Welcome to The Clarifier, where we take a close look at our toughest problems at work.
Speaker 2:There can be some gaps between where people are and where you would ideally want them to be. And so then the question is, how much do you gamble on people? How much do you give them opportunities where it's a stretch?
Speaker 1:And turn that discomfort into advantage.
Speaker 2:I think the transition in terms of the coaching that I've gotten with you, Jeff, is thinking beyond this one situation and then also talking about organizational structures and design that get us beyond this one particular case into something that works more generally for the other leaders that we're betting on.
Speaker 1:Today, you get to meet Natalie Glantz. She's the chief engineering officer at Duolingo. We also have a bonus guest, Natalie's executive coach and founder and CEO of Talentism, Jeff Hunter. In our conversation, we tackle the contradictions of modern leadership. How to give employees the space to fail and learn while still hitting your team's targets?
Speaker 1:Can you really build a diverse empowering culture when you're sprinting on the startup treadmill? One thing is for sure. If you look up Calm, Cool, and Collected in the dictionary, you will find a picture of Natalie. In fact, Duolingo's CEO expressly hired her to be the, quote adult in the room. Keep listening.
Speaker 1:You're in for a real treat as we pull back the curtain on one of tech's most beloved success stories. Whether you're a Duolingo devotee, a battle worn manager, a woman in Tech, or just love a good behind the scenes story. This episode promises to be as addictive as trying to maintain that 100 day streak.
Speaker 2:I came to Duolingo from Google. So I was at Google for 8 years before coming here. I learned a ton about software engineering there and about engineering leadership. I was working in Google Shopping, and so, you know, Google Shopping is fine, but it's not the kind of thing that I woke up in the morning thinking, hooray. I'm making the better the world a better place to to Google Shopping.
Speaker 2:Something I learned about myself, maybe a little too late in my career than would have been optimal, but I learned about myself that it really matters to me, the product I'm building, what I'm working on. And, education, specifically online education, is something that I I care deeply about. I was I was happened to be there at Google when online education started taking off, and it's something that I didn't have the opportunity to work on from Google, but then just in my back door in Pittsburgh, Louis Vuitton had started this new company called Duolingo. And fun story, it's I actually I realized how big Duolingo was because one of my college friends was hue one of the huge early Duolingo fans living in New Jersey and and told me that she had, I don't know how many days straight, and I realized, oh, wow. This is this is really already making it.
Speaker 2:There's something really here.
Speaker 1:This is a product people actually use, maybe even love. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I I came here for 9 years ago, and I thought, oh, Duolingo had already won. You know? What what was I gonna bring to the table? I thought Duolingo had already made it.
Speaker 1:It it almost is a silly question because, I mean, on the face of it, it's obvious why education is important. But I'm curious if there's a reason it was particularly important to you.
Speaker 2:I wanted to do something that would make more of a difference in people's lives. It's interesting. At the time, I was actually thinking, in addition to my day job, maybe I should go and volunteer to be a reading tutor or a math tutor. Just have that connection with people. My kids were little.
Speaker 2:I I was one of the things I loved most was teaching them math, teaching them how to read and and seeing the light bulbs go off. And knowing just how much that's brought to my own life, love of reading, love of math, and being able to bring that to you know, it turns out with tutoring, it's it's 1 on 1. There's only so many people you can reach. And with Duolingo, we're reaching 36,000,000 users every day or learners every day, and that's that's just an incredible thing we can that we're building. We get feedback from our learners all the time about how much we're changing their lives.
Speaker 2:That's that's this is it's it's it's hard for that not to be amazingly meaningful. And then on top of that, you know, I have a particular skill set, and software engineers here have a particular skill set where we can we can improve the product. And we can run we run hundreds of AB tests, in parallel in any given day to improve the product, to improve how we teach, to improve how fun and engaging the app is. It's it's just such a huge opportunity. And we use AI too, and so AI is part of my background.
Speaker 2:So we use AI to improve how we teach.
