How Duolingo Uses OKRs to Drive Performance

As someone with a keen interest in product and project management, I’ve taken to digging deep into the products and services I use daily to gain a better understanding of how successful companies plan, deploy and improve them.

Duolingo is a product that is close to my heart. As the child of immigrant children, I’ve been a language learner of some kind from the get-go. While I could never master my mother tongue, Duolingo has been crucial in my journey of initially getting a handle on Spanish – some 8 years after my last high school class, and today, grappling with its Iberian cousin Portuguese.

Last week, sometime in the middle of my daily metro Duo session, I had a thought:

What makes this product feel so good to use?”

Duolingo have done a fantastic job of creating an enjoyable, low friction, universally available – and let’s not forget profitable product, which has demonstrably met the value proposition proposed in their mission statement:

“…Our global team works together to make language learning fun, free, and effective for anyone who wants to learn, wherever they are.”

– Duolingo

While I could write many a word soup about the myriad of clever UX and UI design choices made by Duolingo, I decided to go a step further. I wanted to understand how these decisions came to be. What made Duolingo the kind of company that it is, and how did those concepts affect their product design?

As luck would have it, I was able to find an enthralling seminar, held by Karin Tsai (Duolingo’s former Senior Director of Engineering) at 2022’s GDC conference at San Francisco.

There were so many great points made during this presentation, I couldn’t hope to summarise all of it (do you self a favour and check it out); so I want to focus on a topic that stuck out to me as I learn more and more about product development and the processes used to facilitate continuous improvement to products in an agile environment. Let’s talk about:   

Objectives and Key Results

History

In 1954, one of the Godfathers of early Management Science Peter Drucker, released his book “The Practice of Management” which popularised the predecessor of Objects and Key Results (OKRs) – Management by Objectives. This process allowed for managers and employees to come together and set objectives which aligned with both the individual and the business’ preferred outcomes.

Fast forward some 30 years and OKRs, in turn popularised by Andy Grove, were created to improve on this process . The issue with MBOs is that while they are great for setting organisational goals agreed upon by the stakeholders involved, these objectives are quite rigid and don’t have any measurable results defined from the outset by which we can measure our success.

Enter OKRs. 

Example:

While MBOs are great at getting product teams working towards mutually agreed objectives, OKRs go a step further by defining just how we plan to tackle this objective, and how we can measure our success.

As you can see above, by including prioritised key results, and the expected measurable outcomes (the price of the rake, the time you have left before it gets dark, and how many weeds you uproot) we can analyse how much waste was avoided (time as well as money) and just how much we got done on Sunday morning.

HubSpot defines Objectives and Key Results as:

“A collaborative goal-setting methodology used by organizations, teams, and individuals to set ambitious goals with measurable results.”

– Hubspot

We can consider Objectives to be what exactly we want to do, while Key Results are tools to measure our progress in doing so.

Great, but what does this have to do with Duolingo?

Duolingo’s seminar makes it clear that they are all in with OKRs when it comes to goal-setting and task based alignment. By using the priorities of key results to generate a weighted score, Duolingo is able to understand how well they planned – gaining insights on how they can provide adequate: resources, support, and time  to realise their goals in a more efficient manner. 

An interesting point made was that there had to have been a mentality shift as OKRs were used not to document how effective a team was at achieving a given goal, but rather as a tool to understand how to plan and scope better – relieving unnecessary stress on the team in question.

The speaker mentioned four problems that were addressed by using this process:

• OKRs deliver better alignment on goals.
• Priorities were communicated to stakeholders with more transparency.
• Teams had more accountability to complete the tasks they were assigned.
• There was now more realistic planning and prediction regarding the goals set for teams in house.

What’s interesting (especially given our evermore KPI obsessed corporate environment) was the focus on ensuring that management was giving their teams the best conditions possible to succeed. Consistent review on both planning and scope  using qualitative data allows Duolingo product teams the ability to better understand the capabilities of their teams and as such avoid the dreaded “crunch”.

Hints and tips when setting OKRs:

1. Use consistent and precise terminology for naming deliverables to help prevent scope creep. By ensuring we are using the correct terms we can ensure we are hitting the correct milestones – while not over exerting ourselves.  
2. When setting a collaborative key result, it should be documented in exactly the same way by all affected teams and assigned the same priority. This explicitly expresses for both parties that: “this is the work that must be done, and this is how important it is to us both.”
3. OKRs can be strong incentives for teams, so we should use them to capture pivotal tasks – this is especially true for unglamorous work (think: documentation, cleaning up tech debt, and bug fixing) using OKRs allows us to quantify how efficient we are and provides an opportunity to celebrate the teams involved.

In conclusion:

OKRs are a process used by Duolingo to streamline the planning and monitoring of tasks performed by product teams. While it’s tempting to use OKRs just as a tool to measure how well we are doing at a particular objective, we can also use them to monitor how effectively we planned for it in the first place – leading to happier, more engaged teams.