Albert Cheng (00:00:00): Growth as the job is to connect users to the value of your product. Growth sometimes gets this reputation that it's just pure metrics hacking. Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:08): You've worked at three of the most successful consumer subscription products in the world. What do you think is the biggest missing piece that people don't get about building a successful consumer subscription product? Albert Cheng (00:00:18): 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. Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:26): Noam Levinsky, he said that I need to ask you about the biggest monetization win that you found at Grammarly. Albert Cheng (00:00:31): 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. Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:50): What's the most counterintuitive lesson you've learned about building teams? Albert Cheng (00:00:54): 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. Lenny Rachitsky (00:01:13): Today my guest is Albert Cheng. 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 now Chess.com. Earlier in his career at YouTube, he worked on streaming a...