This episode of Dollars to Donuts features my interview with Akshay Verma, the head of User Research at Duolingo. We talk about being qualitative focused in an experimentation-driven organization, research team structures, team rituals, and sharing knowledge between researchers.
I don’t actually want to bemoan or belabor this concept of a room that we’re invited to or not. At Duolingo, I feel it pretty acutely just because we do have a lot of rituals and traditions at Duolingo around how product gets built. And it’s great. It works. It works really well. But, you know, I could spend a lot of time and energy going crazy, being like, “How do I get invited to these rooms?” and then get upset when it doesn’t happen? I actually don’t. I try my best, but I think our energy is probably spent elsewhere.” - Akshay Verma
Show Links

• Episode transcript (portigal.com/dollars-to-donut...)

• Akshay on LinkedIn ( / akshayverma3 )

• Duolingo (www.duolingo.com/)

• How Duolingo is using its ‘unhinged content’ with Duo the Owl to make people laugh on TikTok (digiday.com/marketing/how-duo...)

• FigJam (www.figma.com/figjam/)

• IDEO (www.ideo.com)

• Stanford d.school (dschool.stanford.edu/)

• Calendly (calendly.com/)

• How the Underground Dance Music Scene Makes Me a Better User Researcher ( / how-underground-dance-... )

• Get Familiar With Detroit Techno: 10 Essential Songs (www.npr.org/2011/05/27/136655...)

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The post 47. Akshay Verma of Duolingo (portigal.com/podcast/47-aksha...) first appeared on Portigal Consulting (portigal.com) .