最常截图的场景。其他应用也有类似现象，这并非什么坏事。通过这段时期的观察，我们得以明确：连续打卡里程碑是最明显的分享点，

I think it's really hard to generate virality in your product, but Duolingo is a product that is shared quite a bit, and so we invested actually in some time to essentially add screenshot tracking for, like, a brief period of time in the app, just so we could find out the hotspots of where users were doing screenshots. And you see this in other apps too. It's not necessarily, like, you know, some some horrible thing. But we we did this for some period of time, and we're able to basically articulate and say, okay. You know, streak milestones are the obvious one.

多邻国课程里那些特别有趣的挑战也被高频分享。还有冲进排行榜前三名等等。找到这些自然传播节点后，我们配备插画师和动画师，围绕这些场景打造了令人愉悦的体验，效果出奇地好。与其逆着用户直觉强迫他们分享本不愿分享的内容，不如顺势而为——

Really funny challenges that you get in the Duolingo experience is also super highly shared. Advancing in the top three of a leaderboard is another thing. Anyway, so you can find these different moments where that's the case. And then we staff those moments with illustrators and animators and created these really delightful experiences around them, and I that worked amazingly well. So as opposed to going against, I guess, human intuition and trying to get them to share stuff that they otherwise wouldn't, on the margins, wanna share, like, lean into it more.

重点优化那些用户已自发截图的场景，将其体验提升五到十倍。这种方法能带来巨大增长。虽然不算严格意义上的实验，更像是核心产品策略，但这个洞察确实让我觉得很有意思。

Actually, like, grab the moments where users are already organically screenshotting and make those much, much, much better. And you can kind of five x or 10 x and and drive a lot of growth that way too. So that's not so much an experiment. It's more a core product thing, but, you know, it just resonated with me that that was interesting.

嗯，这与你的探索与利用方法论相连接。只需找到正在发生变化的探索点，然后以积极的方式加以利用。

Well, it connects to your explore and exploit methodology. Just find where explore where things are happening, and then try to exploit in a nice positive way.

你说得对。

You got it.

说到这个，你提到Duolingo非常擅长习惯养成和动机行为。感觉国际象棋在这方面也很出色。嗯。你在这两家公司都工作过，关于如何激励人们、如何培养习惯，你学到了什么？

Speaking of that, you mentioned this with Duolingo is just very good at habit formation and motivation, behavior. It feels like Chess is good at this too. Mhmm. You've worked at both these companies. What have you learned about how to motivate people, how to create habits?

再次强调，Duolingo从一开始就离不开这个洞见，对吧？他们致力于关注动机并构建许多策略。Jorge实际上有一个游戏化模型，包含三大支柱：核心循环、元游戏和个人资料。

Again, like, Duolingo would not have started without this, insight from day one. Right? They they aim to to focus on motivation and build a lot of these, like, tactics. Jorge actually had this model of, like, gamification, patterns having essentially three pillars to it. You have the core loop, you have the, metagame, and then you have the profile.

所以我们也是这么考虑的，核心循环就是你完成的课程。上一节课，获得奖励，延长连续学习天数，第二天收到推送通知。这是产品的核心循环，确保其紧凑性至关重要，因为人们需要坚持的习惯。

And so we actually thought about it that way too where, you know, your core loop is is your lesson that you go through. You do a lesson. You get some rewards. You extend your streak, and then the next day, you get a push notification. It's kind of the core loop of the product, and making that really tight is is super important because people need a habit to stick to.

然后你需要元游戏，对Duolingo来说像是学习路径，但也包括排行榜成就这类长期目标，让你有持续的动力。个人资料同样关键，因为它随时间积累，反映了你在产品体验中的投入。当这三者都做好时，就能打造出非常成功的长期学习旅程。转到chess.com这边，我们看到超过75%的新用户自认为是国际象棋新手或初学者。

Then you need a metagame, which for Duolingo is kind of like the path, but it's also the leaderboard achievements, kind of long term things that you're gonna strive to such that you have, like, long term, I guess, motivation, to continue doing the thing. And then the profile is also critical because you build up a profile over time. It's a reflection of your investment inside the product experience. And so when you nail those three things, you can end up with a long term learning journey that can be quite successful. And then to flip over 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.

遗憾的是，如果你是国际象棋新手或初学者，实时对弈的体验不会太愉快。数据显示，这些用户中只有不到三分之一能赢第一局。而输掉一局后，用户留存率比赢局时低10%。

And, unfortunately, if you're new to chess and you're a beginner, you're not gonna have that fun of a time playing live games. We see this in the data. It's like less than a third of those users actually win their first game. And when you lose a game, user retention is 10% worse than when you win a game.

这还不算太糟，但规模扩大后就很成问题了。

That's not so bad, but at scale, that's bad.

是啊，而且情况可能会更糟。确实如此。但通常很多手游的做法是，他们会创建一个极度简化的游戏版本。对我们国际象棋来说这更难实现。

Yeah. And and it could be worse. That's true. But and so, typically, what, like, a lot of mobile games will do is they'll just create, like, a super simplified version of the game. It's harder for us to do at chess.

在不改变规则的前提下，我觉得...我不确定。这让我深刻意识到，当你尝试学习新事物时——无论是语言学习、国际象棋还是其他——最初的阶段往往充满自我怀疑，不断强化'我不擅长这个'的念头。因此，精心设计引导用户绕过这些障碍的体验至关重要。

And so without changing the rules of that, right, I think that that's I don't know. It's just very eye opening to me that when you're trying to learn something, whether that be language learning or or chess or whatever, usually, those first steps are fraught with, you know, a lot of self doubt and reinforcement that you're not good at the thing, and so it's it pays to be very intentional to craft experiences that, you know, guide the user around that.

我不禁要问，有什么方法能改善这种情况吗？

Well, I can't help but ask, is there anything that helped that along?

有的。我们正在尝试的是：如果用户表明自己是象棋新手，我们会设计更愉悦的入门教学体验，而不是直接让他们参与实时对战。比如前五局隐藏评分，避免用户看到分数直线下跌。这类技巧还有很多。

Yeah. So, like, something we're experimenting right now is just, like, purely, if you say that you're new to chess, we're gonna craft a more delightful learn how to play experience as opposed to dropping into a live game. That's an example. Another is, hiding your ratings for the first five times such that you're not seeing your rating kind of plummet. There's a lot of tips and tricks you can do.

我脑海里浮现出一个小人儿在说：'看好了，要这样将军'。

I'm just imagining a little guy that's like, here's how you winch.

没错。或者与教练对弈、与朋友切磋、和机器人练习...其实有很多不同的途径。

Yeah. Or play play against a coach. Play against a friend. Play against a bot. There's there's a bunch of different avenues

你可以采取的方式。我真正渴望的是与真人对抗，然后就像这样，告诉你应该如何移动。就像这样，这里。这就是方法

you can take. What I'd love is play against someone real, and then here's, like, here's the way you should move. Just like, here. Here's how

我们会我们会帮你赢的。就像实时提示那样？是的。没错。

we're gonna we're gonna help you win. Like a hint in real time? Yeah. Yeah.

是的。

Yeah.

是啊。不过，我可不想那时候和你对战。

Yeah. Well, I don't I don't wanna be playing you then.

好的。让我再问你几个问题。首先稍微宏观一点，在你工作过的众多公司中，关于打造产品或组建团队，你学到的最反直觉的经验是什么？

Okay. Let me ask you a couple more questions. One is just zooming out a little bit. What's what's the most counterintuitive lesson you've learned about building products or building teams across the many companies you've worked at?

是的。关于产品我已经谈了很多，所以也许我暂时转向团队方面。我认为标准的招聘和团队建设方式是，你知道，你填写一份职位描述，列出你寻找的一系列特质。通常你会找到一份与你公司类似的公司名单，然后试图从中招聘，对吧？我觉得这是很多公司采取的典型默认路径。而我在一些小型初创公司工作的经历，比如以多邻国为例，让我深受触动——在那里，我反复看到最高效的员工往往就是那些具有高度自主性、思维敏捷、充满活力的人。

Yeah. I've talked a lot about products, so maybe I'll flip to the team side for a bit. I think the standard way to hire and build a team is, you know, you fill out a JD, it's got a whole bunch of different characteristics that you're looking for. You typically will find, you know, a short list of companies that are kind of similar to yours, and then you try to hire for that, right? I think that's kind of the typical default path that that a lot of companies take, and I was really struck by, you know, my experience working at, you know, some smaller startups or, you know, take Duolingo as an example where, over and over and over, like, I saw some of the highest performers just being people that had very high agency, had that clock speed, had that energy.

没错。他们关心使命，但未必需要在该领域有深厚经验。事实上，有时候那些经验反而可能成为某种桎梏，特别是在AI导致行业格局快速变化的当下。很多你习得的习惯实际上需要有意识地摒弃。明白吗？

Yes. They they cared about the mission, but they didn't necessarily need to have deep experience on that matter. And in fact, sometimes that experience could be a crutch in in certain ways, especially in this world where the grounds are shifting so fast with AI. A lot of your, like, learned habits actually need to be intentionally discarded. You know?

在处理这类事情时，你需要保持初学者的心态。因此我认为这一点比以往任何时候都更为真实，即寻找那些反应迅速、行动敏捷、思维快速的人。对吧？我认为学习速度最快的公司，正是我愿意押注的类型，因为我相信这些公司最终能够生存并蓬勃发展。

You need to have a beginner's mind on this type of stuff. So I think this is more true than ever, like, looking for people that respond and move quickly and and think, you know, just just faster and move faster. Right? I think speed the fastest speed of learning, those types of companies are the ones that I wanna bet on because I think those those will end up surviving and thriving.

那么再深入探讨一下，这种高能动性的理念最近非常流行，比如雇佣高能动性的人。稍微展开来说，你提到了几个特质。让我们帮助大家理解你所看到的。其一是时钟速度，他们思考快、行动快、学习快。

So just to double click on this, this idea of high agency is very trending these days of just, like, hire high agency people. To unpack that a little bit, you mentioned a few of these traits. So let's just help people see what you see. So one is clock speed. Just they think fast, they move fast, they learn fast.

你还会关注哪些方面来判断他们是高能动性的人？

What else do you look for that helps you see that they're high agency people?

是的，实际上很多迹象都出现在面试过程之外，这很有趣。很多情况下，是他们提出的问题类型。他们是否真正尝试过你的产品并深入了解？很多情况下，是推荐信。甚至是他们安排面试时的沟通方式。

Yeah, mean, lot of it actually happens outside of the interview process, interestingly. So a lot of it is, you know, the types of questions they ask. Have they actually tried your product and gotten deep into it? A lot of it is the, you know, it's the references. It's the, like, communication that they have to even set up your interview.

比如，他们带入对话的能量。你实际上可以从这些特质中捕捉到很多软性信号。随着时间的推移，你会逐渐识别出这些模式。我不敢说自己做得完美，但我已经学会比过去更平衡地看待这些因素——过去我只机械地按照问题清单和评分标准行事。

Like, it's the energy they bring into the conversation. You can actually pick up a lot of soft signals on some of these traits. Yeah, over time, you kinda pick up on some of these patterns. I don't know that I'm perfect at it, but I've I've learned to balance those things quite a bit more than I did in the past when I would just purely read from my questions and my rubric and not care about anything else.

没错。这里面有种氛围成分。这也支持了工作试用的面试方式，而不仅仅是谈话式面试，比如让他们实际与你共事一周之类的。

Yeah. There's, a vibes component to it. This is also kind of support for the work trial way of interviewing versus just a talk interview where you have them actually work with you for a week or whatever.

说得很对。

It's a great point.

好的。我还想问你一个问题。你曾在从初创公司到Grammarly各种规模的公司工作过。我不确定你是否称它为大型公司、较大公司，Duolingo的规模...我不清楚Duolingo有多大？

Okay. One other question I wanted to ask you. You've worked at a bunch of different sizes of companies from startup to Grammarly. I don't know if you call it a big company, bigger company, Duolingo's Duolingo's. I don't How big is Duolingo's?

他们大约有

They're about

一千人左右。

a thousand people.

好的，明白了。

Okay. Cool.

是的。不过我职业生涯初期也在谷歌工作过。

Yeah. But I worked at Google too to start my career.

哦对。那么关于公司规模如何影响个人幸福感，你有什么心得？在帮助他人决定适合的公司规模方面，你总结了哪些经验？

Oh, right. Okay. What have you learned about just the size of company that makes you happy? What have you learned about just helping other people that you talk to decide what size of company is good for them?

我坚信每个人都有最适合自己发光发热的公司发展阶段。我个人经历了从科技巨头到微型初创公司，最终落脚于中等规模企业的历程——我认为这就是我的最佳适配区。之前提到过，真正能给我个人带来能量的是既能纵观公司全局运作，又能深入细节：我可以与具体团队协作，查阅实验数据结果，这种规模刚刚好。

I I definitely believe that everyone has a company stage that they shine best at. I've personally gone through this journey of big tech to, like, tiny, tiny, tiny startup, then landed in the middle, which I consider, like, my own goal lock zone. I talked earlier about, like, what actually gives me personally a lot of energy is seeing across a company's efforts, but also the company being small enough that I can get into the details. I can work with the specific teams. I can read experiment, you know, results.

