Duolingo

Great to see The Wall Street Journal talking about the power of the Duolingo streak! Duolingo’s streaks and notifications transform learning into a fun daily habit. Through thousands of A/B tests on streaks and notifications, we’ve refined how we create lasting habits. Our very own Liz Nagler and Bozena Pajak do a great job of explaining how and why we do the things we do to keep our learners engaged: https://lnkd.in/dGcFS_4Y

Today, we announced Duolingo’s second acquisition as a public company: Hobbes, a motion design studio. Motion design—an animation discipline that uses movement to add visual interest to user experiences — is a gap in our current animation pipeline. To date, we have invested most of our energy and focus into character and technical animation. The creatives at Hobbes will bolster our existing animation pipeline, improve our UX, deepen the ways in which users interact with our product, and help further our mission of developing the best education in the world. We are so excited to welcome the Hobbes team to Duolingo—let’s do this! Read more about the acquisition here: https://lnkd.in/dJjpZ2Kz

Since I joined Duolingo in 2015, we’ve grown from 20 engineers to a team of almost 400. I came across our first-ever employee handbook and our rules and expectations have grown quite a bit in the last 9 years 🤣🤣🤣 As we’ve grown, we naturally have had to implement processes that are necessary for any company of our size. Whether it was a simple thing like “come in before noon” or bigger changes, like career ladders and project retros, growing almost twenty-fold requires figuring out what engineering needs at each new stage of growth and maturity! But there are also things we wanted to preserve no matter how big that we got: 1. Gathering a range of perspectives 💡 In the very early days (before my time) the entire company met together every day (there weren’t many of them!) to decide what to work on that day. Since we’re far too big to take in everyone’s opinion when we make a decision that impacts all of engineering, we’ve tried a few things to ensure we’re getting diverse perspectives. One is the Engineering Council, a cross-functional group made up of 12 engineers in different levels, tenure, specialties (with rotating membership). The council can bring forward topics they want to discuss. It’s really great way to keep a pulse on what matters to the engineering org, with council notes shared publicly over Slack. 2. A culture of collaboration 🤝 As we get bigger and have more and more teams, we wanted to ensure that people continued to help each other out and mentor each other, whether it’s via code review, tech spec review, or architecture review. We do this in a few ways, one of the best being our “Peer Bonus” system. Any Duo can nominate another Duo for a monetary bonus for “going above and beyond” to help out, taking the time to teach and share knowledge, or making a key process improvement. The bonus and recognition is sent to their entire team so that we’re incentivizing this kind of positive, collaborative behavior. 3. Time away from the desk 🥪 Social time is really important at Duolingo. I think one of the coolest things we’ve managed to preserve as we grow is that we all eat lunch together every day. New Duos are always so surprised to see Luis von Ahn in the cafeteria! It’s such a special hour and people really respect it—if someone schedules a meeting over lunch, it must be a really urgent meeting. These are just a few examples! Since engineering is the biggest org at Duolingo, we’re often the testing ground for new processes and changes (our experimentation culture is literally everywhere!) For the most part, I think we’ve done a good job… though maybe some Duos miss coming into work at noon 🤣 #workplaceculture #engineeringculture #changemanagement