Jackson Shuttleworth
Group Product Manager, Duolingo. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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Jackson Shuttleworth leads the retention team at Duolingo, where he is widely recognized for overseeing the development and optimization behind the app's signature streak mechanics. He previously worked in management consulting before joining Duolingo to spearhead product initiatives driving user habits.
1shows
1appearances
32statements
2resolved
2supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
Everything Jackson Shuttleworth said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Adding an explicit opt-out button to streak goals increased user commitment
“We captured, you know, just what happens if we add an opt out button and adding an opt out button when you would think like as a PM, oh, I'm like, you know, now users might not engage with my feature. That's a bad thing, but it was a huge win to let them do th…”
Strategic friction via haptics and animations significantly boosts user retention
“Your phone, you know, like there being a really cool haptic pattern as you extend your streak all of this stuff wins and it's cool because I think it wins There's a few reasons. One is it just makes you feel good, right? You know, you get some cool moment in y…”
Switching Duolingo streaks to one daily lesson drove massive DAU growth
“One of the most impactful experiments we ran was about, this was actually as I was joining, we had, or just after I joined, we had run this experiment was to move it from a XP based streak to just do one lesson a day and you'd extend your streak. And, you know…”
Duolingo's user retention jumps exponentially between days one and seven
“And what we found is that once you get to seven days, loss aversion kicks in and you retain. So going from a one to a two day streak, huge jump in retention, two to three day streak, slightly less, but still huge. And it's up until day seven. Once you hit day …”
Pre-selecting streak goals for users significantly reduced Duolingo engagement
“We thought once we built you know, a goal picker screen where you could pick between different streak lengths, we were like, oh, well, let's like recommend that users do a hard, you know, a harder goal and thinking that, okay, well, a harder goal is going to b…”
Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn personally reviews every proposed product experiment
“All of our changes at Duolingo go through product review that, you know, are reviewed by Luis. Luis reviews every single change that, you know, we propose or every experiment that we run”
Current user retention rate is Duolingo's most effective DAU growth lever
“What we found is that if we wanted to drive DAUs and Duolingo Cares, you know, our growth Northstar is DAUs, the metric that is most effective, you know, where a percentage change in that metric is, is most effective at driving DAUs is current user retention r…”
Duolingo purposely killed a winning in-lesson XP experiment to preserve UI simplicity
“It was a nice win, but we had added that UI element and You know, at least at the time, it was less clear what we would do with it, and we realized that, like, long-term, it was just gonna get in the way, and we'd rather, for simplicity's sake, pause that, you…”
Free lesson-based streak recovery outperformed paid gem repairs for user retention
“We had a feature in the day, you know, back in the day called streak repair. We give you your streak back. You had to pay gems, but we found that worked way better was a feature called earn back. And this is basically where you would have to do a certain numbe…”
Over-cheapening streaks for short-term engagement is an irreversible one-way door
“You can almost always get engagement wins up to a certain point by just Cheapening the streak, making it easier to extend, letting users have more flexibility, but you kind of got to hold the line at some point. It's not clear where that line is. And once you,…”
A basic 23.5-hour notification consistently outperforms complex delivery algorithms at Duolingo
“We have tried a bunch of ways to have much more complex logic and what always wins is 23 and a half hours.”
Metric-based product teams find high-ROI work easier than feature-based teams
“When you can be really laser focused on my goal each quarter is to make this metric go up. I think it's much easier to make sure that you're working on the highest ROI thing. I think when you think more about like, oh, I want to make this feature better. I thi…”
Any app can retain users with streaks if the core product works
“I'm kind of the opinion that any team, you know, any app out there can introduce a streak. And if you figure it out, it probably works you know, to retain users, but at the core, like you have to have an app that people want to use and people really like using…”
Duolingo has over 9 million users with year-plus streaks
“So we have right now over nine million users with a year plus streak.”
Streaks are Duolingo's biggest growth lever for driving daily active users
“I mean, if you look at the numbers, I think pretty objectively has been our biggest growth lover for driving DAUs.”
Streak mechanics should require only one atomic unit of app use
“As you're thinking about building a streak, like, I think it's really important to think about like what the unit of use of your app is. The unit of use for Duolingo is like doing a lesson. And so if what we care about is users coming back every day and doing …”
Duolingo tested one-exercise streak extensions and saw zero DAU lift
“And so we actually tested, Hey, if you do one exercise, Just one exercise in a lesson will extend your streak... What we realized when we ran this experiment is you know, DAUs moved not one bit.”
Duolingo ran over 600 streak experiments in a four-year period
“We we've run in the last four years, over 600 experiments on the street. So every other day effective. We're running an experiment”
About half of Duolingo's product experiments fail and are shut down
“We shut down about half of our experiments. So half of our experiments lose.”
Duolingo kills neutral experiments to prevent UI complexity and cognitive load
“If we're adding something and it's neutral, we tend to shut it down because it's just more cognitive load. It's something that we're gonna have to start building around a new UI element that we have to figure out how it fits into our system.”
Resetting optimized features to simple baselines prevents long-term UI bloat
“Eventually you just hit a local maxima and you say, like you talked about lunch and neutral experiments. This is a great example where it's like, all right, cool. Now we need to throw a bunch of this stuff out based on all the learnings. Can we reset this real…”
Streaks work best for products where daily user progress feels imperceptible
“The streak works really well for Duolingo because with language learning, it's really hard to see day-to-day progress and becoming more fluent, like become, and fluency is, is, is, is not even the right word. It's like becoming better at Spanish or whatever. I…”
An eight-word streak explanation added over 10,000 DAUs at Duolingo
“I ran some tests that just like tried to, in eight words, explain what a streak was. That was it. And it was a massive win because it really required, like it really dumbed down here is exactly how the streak worked. And it really helped users just understand …”
Streak design must prioritize functional comprehensibility over elaborate visual storytelling
“As you're thinking about designing around a streak, don't get too bought up, you know, or caught up into like, what is this, you know, like the beautiful story that you're trying to tell at the expense of it being a really comprehensible feature.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Jackson's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Group Product Manager, Duolingo | 1 | 32 | 100% 2/2 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |