We needed to be better at basing our decisions on data, insights, and foundational principles. I was committed to making sure our next attempts would be more methodical. And we would have probably been dissuaded from focusing on referrals altogether. Being more systematic in just this area would have made a big difference in what gamification mechanics we chose to pursue. In other words, we needed to use better judgment in adapting when adopting. What adaptations are necessary to make this feature succeed in our context? Why might this feature succeed or fail in our context, i.e.

Why is this feature working in that product? Now when looking to adopt a feature, I ask myself: I came away from these attempts realizing that I needed a better understanding of how to borrow ideas from other products intelligently. We had failed to account for how a change in context can impact the success of a feature. In both of these situations, we had borrowed successful features from other products, but the wrong way. This meant that our strategy, which needed to rely on our best users, actually excluded them. However, our best and most active users already had Super Duolingo, and we couldn’t give them a free month when they were already in a plan. For Duolingo, we were trying to incentivize users by offering a free month of Super Duolingo. Referrals work for Uber because riders are paying for rides on a never-ending pay-as-you-go system. It also did not take long to understand why our referral program did not produce Uber-like success. I realized that I had been so focused on the similarities between Gardenscapes and Duolingo that I had failed to account for the importance of the underlying differences. It was the wrong gamification mechanic to adopt into Duolingo. Because there wasn’t any strategy to it, the Duolingo moves counter was simply a boring, tacked-on nuisance. But strategic decision-making isn’t required to complete a Duolingo lesson-you mostly either know the answer to a question or you don’t. When you are playing Gardenscapes, each move feels like a strategic decision, because you have to outmaneuver dynamic obstacles to find a path to victory. In hindsight, it became clear why the Gardenscapes moves counter was not a good fit for our product. The aftermath of these back-to-back failures in only a few months was a period of reflection for me about making better product bets.

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