What Albert Cheng thinks about design
Head of growth at Chess.com, previously growth and monetization lead at Grammarly and Duolingo and a product manager at Google.
Albert Cheng did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
Filter design · Newest first
Only Albert Cheng on design. See everyone on design
6 dated positions, 2025, in their own words. Our reading of what Albert Cheng has said — not written or endorsed by them.
-
Their wordsWhen 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%
↗Finding hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com)youtube.com 2nd of 26 in this recording
-
Their wordsAnd 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.
↗Finding hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com)youtube.com 13th of 26 in this recording
-
Their wordsI've worked a lot of companies right 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.
↗Finding hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com)youtube.com 19th of 26 in this recording
-
Their wordsSo 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 want to share like lean into it more actually like grab the moments where users are already organically screenshotting and make those much much much better and you can kind of 5x or 10x and and drive a lot of growth that way too.
↗Finding hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com)youtube.com 22nd of 26 in this recording
-
Their wordsThen you need a metag game, which for Duolingo is kind of like the path, but it's also the leaderboard, achievements, kind of long-term things that you're going to strive to such that you have like long-term, I guess, motivation uh 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.
↗Finding hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com)youtube.com 23rd of 26 in this recording
-
Their wordslike 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. And unfortunately, if you're new to chess and you're a beginner, you're not going to 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.
↗Finding hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com)youtube.com 24th of 26 in this recording