#89: The hidden role of rituals in Duolingo's product culture | Nickey Skarstad (Director of Product @ Duolingo, ex-Airbnb, Etsy)

Dec 22, 2025

Nickey Skarstad, Director of Product at Duolingo with experience at Airbnb and Etsy, dives into the fascinating world of product rituals and AI. She reveals how Duolingo maintains high-quality standards while shipping quickly, showcasing unique practices like 'hot trash' Fridays for low-risk experimentation. Nickey discusses the significance of dogfooding AI products and how structured product reviews elevate team standards. With insights on balancing speed and quality, she empowers product builders to refine their craft and build user-trusted experiences.

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ADVICE

Schedule Focused AI Learning

Carve out regular time (2–4 hours/week) to follow AI: newsletters, podcasts, and internal Slack updates keep you current.
Try tools on personal projects first to learn prompting and share useful patterns with your team.

ADVICE

Normalize Early, Shared Experimentation

Share experiments asynchronously in Slack and run regular demos labelled as "hot trash" to normalize early, imperfect work.
Use these forums to surface scalable-generation learnings and speed up cross-team iteration.

INSIGHT

Reviews Scale Collective Taste

Product review rituals act as an organization-level quality mechanism that aligns taste and sets a consistent bar for work.
Regularly exposing teams to leader feedback trains junior PMs and sharpens product sense across the company.

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What does it take to build products that feel thoughtful, emotionally resonant, and unmistakably high-quality, especially inside a company that ships fast and experiments constantly?

In this episode of Supra Insider, Marc and Ben sit down with Nickey Skarstad, Director of Product at Duolingo, to unpack how one of the world’s most beloved consumer apps maintains its bar for craft, clarity, and delight while operating at massive scale. Nickey shares how Duolingo operationalizes quality across teams, how they dogfood relentlessly, and why “unreasonable hospitality” applies just as much to software as it does to service.

She also shares the internal rituals Duolingo uses - like their “hot trash” Friday forum for sharing early experiments, and how these lightweight mechanisms help PMs, designers, and engineers learn from each other. Nickey walks through Duolingo’s product review process, how senior leaders give feedback, and how the company ensures teams move quickly without shipping work that falls below their quality standards.

Whether you’re a PM trying to strengthen your intuition, a design-driven leader aiming for higher quality bars, or a product builder exploring how AI should (and shouldn’t) fit into your workflow, this episode is full of concrete lessons you can use immediately.

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In this episode, we covered the following topics:

* (01:35) How Nickey keeps up with AI: newsletters, podcasts, internal Slack channels, and intentional learning time

* (07:15) Internal rituals for sharing AI learnings: Slack posts, demos, and Duolingo’s “hot trash” culture

* (11:12) Duolingo’s product review process as a mechanism for scaling quality and judgment

* (14:12) How Duolingo balances speed (“clock speed”) with rigorous product reviews

* (23:31) What makes feedback actually useful—and when it should block shipping

* (29:05) The importance of heavy dogfooding for generative AI experiences

* (32:22) Turning product taste into evaluators for non-deterministic systems

* (37:50) Why slapping “AI” into marketing often hurts more than it helps

* (41:52) How to intentionally develop better product taste

* (51:28) Why AI has re-energized builders and product teams

* (55:01) Why hobbies, fiction, and being “in the world” matter for product taste

* (58:40) Nickey’s closing advice: investing in taste is never wasted time

* And more!

Links:

* Nickey’s Newsletter: https://nickey.substack.com/

* Nickey Skarstad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickeyskarstad/

* Marc: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcbaselga/

* Ben: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benerez/

Resources Mentioned:

* Duolingo’s Product Review Process: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-product-review-works-sneak-peek-key-decision-making-process-lnpoe/

* Peter Yang Podcast: https://creatoreconomy.so/

* Lenny’s Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/

* Book Suggestions:

* The Thursday Murder Club - recommended by Nickey

* Hyperion - recommended by Ben

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