Hey there!
Welcome to “This week I learnt” - edition #1.
To become a better Product person, it's important to learn new things all the time. There are lots of blogs, articles, books, and podcasts, but it can be hard to find the good stuff. We want to help you by sharing the best learning resources you will need in your journey. We'll share only what we found to be the best and most helpful.
If you are upskilling to become a better Product person, you will love our posts.
📜 How Duolingo’s AI learns what you need to learn
A very interesting article on how Duolingo built and uses AI to personalize language courses for individual users and how they used learners’ data to enhance their curriculum. They call their AI model the Birdbrain. They also cover how they had to scale their model and systems as the user base and the number of lessons grew. One fascinating piece for me is how they aptly applied the Elo rating system, which is typically used to rank players in chess.
You do not need to be a coder to understand this article.
📜 Micro nudge: a micro animation for behavioral change
As a PM, we use nudges in many scenarios. A micro nudge is a well-timed small animation that prompts the user to do a “small” task that they may have otherwise forgotten or not noticed. With the examples of Instagram’s & Linkedin’s micro nudges, this article gives important things to keep in mind while designing a micro nudge for the users.
This is relevant for designers & PMs.
📜 How to turn problems into a curiosity engine
Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius: You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. The objective of having these problems is not because you want to solve them as soon as possible, but because they feed your curiosity and turn the world into a big mystery game.
The article also provides tips on how to identify your favorite problems and be a more curious person.
Hope you too have learned something new this week! If you have any good resources, do share them as a reply, or in the comments section. We are eager to learn and share them with others.
Will come back with another interesting post. Bye! 👋