我可以从像素层面分析问题。因此我发现，这两种特性的平衡最适合中等规模的公司，至少对我而言是如此。在像谷歌这样的大公司，你面对的是巨大的规模，这本身就很有趣。你能从同事那里学到很多最佳实践。

I can look at the pixels. And so I find that the balance of those two things tends to fit best with medium sized companies, but that's me. Right? I I think at big companies, like Google, you're dealing with immense scale, which is interesting by itself. You learn a lot of best practices from your peers.

大公司拥有你可能想学习的所有工具和功能，但它们往往行动迟缓，很难快速推出产品，这最终让我有点抓狂。而光谱的另一端是那些微型初创公司，它们动作极快，但我在这些初创公司里熬白了头——因为没人知道你的公司存在。你需要一个个地招募员工，一个个地争取用户。虽然你能快速学习并推出大量产品，但若想对世界产生重大影响，在极其微小的初创公司里奋斗其实相当煎熬。

They have all the kind of tools and functions that you would possibly want to go learn from, but they can tend to move slower, and it's harder to kinda ship things and get them out the door, which, you know, eventually drove me nuts a little bit. On the flip end of the spectrum, these tiny startups, they move incredibly fast, but I grew, like, all my gray hair from those tiny startups because no one knows about your company. And so you're recruiting people one by one. You're, you know, trying to get users one by one. So, yeah, you can you can learn fast and ship a lot of things, but if you're trying to make a big impact on the world, it can be be actually pretty grueling to do so at at really, really, really small startups.

当然有些初创公司能超速发展并成功突围，显然我不会贬低这条路，毕竟我自己也尝试了很久。但对我来说，我更喜欢这样的领域：既能参与规模化的贡献，又能以更接近日频或周频的节奏推进工作，而不是月频或季频。

Now some of them do hyperscale and make it out, and, obviously, I I'm not one to to trash that because that's the path that I tried for for quite a while. But for me, like, I really like the zone where I can contribute at scale, but also execute at a pace that's more on, like, the daily and weekly scale, right, as opposed to monthly and quarterly.

你提到中等规模时，大致是指多大的公司？

And when you say medium, what size of company is that roughly?

对。我们播客里讨论的这些公司规模通常在500到1000人左右。这类公司往往已有十到二十年的历史，具备持久性，最好是盈利状态。它们拥有优秀的管理团队，但仍有许多发展空间需要探索。

Yeah. So these companies that we've talked about in the podcast are about 500 to a thousand people. Typically, these companies will have been around, let's say, ten to twenty years. Like, they're durable, ideally profitable. They have a good leadership team, but there's still a lot of dimensions to go figure out.

很多这样的公司正处于关键转折点，所以它们绝非停滞不前。你需要找到一个同样充满活力的平台。

A lot of them are in in key inflection points, so they're certainly not stagnant. Right? You you need to find a place that's dynamic too.

有意思。十到二十年的公司...我不确定。确实没多少人会觉得这是理想选择。

Interesting. Ten to twenty years old. I don't know. Yeah. That's a that's a not many people would feel like that's where I wanna be.

是的。我很高兴你找到了几家喜欢工作的公司。最后一个问题，这将带我们进入播客中一个我称之为'失败角落'的固定环节。人们听到你在这些公司做的所有实验故事。它们都取得了巨大成功。

Yeah. I love that you found a number of companies like that that you enjoyed working at. Last question, and this is gonna be taking us to a recurring segment on the podcast that I call Failed Corner. People hear all these stories of all these experiments on all these companies you worked at. They're all killing it up into the right.

实际上你也提到过，很多事情并不顺利。能否分享一个出错的经历，一次失败，以及它教会了你什么？

In reality, you've touched on this. A lot of things don't work out great. So can you share a story when something went wrong, when you failed, and what that taught you?

