Day two of Pendomonium was just as jam-packed as the first, with many great insights from Product pros at Duolingo and General Motors to seasoned product experts and authors. Read on for a recap!
Zan Gilani, Staff Product Manager at Duolingo, led a great opening session on the #mtpcon stage about how Duolingo uses AI in its product. He explained how the platform recently introduced a video call feature to enhance its learning experience.
To build this experience, the product team honed in on four key principles:
Following these steps enabled Duolingo to build an enhanced AI experience for its users.
Another great nugget of insights was from Katie DeGraaf, SVP, Product and Design of General Motors. She led a session on transitioning into modern product practices. Katie walked us through the early stages of modern frameworks, citing methodologies like Agile, OKRs, and MoSCoW, explaining how we don't have any current frameworks to deal with the current product landscape. Her takeaways from her talk were clear:
Next up was seasoned product leader and CEO of Product Growth, Aakash Gupta, who took us through the fundamentals of PLG, breaking down case studies into what companies are doing PLG well.
He broke the process of creating a PLG movement into seven layers:
After the lunch break, we headed back to the #mtpcon stage to hear some great tips from Kasia Chmielinski, Co-Founder, The Data Nutrition Project on building ethical AI products.
Kasia made it clear that there will always be dangerous gaps in technology that humans need to fill; however, we always have opportunities to refuse, redirect, build better, or create new solutions.
"We need to make and develop technology that works for everyone," they stressed.
Our afternoon started with a double-header keynote featuring Hunter Calvert, Director of Analytics for Games at The New York Times, and Jessica Gelman, CEO of Kraft Analytics Group (KAGR). With extensive analytics experience, they both discussed the challenges and possibilities for creating better user experiences and using analytics.
Who remembers that whole viral spread of Wordle in late 2021? After being acquired by The New York Times (NYT) in 2022, the digital game became even more popular and garnered 3.4 billion players in 2023 alone.
In Calvert’s session, we got a peek into the NYT’s strategy and growth strategy after they bought Wordle, like metrics for success—aka app downloads and retention. They realised that users who played 2+ games a week had stronger retention.
Closing out the #mtpcon stage was Connor Joyce, Senior User Researcher at Microsoft, and author of Building Products That Make an Impact. He walked us through ways to identify the unique value additions AI can bring.
"With a solid feature definition and an understanding of the relevant superpowers, you and your team can decide if AI is the best tool to achieve the desired behaviour change. From there, it's essential to validate your approach," Connor explained.
No matter how advanced the technology, the key to success remains the same — solving real user problems. Our competitive edge comes from designing products that make a tangible difference.
We wrapped up the day with a laughter-filled keynote from Dan Heath, a best-selling author, speaker, and fellow at Duke Universtiy’s CASE center. His talk focused on how to change things that aren’t working and how to tackle obstacles, no matter how big or small. The metaphor he used during his session was the blockers or boulders we find in our paths. It might be in our path for a reason, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find ways to move it if we redeploy our resources effectively. Dan said that shifts happen when you change the system itself, not trying to change what’s in front of you.
As we close the curtain on another mind-bending day at Pendomonium, one thing's clear: the future of product is as unpredictable as a game of AI-powered charades.
From PLG layers to ethical AI, we've covered a lot of ground in such a short space of time. In case you missed a talk that you really wanted to catch, or simply wanted to relive a keynote session, stay tuned for full videos, slides, write-ups and more, all on our recap page, going live in the coming weeks!
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