Run Weekly Growth Review Cadence

Project Background

Duolingo's Growth team is launching a new weekly growth review with Product and Data Science partners to improve decision-making across acquisition, activation, and retention experiments for the English-learning app. Today, teams review metrics in separate meetings, which causes conflicting priorities, slow experiment follow-through, and repeated debate over the same data. You are the program manager responsible for designing and operationalizing a single weekly review that executives can trust.

The working team includes 2 Product Managers, 2 Data Scientists, 1 Growth Engineering Manager, 4 engineers, and 1 designer. The review must be live in 3 weeks because the VP of Growth wants a standardized operating cadence before Q4 planning begins. This matters because the team is managing 14 concurrent growth experiments and has missed two launch decisions in the last month due to unclear ownership.

Key Stakeholders

The VP of Growth wants fast decisions and visible accountability. Product Managers want the meeting to drive roadmap trade-offs and unblock launches. Data Scientists want rigor in metric interpretation and less time spent on ad hoc requests. Engineering wants fewer last-minute priority changes caused by unclear experiment readouts.

Constraints

• Timeline: 3 weeks to launch the new review cadence
• Budget: $15,000 for dashboard updates and analytics support
• Team capacity: no new headcount; Data Science can support only 6 hours per week
• Dependencies: one shared experimentation dashboard, weekly metric refresh every Monday by 9 a.m., and alignment with Q4 planning by the end of Week 3

Complications

1. Product and Data Science disagree on the primary KPI for growth reviews: weekly active learners vs. 7-day retained learners.
2. The experimentation dashboard has inconsistent definitions across acquisition and retention funnels.
3. The VP of Growth wants a 60-minute meeting, while PMs are asking for 90 minutes to cover all experiments.

Your Task

1. Design the weekly growth review structure, agenda, and decision framework.
2. Define roles, ownership, and pre-read expectations across Product, Data Science, and Engineering.
3. Create a 3-week rollout plan to launch the cadence before Q4 planning.
4. Propose how you will resolve KPI and metric-definition conflicts.
5. Identify the top execution risks and how you would mitigate them.