Albert Cheng
Head of Growth & Monetization at Chess.com / Former Duolingo & Grammarly
One of the top consumer growth minds in the world, having led growth and monetization at Duolingo, Grammarly, and Chess.com, with earlier experience at YouTube working on streaming and gaming features.
Dimension Profile
Key Themes
Episode Summary
Albert Cheng shares his explore-exploit framework for finding growth opportunities, drawing from leading growth and monetization at Duolingo, Grammarly, and Chess.com. He reveals key monetization wins like sampling paid features for free Grammarly users, advocates for running 1,000 experiments per year, and discusses how AI is accelerating growth work while making experience-based intuitions less reliable.
Leadership Principles
- → Growth's job is to connect users to the value of your product, not pure metrics hacking
- → User retention is gold for consumer subscription companies — without it, you're forced to monetize on day one
- → High agency and clock speed matter more than deep experience, especially in fast-moving AI environments
Notable Quotes
"Growth as the job is to connect users to the value of your product. Growth sometimes gets this reputation that it's just pure metrics hacking."
— Reframing the purpose of growth work
"User retention is gold for consumer subscription companies. If you don't retain your users, then a lot of the onus is on getting them to pay on day one."
— On the biggest missing piece in consumer subscription products
"What if we actually sampled a number of different paid suggestions and interspersed them to free users across their writing? All of a sudden, people were seeing Grammarly as a much more powerful tool."
— On his biggest monetization win at Grammarly
Want to know how you compare?
Take the Assessment