Speaker 1:I'm so curious. I I heard you describe what sounds like a really intimate and meaningful context, teaching your kids to read. Whereas, I can imagine in a large organization working on a product that reaches millions of people, the day to day isn't as intimate and connected to that light bulb going off in someone's brain. I'm curious if it's if it feels as fulfilling to you as you imagined it would.
Speaker 2:No. I I never I never actually imagined. I I could not have guessed, how fulfilling this would be. And I I I followed my heart to go to come here. Like I said, I thought Duolingo had already kinda figured things out, but there's so much that we've accomplished since then.
Speaker 2:And and like I tell candidates when I talk with them, it's still day 1. There's so much more we wanna do. We're we're in the early days for math and music, for example, so we have we're just starting there. And and yet and still so much more we wanna do for language education.
Speaker 1:Jeff, I want to turn to you. One of the core tenets of what we call the big 4 at talentism, where people find alignment between, you know, what they're like and their work environments to to pursue their potential is understanding what's meaningful to them, what they're compulsive about. What do you see in Natalie as her coach, as she describes, you know, why this work is meaningful for her? What do you see about what's a natural connection for what she's like?
Speaker 3:What Natalie has discussed is already, that doesn't surprise me that that comes up in our conversations, but the connection I would make there in our big four model around purpose, specifically around meaning, is that when Natalie is managing, she has that same sort of like, I want to help this person unlock something they're capable of and see that light bulb go off so that, you know, so that then they can actually not only do better for themselves, but do better for Duolingo. And I think all great people managers have that, that joy of helping someone else unlock something in themselves. And not everyone, has to get meaning out of that, but the people who do get meaning out of that and have leadership positions tend to be, really good people managers. And what I would say is I have found it unusual in my experience to find a, also to speak to a big 4, which is home. Duolingo is a product centric company that is run on world class technology.
Speaker 3:It's a consumer company. And so the the users are engaged in this and highly, interactive engaging experience where front and center is, you know, what's on the screen, not what's behind the screen. And yet absent excellence in engineering, that could never happen. And I find that that combination of great people leadership, really caring deeply about the people and wanting to unleash potential in them, not caring for them in the perspective of wanting to protect them, but caring in in the perspective of wanting to unleash them, having high standards for technical excellence, but being good in the context of a product led company. That's a unique combination, and I think Natalie embodies those attributes.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Jeff.
Speaker 1:You know, that actually reminds me of something I heard you say in another interview, Natalie, which is that managing an engineering team is kind of like managing a soccer team. You want them to win, but you also want your players to develop. And I loved that when I heard you say it. And I was particularly thinking about what that experience must be like at a place like Duolingo, which was a rapidly growing start up, now a public company but still under scrutiny to, to grow and to evolve. And I'm curious how you've thought about that, your commitment to the way Jeff describes it, it's more than a commitment.
Speaker 1:It's a compulsion. It's something you can't help but do. Helping people grow in a context where maybe the metric isn't necessarily about personal development, but it's more about results and speed, as is true at most startups. Can you tell us a little bit about what that tension feels like at Duolingo and how you've prioritized the thing you care about helping people grow?
Speaker 2:I actually care about both. I care about results and impact, and I care about people grow growing. So I have this explicit conversation with with managers in engineering that they have a tough job because they're wearing 2 hats. So our engineering managers are are people managers. We call them role managers here, and they're also typically team leads.
Speaker 2:And so they they really have these 2 jobs that sometimes can be in conflict, just like a soccer coach has 2 jobs which could be in conflict. So I caught soccer coach, you know, and I I learned this because my my kids are soccer players. So a soccer coach has 2 jobs. They they want their team to win that day, but then they also want their their players to develop so that they can win the season and, you know, multiple seasons. And so what do you do with your weaker players there?
