How Duolingo Built Duolingo Max
with Natalia Castillejo — Director of Product
Duolingo Max put AI features behind the company's biggest price point. Natalia Castillejo on a decade of product work and how the team built its premium tier.
In this episode
- Duolingo started investing in AI product features in 2022 after getting early access to ChatGPT. It spent a year building and refining these features before packaging them into its new higher-priced Duolingo Max subscription tier in 2023.
- Duolingo Max wasn’t an overnight success. It wasn’t until the company launched video calls and repositioned Max from “pay more for AI” to “pay more for conversational language learning” that the new subscription tier really took off.
- Duolingo requires all PMs to be daily users of its app, and the company A/B tests every product change. This has led to a world-class product development culture built on both strong product intuition and rigorous experimentation.
- Duolingo always starts with the user problem that needs to be solved and works backward from there. This helps avoid “technology in search of a problem,” which is especially important right now as AI is unlocking all sorts of new technology.
- Duolingo is also encouraging its PMs to invest in AI tools to boost efficiency. This includes using tools like Replit to build prototypes without engineers, and building internal tools to predict the impact of an A/B test based on previous experiments.