Albert Cheng is the Chief Growth Officer at Chess.com. Drawing on growth roles at Duolingo and Grammarly, he discusses how to help users discover product value, build durable habits, and run disciplined experiments. — Lenny’s Podcast.

Albert Cheng consumer product growth infographic.

Part 1: Product Growth and User Activation

  1. User Onboarding: Early onboarding should help new users experience the product’s core value; Cheng urges growth teams to understand the user’s psychology and where the journey stalls. — Lenny’s Podcast.
  2. Activation: Define a meaningful first-value moment and test how the product helps users reach it; tutorial completion alone need not mean activation. — Lenny’s Podcast.
  3. Durable Retention: Cheng distinguishes lasting product value and habit formation from short-lived growth tactics; retention depends heavily on the core product experience. — Lenny’s Podcast.
  4. Feature Discoverability: At Grammarly, limited exposure to premium features let free users experience their value; Cheng reports that the approach nearly doubled upgrade rates. — Lenny’s Podcast.
  5. Explore and Exploit: Cheng describes growth work as balancing exploration for new opportunities with exploitation of approaches already shown to work. — Lenny’s Podcast.
  6. Grow Through Organic Discovery: In a direct Chess.com interview, Cheng describes search visibility, word of mouth, tournaments, and creator relationships as important acquisition channels; the original claim about marginal acquisition cost is not supported. — Subversive Podcast.
  7. Organic Sharing: At Duolingo, Cheng favored shareable moments that fit the learning experience over forcing users into viral mechanics. — Lenny’s Podcast.
  8. Product-Led Growth: At Grammarly, the growth and sales motions served different users; Cheng describes premium product sampling as a way to let users see value before upgrading. — Lenny’s Podcast.
  9. Learn Why Users Behave as They Do: Cheng pairs experiment results with questions about user psychology: measurement can show a change, while research helps explain its cause. — Lenny’s Podcast.
  10. Gamification With Purpose: Cheng discusses a framework of core loop, metagame, and player profile for building sustained engagement, crediting the framework to his former colleague Jorge. — Lenny’s Podcast.
  11. Design for Returning Users: In a mature product, lapsed users form a large audience. Cheng argues that their return experience deserves deliberate design, such as helping a language learner find an appropriate level again. — Lenny’s Podcast
  12. Put the Core Value in the Free Tier: Cheng favors keeping the core value of broad consumer products permanently free, then offering a limited taste of premium features so users can judge the upgrade. — Lenny’s Podcast
  13. Let Brand and Product Reinforce Each Other: Cheng says he moved from treating marketing and experimentation as alternatives to seeing how a product personality, social content, and the in-product experience can amplify one another. — Lenny’s Podcast
  14. Build Before the Wave: Chess.com invested in its core playing experience and infrastructure before the pandemic and The Queen’s Gambit sharply accelerated interest in online chess; the prior groundwork helped it absorb that demand. — Subversive Podcast
  15. Model Growth Before Scaling Tests: Cheng recommends starting with a growth model and reliable instrumentation so experiments can be interpreted against how the product actually acquires and retains users. — Lenny’s Podcast

Part 2: Leadership and High-Agency Teams

  1. Hire for Agency: Cheng says some high performers he worked with stood out for agency, energy, and learning speed rather than only prior domain expertise. — Lenny’s Podcast.
  2. Experience Is Not Everything: For some growth roles, Cheng places weight on commitment to the mission and capacity to learn even when candidates lack deep experience in the specific field. — Lenny’s Podcast.
  3. Scale Experimentation: Cheng describes systems and teams that enable many experiments and share what is learned, so decisions need not depend on one central approver. — Lenny’s Podcast.
  4. Put the Metric With the Right Team: At Grammarly, Cheng found that the core product team had more influence over repeated use than his growth team, so he moved ownership of that retention work to the product team. — Lenny’s Podcast.

Part 3: Experimentation and Data

  1. Learn From Failed Tests: Cheng treats a failed A/B test as useful evidence when the hypothesis and result are shared, instead of judging the team only by wins. — Lenny’s Podcast.
  2. Verify the Measurement System: Cheng warns that experiments need sound product instrumentation; he recounts finding a retention metric configured backwards in one company’s testing system. — Lenny’s Podcast.
  3. Measure the Behavior That Matters: Cheng discusses activation, engagement, retention, and monetization as distinct parts of the user journey; a metric should fit the behavior the experiment is intended to change. — Lenny’s Podcast.
  4. Let Behavior Challenge Assumptions: Chess.com expected players to use Game Review after losses, but Cheng says usage data showed they mostly reviewed wins; the team used that finding to revise the experience. — Lenny’s Podcast.
  5. Share the Learning Loop: At Chess.com, Cheng describes making experiment hypotheses and results visible across the company so other teams can learn from them. — Lenny’s Podcast.
  6. Make Data Questions Easier to Ask: Cheng describes experimenting with a text-to-SQL Slack bot to answer ad hoc company questions, reducing the analyst bottleneck and encouraging more questions. — Lenny’s Podcast.

Part 4: Integrating AI in Workflows

  1. Use AI to Shorten the Experiment Loop: Cheng says AI tools can speed ideation, prototyping, and analysis in growth work, while still requiring product judgment and testing. — Lenny’s Podcast.
  2. Prototype Before Committing: Cheng describes using tools such as v0 and Lovable to prototype onboarding and chess interfaces quickly, while noting limits in integration with production workflows. — Lenny’s Podcast.
  3. Adapt Marketing Content: Cheng describes using AI for marketing tasks such as translation, subtitles, and content adaptation; he does not claim this was AI dubbing for studio productions. — Lenny’s Podcast.

Part 5: Career Trajectory and Adaptability

  1. Keep Updating Your Approach: Cheng says lessons borrowed from past roles should be adapted to a new organization rather than copied unchanged. — Lenny’s Podcast.
  2. Find the Right Career Setting: Reflecting on work at companies of different sizes, Cheng describes preferring a stage where he can have significant impact without starting from zero. — Lenny’s Podcast.