Speaker 2:Do you just sideline them because they're they're not gonna help you win that day, or do you give them playing time so that they can develop and help your team win the future and and just develop them as human beings because you care about them as human beings? And we have exactly the same kind of tension, at a company like Duolingo where we have some really concrete metrics and goals we're trying to hit for the quarter. Like, we're trying to hit our subscriptions goal goal for for for you know, so that we can tell, the street that that we hit our our goals for the quarter. It's really that's really important for us as a public company. And so it really matters that if you have some big projects for your team, what do you do?
Speaker 2:What do you do to make sure that you hit your your objectives for the quarter? Do you always just put your best people on it? How do you how do you share those projects across people in the team so that you can also, at the same time, develop people for their own sake and for also for the sake of the future of the team so that those folks will get stronger and and contribute more in the future.
Speaker 1:Is there a story or an example that comes to mind of navigating this tension?
Speaker 2:At a place like Duolingo, and I'm sure, you know, other companies as well, there can be some gaps between where people are and where you would ideally want them to be. And so then the question is, how much do you gamble on people? How much do you give them opportunities where it's a stretch? And historically at Duolingo, we've done a lot of that, especially when you're you're starting at a start up. I remember in the early days, Severn was actually really good at this.
Speaker 2:He would take a new grad. He would say, you go build our new AB testing framework. And, honestly, I would be like, aghast. Like, really? You're giving that to a new grad?
Speaker 2:Aren't you sending them up for failure? And and the amazing thing is people would step up and do it. CTO asked them to do something, and they'd be they still talk about it today, how how he gave them this huge opportunity, and trusted them with this huge thing, and it was such a such a game game making moment for them to have that opportunity. And then we still at the size we are today, we're about 750 people. We need really strong leaders for different initiatives, and we don't necessarily have enough people who are tried and trued and and and trusted who can you know, we're we're a 100% sure that they can succeed at this.
Speaker 2:And so we we make bets on people that we think are great, and give them a chance to to prove that they can do it. And then the question is, can we really back that up? And I think that's kind of like the tension that sort of the struggle that Jeff and I have been talking through is, are we really setting up these people for success as much as we can, or are we going and second guessing the decision to trust them and, you know, what I call meddling? Not giving not being patient enough, not giving them enough time to figure things out. And instead, you know, saying we're gonna be patient for quarters or years, and instead within a quarter or so, say thinking, oh, the results aren't there.
Speaker 2:We're gonna second guess this person's decisions and and try to get them to pivot pivot to some pivot in some way.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like, Angie, if it's okay, let me pick up on that thread. You know, Natalie said she cares both about results and about the people. I think a lot of people believe that about themselves, but they make sort of unconscious trade offs in really unexpected ways along the way. They get nervous about a result, and they sort of throw somebody under a bus, or they get nervous about a person, sort of put results in the back seat.
Speaker 3:I've never seen, Natalie, you know, give into one bias or another. She is always trying to bring the and statement to our coaching and figure out those two things. And that's incredibly difficult, and therefore, most people would rather avoid it because it feels, you know, it it can feel not only difficult but painful. But Natalie never does. Natalie always, like, tries to confront that thing.
Speaker 1:What you're describing sounds, like, such a a challenging line to navigate. What I'm hearing you say is you can help 1 player on the team or you can develop systems that uplevel all your players. And I'm curious if you can talk about what it's been like to think about that at Duolingo. What are the what are the systems that needed to be built?
Speaker 2:So this is something that we've been and I've been thinking about a lot recently. So this is getting a little bit into a different angle here, but we have a particular organizational design that we've evolved into over time. When I first started here, it was 40 people. We had, I don't know, 5 teams or so. And then over time, the company grew, and having a just countless number of teams didn't really work as an organizational structure.
Speaker 2:So we had teams that were cross functional with team leads that worked for a while. Our teams are also very metric space, so this this is how we organize our work. Each each team owns typically on some metric that you're trying to improve, and that gives them some amount of freedom to figure out what work they're gonna do to achieve their goals with with respect to improving their metric. And then over time, we realized that that wasn't scaling, so we started organizing teams into what we call areas. And areas where logical groupings of teams that all were combined under one top level business metric.
