Shortcuts to Building Trust, Four Growth Tactics from Duolingo - Tactician: #0092

"Shortcuts to trust are cool, man. Like when someone says, 'Here, take the last piece of my gum.' It's small, but it says, 'I care about your breath as much as mine.' That's not just gum; that's trust in a wrapper."

04/04/24

Shortcuts to Building Trust

Why Read:

• Actionable strategies for accelerating trust-building

Authors:

• Admired Leadership, a development program focused on leadership behaviors that create loyal followership & results

Link: 

• “How to Speed Up Trust”

Key Concepts and Tactics:

• The Importance of Trust in Relationships and Teams:

  • Point: Trust is the critical building block of effectiveness in relationships, teams, and enterprises, enabling smooth and efficient operation.

  • "Trust in relationships, on a team, and within an enterprise is the critical building block of effectiveness. Without it, everyday tasks become burdensome and take longer, as people must find a way to get comfortable with what they are told. When trust is low, verification, second-guessing, and interpretation clog the ability to act quickly and smoothly."

• Building Trust Takes Time and Consistency:

  • Point: Establishing trust requires time and consistent, predictable interactions through repeated experiences.

  • "Unfortunately, building trust takes time. It is a conviction built slowly through experience. Trust requires a consistency and predictability proven through repeated interactions. Trust built without a strong foundation of experience creates relationships that are fragile, superficial, and vulnerable to a single act which can erase it quickly."

• Leaders Can Accelerate the Trust-Building Process:

  • Point: While building trust takes time, leaders can use shortcuts to speed up the process, such as increasing the frequency of interactions and making and keeping small promises.

  • "But that doesn't prevent leaders from accelerating the process to a degree. The best leaders have learned there are a few shortcuts that help them speed up trust and they use them to their advantage. You can, too. If trust depends upon repeated interactions and experience with others, then leaders can purposefully expand the number of times such interactions occur in a given period of time."

• Increasing the Frequency of Interactions Speeds Up Trust:

  • Point: Leaders can create more opportunities for interaction in a shorter timeframe to accelerate trust-building, especially in new relationships and teams.

  • "Rather than allowing the normal cadence of contact and experience to play out, leaders who want to speed up trust create more opportunities for interaction in a shorter timeframe. This is especially powerful in new relationships and with newly formed teams."

• Making and Keeping Small Promises Deepens Trust:

  • Point: Leaders can intentionally make small promises and keep them religiously to deepen trust, as keeping small promises faithfully symbolizes trustworthiness.

  • "In addition to more opportunities for interaction, those who want to accelerate trust often go out of their way to make small promises and to keep them religiously. They set precise expectations as to when they will show up to events, how they will follow up on key items, and what resources they will deliver. Keeping those promises exactly as they were offered deepens trust in a way nothing else can. When leaders can be counted on to keep the small promises they make with precision, trust blossoms."

• Small Matters Reflect Trustworthiness in Larger Matters:

  • Point: Taking small matters seriously is crucial, as it indicates trustworthiness in larger matters as well.

  • "If others can't count on you to take the small matters seriously, they know for certain you can't be trusted on the large ones either. Think small when it comes to creating big trust."

Four Growth Tactics from Duolingo

• Why Read:

  • Learn key growth strategies, including maintaining urgency, leveraging strategic advantages, copying industry best practices, and carefully using notifications

• Author:

  • Sean Colombo, VP of Engineering at Duolingo

• Link: 

  • “The secret to Duolingo’s growth”

• Key Concepts and Tactics:

  • Maintaining a Sense of Urgency Drives Compounding Growth:

    • Point: A sense of urgency leads to faster launching of winning experiments, which compounds growth over time, especially for metrics like retention.

    • "To get the best long-term gains, you should always have a sense of urgency. The quicker you launch winning experiments, the quicker those changes impact your growth. Not only that, but these improvements compound!"

    • "An even more pronounced compound growth effect is seen in retention metrics."

  • Identifying Your Strategic Advantage Guides Product Strategy:

    • Point: Finding your unique strategic advantage that aligns with market opportunities helps focus on impactful product changes that are hard for others to replicate.

    • "Finding your strategic advantage can be really helpful in guiding your product strategy. At Duolingo, our strategic advantage is that our users want to build a habit."

    • "Identify a unique strength that your company/product has that aligns well with the current opportunities in your environment. Then leverage that strength in a way that others cannot easily replicate. Focus on what sets you apart and use it to create a sustainable competitive advantage."

  • Copy Industry Best Practices Before Innovating:

    • Point: When implementing common app mechanics, start by closely copying successful industry examples, then innovate later once you have a solid foundation.

    • "There are literally millions of mobile apps, and the biggest of them have billions of users. The larger ones have run A/B tests with a combined total of billions of treatments...This means that if you would like to use a concept that's already widespread in the industry, your first approach should be to start with a system that closely resembles an existing successful one, but adapted to your app."

    • "Your first minimum viable product (MVP) version of an existing, widespread mechanic is not the time to get clever and innovative."

    • "There are two scenarios where I think you should try to be clever and start to push the envelope: When you're already at the cutting edge...After launching a solid MVP based on best-in-class industry standards."

  • Notifications Are a Valuable Growth Lever, But Don't Overdo It:

    • Point: Notifications can drive consistent wins, but sending too many low-quality notifications risks damaging the channel and losing users.

    • "Modifying existing notifications and even (rarely and carefully) adding new, useful notifications has been a nearly infinite source of gains. We've been improving notifications for years, and they still deliver consistent wins that affect a huge slice of the pie."

    • "If we send notifications that users do not find interesting, that they don't think are worth reading, or that cause them to unsubscribe, we will destroy the channel and kill the goose."

    • "We set a very high bar for how successful an additional notification has to be. We've killed some notifications that were huge wins but weren't big enough to justify the additional level of spamminess."

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