首先，在增长领域，失败是家常便饭。所以我不会具体讲某个增长故事，因为这些对我的自尊打击不大。但在我职业生涯早期，我做过很多核心产品工作。我曾在一家叫Chariot的初创公司工作，不知道你是否在旧金山生活过。

First of all, in the growth world, you're failing all the time. So I'm not gonna pick a specific growth story because those don't actually eat my ego too much. But earlier in my career, I did a lot of core product work. I worked for this startup called Chariot. I know if you ever lived in San Francisco.

对，就是那种类似公交的Uber蓝色巴士

But Yes. It was like the bus, Uber blue

没错。通勤班车，大约15座的班车。它们基本上是从各个社区开往旧金山市中心。这种通勤服务介于公交系统和Uber/Lyft之间。

Yes. Commuter shuttles, like 15% shuttles. Yes. They would essentially drive from various neighborhoods into Downtown San Francisco. It's kind of a commuting use case across between, like, the the public bus system and and an Uber and Lyft.

我在那里工作了一段时间，负责产品。核心服务深受用户喜爱，可靠、快速且价格合理。但我们开始对提升车辆利用率这个想法很感兴趣，认为如果提供动态路线可能会让服务更具创新性，更接近Uber和Lyft的模式。

So I was there for some time. I 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 enough. But we got pretty interested in this idea that, you know, maybe we can improve utilization. Maybe we can make the service a little bit more innovative if we offer dynamic routes, more similar to Uber and Lyft.

比如，司机原本是固定路线行驶，但如果他们有空闲时间，是否可以绕道去接人，比如到乘客家门口之类的。我们尝试了这个方案，称之为Chair Direct。虽然是个有趣的尝试，但最终失败了，我也从中吸取了很多教训。其中一个教训就是：这有点像在寻找问题的解决方案。

Like, how could we, like, the drivers are driving these fixed routes, but, you know, if they have spare time, they can go out of their way, go pick up somebody, like, at their house or something and, like, keep going. So we tried this. We called the chair direct. Really interesting attempt, but I learned a lot of lessons there because ultimately it didn't work out. One lesson is like, this was kind of a solution searching for a problem.

比如说，你从来不会单纯地想要追求一个，呃，你知道的，如果我们这样做而不是那样做会不会更好，而不是像这样——这是我们的用户，这是我们要解决的问题。这就是为什么这会让他们高兴，等等。这是第一点。第二点是，你必须考虑到，特别是在这些更像市场平台的业务中，不止有一个终端用户。我们把太多注意力放在乘客应用上，却没有意识到，哦对了，司机们也在承受着这种体验的大部分压力，我们的运营团队同样如此。

Like, you never just purely wanna chase a, like, you know, wouldn't it be nice if we did this as opposed to, you know, this is our our user, and this is the problem that we're solving. This is why it's gonna delight them, etcetera. That's kind of one. Second is, you gotta consider, especially in these more, like, marketplace type businesses, there's more than just one end user, And we focus so much of our attention on the rider app without realizing, oh, yeah. The drivers are carrying a lot of the brunt of this experience, and our operations team is as well.

对吧？所以当司机们感到困惑或不满时，这可能会导致整个产品体验变得很有挑战性。对吧？所以这绝对是另一点。第三点是，我们实际上在服务推出前做了很多公关工作，只是为了宣传。

Right? And so when the die the drivers are confused or disgruntled, that can lead to a a challenging overall experience for for the product. Right? So that's definitely another one. And the third one is, like, we did a lot of actually PR prior to the service going out just to get the word out.

而且，你知道，公关有其时机和场合，但我认为在你还没有验证客户确实需要这个东西之前就做公关是相当冒险的。一旦推出，可能会导致很多沉没成本，因为你只是，你知道的，你需要坚持到底。你希望看到它成功。所以，是的，这是十年前的事了。说实话，我在那家公司过得很愉快，但我仍然清晰地记得这件事，因为它包含了，你知道的，三个或更多关键教训，这些教训在我之后构建许多产品时一直伴随着我。

And, you know, PR has has its time and place, but I think doing it before you have validation that customers definitely want the thing is quite risky. It can lead to a lot of sunk cost once you get it out because you're you're just, you know, you need to see it through. You wanna see it succeed. So, yeah, this is a decade ago. Honestly, I had a great time at that company, but I still remember that vividly because it contained, you know, three or more kind of key lessons that carried forward as I have built many products since then.

是啊。感觉你走到了完全相反的极端。在告诉任何人之前，我们会把所有事情都先试验一遍。

Yeah. It feels like you went to the complete other end. We'll run experiments of everything before you tell anyone about it.

没错。

That's right.