Speaker 2:And we're starting to outgrow this. And one way that we're starting to outgrow this, and we found this out by issues that were coming up is that we have these large areas of teams with maybe, like, 10 teams. And so the people who are leading these areas, we call them area leads, they they've grown up with the area. So when they first started being area leads, the areas only had 2 or 3 teams. So they grew from being team leads to area leads of small areas that then grew into area leads.
Speaker 2:And these were incredibly trusted individuals who have huge amounts of context about Duolingo, know how to succeed here, know how the company works, know how to just have really strong relationships with Luis and me and our head of product and so on. And then, you know, at a certain point, you have to be at the grow new area leads. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And that's the issue. Not everybody's gonna have been here for 5, 6, 7, 8 years and be an extremely trusted individual who knows exactly how to navigate Duolingo. You might even wanna be the highest somebody from the outside. Go figure.
Speaker 1:I think I think there's an old proverb, which is when's the best time to plant a tree 20 years ago?
Speaker 2:That's exactly right.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So if it's gonna take us 5 or 10 years to grow a new area lead, we're we're in big trouble. So one thing we've been thinking about is a new organizational structure, and it it kind of seems obvious when I even say it, that allows people to be somewhere in between a team lead and an area lead of a 10 t of a, you know, a 100, a 100 50 person area. So we're figuring that out so that it's I think, Jeff, you call it a talent pipeline. Basically, how can we how can we grow people so that from team lead to something in between a team and an area lead? So that that's one big thing that we need to figure out, a design solution for how do we train, how do we help people get from managing people directly and being really good at that to training managers to being themselves really good managers.
Speaker 1:Jeff, is there anything you wanna add to that sort of process of discovery of, oh, we're lacking, a more deliberate, maybe less time consuming way of getting managers at the right level?
Speaker 3:So the reason I call it a talent pipeline is you see organizations that are playing at higher and higher levels that are attempting to scale excellence, scale their impact in the world, etcetera, having to deal with this talent pipeline. And and it doesn't really matter whether it's business or it's sports or it's the arts or whatever. You have to build leveling that you can move up in inside an organization. You don't recruit people out of high school baseball into the Yankees. Most of the time, you put them into the farm system.
Speaker 3:And in business, it's just trickier than I think anywhere else because Natalie has to have each one of those people both producing results and getting the benefit of this new design that will give them less complexity, less risk, more opportunity to grow and experiment. And so Natalie is just demonstrating how important it is to use design in order to solve the people management problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, let me pause for a second and and just digest what I'm hearing both of you say. I think when we began this conversation, you both reflected so beautifully on how much it means to you, Natalie, to help someone grow. Whether it's your young kids, whether it's, the person you manage directly and seeing them evolve and being able do more than they could, you know, yesterday or 2 years ago. But to do that at scale in an organization where you simply can't touch every individual 1 on 1 requires you to operate differently.
Speaker 1:You can't be the one sitting in the meetings with all of them, helping them grow, figuring out what to do next. And so how do you set up a system that does that reliably outside of your constant involvement? Yeah. There's a way
Speaker 2:I think about it that really helps me. I see this in new managers that new managers tend to be really, really invested in every single one of their reports. They want all of them to be very successful, and they take it very personally if if that's not the case. And I had a conversation about this with a a new a relatively new manager recently, which is why I'm bringing it up. And the way I think about it is you wanna help set people up for success, but then at the end of the day, it's up to them what they do with the opportunity and the tools that you're giving them.
Speaker 2:It's not your responsibility to make sure that everybody succeeds. You you want them to put them in a position where they can succeed. I don't know how you you think about this, think about this, Jeff. So for me, it's it's a little bit also like having maybe a mixing metaphors here. It's like having a portfolio.
Speaker 2:You're investing in a lot of different places, and you're planting this so many different metaphors. I am just this is terrible. You're gonna have to edit this all out. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We are famous for mixing metaphors here. Please go ahead.
