Project Background

Duolingo's Growth team is launching a 10-week initiative to improve free-to-paid conversion for new users in the English-learning segment. You are the program manager supporting a cross-functional squad of 11 people across product, engineering, design, data science, and lifecycle marketing. Leadership expects visible progress within the quarter because paid subscriber growth is 8% below plan.

Key Stakeholders

The VP of Growth wants weekly evidence that the initiative is on track and expects fast decisions on trade-offs. The Product Manager wants room to test multiple ideas, while the Engineering Manager is concerned about team capacity because two engineers are also supporting a separate onboarding refactor. The Data Science lead wants decisions tied to clean experiment readouts, and the Finance partner wants confidence that the initiative can deliver at least $1.2M in annualized incremental revenue if rolled out.

Constraints

The team has 10 weeks before quarterly business review, a remaining budget of $95,000 for creative, incentives, and analytics tooling, and no approval for additional headcount. Engineering capacity is limited to 28 story points per sprint, with 8 points already reserved for mandatory platform work. The initiative depends on a new event-tracking schema that will not be production-ready until the end of Week 2. Leadership has asked for a weekly review format that takes no more than 45 minutes and can be consumed asynchronously by executives.

Complications

1. Baseline conversion data from the prior quarter is inconsistent across dashboards, creating disagreement on the starting point.
2. Marketing wants to add a referral incentive midstream, but the PM believes it will distract from the core onboarding funnel work.
3. One proposed experiment requires legal review for pricing copy, which may take up to 7 business days.

Your Task

1. Design a weekly review structure to keep the initiative on track.
2. Define what inputs, metrics, decisions, and owners should be reviewed each week.
3. Propose how you would handle scope changes, blocked dependencies, and conflicting stakeholder asks.
4. Create a 10-week execution cadence with milestones and escalation points.
5. Identify the top risks and how the weekly review should surface them early.