Duolingo's not-so-secret formula to success
Being able to move fast is half the battle.
When TikTok was being banned, the only approval we needed for our post was “did we translate this correctly in Mandarin?” Our posts were up within 3 hours.
When Duolingo took over Charli XCX's opening night, Kelsey Dempsey pitched an idea and got approval for excess budget within a day.
When a learner posted their kid wanting the owl to prove he goes to sleep too, Roy Park and Karen Buchanan pitched an idea to each other and posted within an hour. I found out later after checking my phone.
We arm our team with knowledge: they know our brand limits, they know what leadership cares about and what to avoid, and they know where to go when they’re unsure - with guaranteed fast response. They know our work is a priority because it leads to new users and all teams will treat it as such: legal, senior leadership, and standards and practices.
We run with speed - understanding the risks that can be posed. However, every strategy has pros and cons and the amount of new learners social brings with rapid response is not worth the con of waiting for every inch of approval.
Most of the time, we’ve come out on top. And, the times we haven’t, we learned from our mistakes and integrated them deeper into our brand guidelines. Whether we like it or not, the internet moves on fast from our wins and our losses.
"Fear is expensive. Fear and growth cannot co-exist." - Layla Shaikley
We are not afraid of messing up. We are not afraid of having to have tough conversations. We are not afraid of Legal. We are not afraid of our senior leadership team. We've spent the past 5 years fostering this mindset, these relationships because it is far too expensive to not do so. It costs more time & resources for less user acquisition to sit on the sidelines waiting.
Every single person on our short-form content team knows how to ideate & create a short-form video... and has made multiple viral hits.
You can tell pretty early on in an interview process who is used to making their work and who's had others make their work for them.
In fact, Kelsey Dempsey, Karen Buchanan and Melissa Yeung hold the trophy for most viral Duolingo TikTok ever. We’ve invested in a team that can roll their sleeves up & make the work happen. Our most impactful moments at Duolingo have been done by L1s and L2s!
The people creating the content are the approvers. The buck stops with the social team. This culture is so ingrained now at Duolingo, that if I even ask our PR team or Senior Leadership if they want to approve a certain post, they always look at me like I’m crazy. They trust us to do our job.
That literally means I approve my own posts & my teams posts. If we want to gut check a risk, we always flag it with our broader brand marketing team, but the decision always comes back to social.
We run on these basic assumptions.
We are all stewards of the brand - the social team wants the brand to go viral and gain new users without sacrificing brand love.
SLT trusts that social is not trying to destroy the brand.
Social owns social channels (…shocker!). Unless something is highly illegal or a huge no no, we decide what goes live. We are the final decision makers.
Our users are not a monolith. Just because they’re seeing spicy personality on Duolingo's TikTok does not mean they think Duo is incapable of teaching languages. In fact, the human connection of it all makes them trust us more.
We will not be liked by everyone and that’s ok. Our duty is to new users, not marketers. We disagree and commit.
When we were creating our TikTok farewell content, and tweeting, we had a quick conversation about our idea of exposing that Mark Pavic was the person in the suit.
Brand flags:
Exposing the person in the suit
Tweeting about an increase in learners - how do we report on data and internal metrics when things area changing every second? We needed to make sure the data was accurate and waited until we got the go-ahead.
What was not a brand flag:
Including “raw, next question” in Mandarin. The joys of learning a language are the fun phrases, the slang, the cursing. They're going to say it anyways, might as well learn while doing it.
These are all qualities of a social team that can be replicated. What's unique about Duolingo is we approach our brand in a social-first way which has always meant optimizing for speed, teamwork and all hands on deck.
This post is a part of my series of bringing my LinkedIn newsletter over to Substack. Thank you for your patience!
I’d love a post on how your interview! When you say you can tell who is used to making their work, how? Thank you! Love your writing!