Speaker 2:This is terrible. This is terrible. I'm doing so many metaphors. But I feel like I'm doing my job if I not everybody has to be that superstar. Right?
Speaker 2:I'm doing my job if I'm helping some people on their path to success and to growth at whatever rates work for them. Not everybody has to get the promotion next cycle, for instance, or have the great results and the great impact on the business. It's enough that I'm putting the pieces in place for people to grow and teams to have impact.
Speaker 1:Natalie shared that she didn't always know where she fit in. At 12 years old, she encountered some unsettling data and limiting narratives that still influence how she approaches managing diverse teams today.
Speaker 2:And really, it it starts well before joining the workforce and growing up as a as a girl. For me, it was quite a number of years ago, so I don't know what the experience is of of current generations. I'm sure there's some similarities and differences. But I was, growing up as a girl, I love math. I love science.
Speaker 2:And that that made me different at that time. You know? And I I remember even hearing somehow at a very young age, at the age of 12, I was already reading studies about how boys were better than girls at math. Like, on average, girls could be really good, but the very best were always gonna be boys. And That's a lot to lay on a 12 year old.
Speaker 2:And so I grew up with these grew up with all these societal things about what girls were good at and girls were not good at. And then, I remember having a friend when I was 12 who would intentionally get bees because she wanted the boys to like her. I just thought that was crazy. And so, you know, we can't really separate out how we are brought up and and how the the messages we get from society to what we take into the workplace. That's why I bring it up.
Speaker 2:And then in the workplace, in the earlier parts of my career before Duolingo, definitely very, very male dominated. I used to probably joke at home that the larger the more people in the meeting, the worse the ratio because I was the only woman in the room. And most of the time, it it actually it was fine. You know, I don't think it was I don't think it bothered me too much.
Speaker 1:I do think it's an unusual for a 12 year old to have, the awareness and and sort of, like, the orientation to reading scientific studies to know that there are performance differences between boys and girls in in math and science and that kind of thing. And so curious, do you remember what you thought upon reading that?
Speaker 2:You know, I do remember. I I felt I felt in one at first, I felt a lot of pressure. I was thinking, well, if it is the case that only boys score at the very, very top levels here, well, if I scored at the very top level, I could disprove that, but then that's statistically very unlikely that I would be the one girl who could score at that very top level. So I I was really thinking through this all Yeah. And realizing I I shouldn't put that kind of pressure on myself.
Speaker 1:When you, think about that sort of internal turmoil that you had at such a tender age at 12
Speaker 2:Well, you know, when you're 12 when I was 12, I thought I was pretty much grown up. I don't know about you.
Speaker 1:Well, I have a 3 year old who's convinced that he's grown up. But I I'm curious. Has that informed how you think about approaching management and other people who similarly might experience that internal turmoil? Okay. I look around the room and, you know, the people who are the highest performers don't look like me or the ones who seem to be being rewarded don't look like me.
Speaker 1:Has that translated into how you think about your management?
Speaker 2:I think it gives me empathy. It gives me the empathy to to remember what that's like, and whether it's for a woman or for a black engineer or, you know, somebody from a underrepresented group that it's a lot of extra pressure to feel like you're representing a certain group within the population, and that somehow people are gonna generalize from you to that group, and and it's just not a fair pressure to have on you. And then I think the other thing that it helps me with is to realize that folks who are in the majority group, they haven't had that lived experience. They just don't know. And, you know, we we somehow, let's say, as a woman engineer, expects our male manager to understand this, but why would they?
Speaker 2:And so whose responsibility is it can't really be the, you know, somebody straight out of college who happens to be a woman. It just can't be her responsibility to teach her male manager. But whose responsibility is it? Male the male managers or whatever manager from a a majority group, they don't know what they don't know. So we all have to have I think it's for for me, it's about education, and it's about curiosity and having an open mind and trying to understand other people's experiences so that we can be better colleagues and better managers.
