Duolingo · Go-to-market · Mid · 45 to 60 minutes

How should Duolingo grow in Asia?

Duolingo is a language-learning app that helps people study languages through short lessons and habit-building features. Answer this product management case and get it graded line by line against a weighted rubric.

segmentation
prioritization
experimentation
go-to-market strategy
metric design

The situation

You are the PM on Duolingo's international growth team. Asia accounts for more than half of the world's language learners but only a small share of Duolingo's learners. Country-level research is surfacing gaps that may be hurting activation and habit formation. In Japan, new learners are much less likely than the global average to opt into reminder notifications, a known driver of learning habits. Interviews also suggest some people with prior English experience avoid the placement flow because it feels intimidating. In Vietnam, overall registration is about 15% below the global average, and early analysis suggests the gap may be concentrated in the privacy-compliant flow for learners under-13, who represent a much larger share of new users there. The VP of Growth wants a plan before the next planning cycle. You need to recommend how Duolingo should respond across Asia without creating a fragmented app that is costly to maintain. Assume engineering capacity this quarter can support either one region-specific product change plus one experiment, or up to three globally reusable experiments. Your task is to define the go-to-market and product testing approach, explain where to start, and show how you would tell whether the issue is truly local or a signal of a broader opportunity.

What to produce

A 1 to 2 page decision memo.

Your answer must

State the core growth problem and separate product friction from market mix or demographic effects.
Recommend a strategy for Asia that chooses between local customization, global experiments, or a mix, with clear reasoning.
Prioritize up to three actions for the next quarter, each with a target segment, hypothesis, and expected impact.
Define primary metrics and guardrails across registration, activation, habit formation, and early retention.
Explain how you would use results from Japan or Vietnam to decide whether to scale a change globally or keep it local.

Constraints

Stay within the stated engineering capacity for this quarter.
Do not change legal or privacy requirements for learners under-13.
Focus on in-product and onboarding levers, not paid acquisition, partnerships, or brand marketing.

Format

Use sections for diagnosis, recommendation, experiments, metrics, and risks.

How Duolingo actually played it

Duolingo set up teams to grow in Asia and found local differences: Japanese learners opted into reminders far less, and Vietnam registration was lower partly due to under-13 users who made up 2.5 times the share. The post shows how local research became experiments and doubled Asia's share of learners. A useful case of regional growth.

Local research reveals assumptions that break abroad.
Check composition effects before reading a rate gap.
Turn local findings into tests that can scale globally.

Built from Lessons from Asia: Turning local research into global experiments by Zan Gilani and Carrie Wang.