Speaker 1:And I'm curious since we've spoken a few times in this conversation about how to do that not just at a one to one level because that's, you know, limited in its scale, but how to do it at a systems level. Is there anything you feel like you've cracked the code on at Duolingo to do that education and empathy building at a systems level?
Speaker 2:We haven't cracked the code. We're working on it. We now have a head of the IB, and he's great. And and he and I talk we talk a lot about this. So he's built an allyship course for anybody in the company to take.
Speaker 2:And then we talked about this allyship course, which I was, you know, I was lucky enough to be one of the first people to pilot. How could we then do an allyship 102 course for managers to help them be better managers of people from different groups than they are? And and and the thing is, you know, there there's no quick answer here, and we all know that. There's you can't take a 1 hour course and suddenly become a 10 times better manager. Doesn't it work that way?
Speaker 2:So it's a first step. There's a lot more to do.
Speaker 1:Jeff, I see you nodding, and I know you see this challenge being tackled across a lot of organizations. Is there anything you wanna add here about what you see, at Duolingo or with Natalie in particular?
Speaker 3:I just wanna call out the answer Natalie gave, I think, is what good looks like. In other words, what she's saying is we have to acknowledge there is a problem in a business setting. That problem goes beyond, right and wrong, but ineffective and effective. And it is ineffective to have majority groups be blind to the talent and opportunity presented by underrepresented groups. And so it is critical for business to be able to access the best talent where it exists and be able to grow and evolve that talent to create an excellent company.
Speaker 3:And for many, many, many years, that was a bunch of guys that looked like me sitting in a room saying we're doing a great job. And I've
Speaker 1:met some of those guys.
Speaker 3:You've met some of them. We all have. Perhaps I'm one of them. I have to acknowledge that and accept that. But, you know, that was just wrong.
Speaker 3:They were just blind. They were they they were just operating in a blind spot. And then that, crept into science and crept into culture and crept into all sorts of things. Like, we can and then all these millions, if not billions, of people who are left outside of that who are being told not just, hey. You can be anything you want, but, like, you probably can't be anything you want.
Speaker 3:And we've proven it because we're successful. To grow up in that environment is incredibly potential limiting. And to be able to work with a leader like Natalie who experienced that, had the self awareness to know this is how it's affecting me, but then not get angry or even, which is an entirely reasonable response by the way to that situation. But instead to say, okay, how am I gonna fix it? And in the fixing it, say the thing that she said which is, okay, I have blind spots, they have blind spots, of course they have these blind spots, How am I going to sensitize them to those?
Speaker 3:How am I gonna bring that into their experience? How much they're hurting the company? How much they're hurting people? How much they're doing this just from that blind spot? And so, again, to get back to this coachability concept, but also I just think it's so key to 21st century leadership and management.
Speaker 3:Natalie is seeing what is wrong. She's trying to address it systematically. She's taking personal responsibility, and she's seeking to move people from confusion to clarity, not to get even. And that's how great companies are built. That's how progress happens.
Speaker 3:I hope anybody who's listening to this, who believes that it's impossible to get better when you're already at the top of your game takes inspiration from Natalie's example.
Speaker 2:My ears are burning.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, Natalie for spending the time with us and for being so generous with your personal stories and with your insights. I'm very, very appreciative.
Speaker 2:It's been a pleasure.
Speaker 1:This conversation reminded me how people in power, who are aware of their own blind spots and the blind spots of others, can make revolutionary change inside of an organization. At Talentism, we're obsessed with how a company's conditions can either unlock or limit potential. I love working with founders and leaders like Natalie, who are committed to making conditions more empowering and ultimately their companies more successful as a result. But that's not easy and that's where coaching comes in. If you want the help Natalie is getting, reach out to info at talentism dot com and talk to a coach today.
Speaker 1:Today's episode was produced by John Hunter and Jesse Gormizano with original music by John Hunter. Special thanks to Nate McLeod and Montgomery Pace.