Duolingo's Osman Mansur on the power of relentless optimisation

Pocket Gamer Connects, the leading international conference series for the global games industry, returns to London on January 19th to 20th, 2026. 

The must-attend conference will bring together 3,000 delegates from 70+ countries, including decision makers from key international games hubs across the globe. Companies set to join the show include Supercell, Epic Games, Duolingo, CD Projekt Red, Tencent, PlayStation, EA, AppLovin, TikTok and many more.

PGC London will host 32 tracks across two days, including at the Apps Business Summit (January 19th) and the Beyond Games: Transmedia Summit (January 20th).

One of the speakers set to join the conference is Duolingo senior product manager Osman Mansur.

Mansur has been a product manager at Duolingo for five years. He currently leads the social experiences team, which drives user growth via social mechanics such as Leaderboards and Friend Quests.

Previously, he led the reengagement team optimising out-of-app channels like notifications, emails and widgets.

Mansur will be hosting a session entitled 'How Does Duolingo Drive Growth At Scale Without Losing Speed Or Quality?' on the Game2App track at the Apps Business Summit on January 19th.

We caught up with Mansur ahead of the show to discuss optimisation, retention and how the platform has 10 million users with a 365+ day streak.

PocketGamer.biz: Please give us a summary of what you’re speaking about and why it’s important.

Osman Mansur: This talk will dive into Duolingo’s experimentation-forward philosophy, showcasing the powerful internal tools product managers use behind thousands of A/B tests, real examples of experiments that moved key metrics, and how the company’s processes are evolving in the quest to reach a billion learners.

If you could give other mobile games companies one piece of advice, what would it be?

Don’t underestimate the power of relentless optimisation. Many games teams focus on feature level ROI or new game ROI, but much of Duolingo’s growth from 10 million to 50m DAU in the past five years has come from the compounding effects of thousands of small optimisations to everything from copy to reward animations.

What’s the most important key performance indicator (KPI) for you - and why?

Long-term retention is the key for any app or game. Particularly on the growth team at Duolingo, we obsess over KPIs like new user seven-day retention, current user retention, and inactive user return rate. We can’t teach people anything if they are not in the daily habit of coming back.

But the one metric that really blows the minds of most game devs is the number of learners with a 365+ day streak. For many game teams, if you get 5% to 10% of your DAU coming back seven days in a row, that’s huge.

On Duolingo, we have over 10m people with a 365+ streak. It’s not necessarily the most important KPI but it’s one that never ceases to amaze me!

What company do you most admire in the mobile games world?

At Duolingo, we admire Supercell a lot. We’ve chatted with their teams several times to trade insights and always come away with valuable learnings on making the core gameplay loop as retentive as possible, adding atomic delight to every moment, and how to approach tradeoffs we're less familiar with like maintaining in-game events with content treadmills.

What is the single biggest challenge facing the mobile games industry today?

I don’t know if it’s the biggest challenge, but finding an audience feels really difficult when there are so many excellent games launching every week.

I have to admit I’ve had it easy compared to game devs as I’ve had the privilege of working for a category leader and globally beloved brand, which makes distribution somewhat easier.

What sessions/speakers (apart from your own) are you planning to attend?

Bit of a shameless plug here but I’m really excited to hear from Nicky (Nicoll) Hunt in the indie track: 'Quit Your Job… Then Join Duolingo? The Unexpected Journey of an Indie Icon'. 

Nicky works in our London office on our music product after a successful run as a game dev on some huge games, including a successful indie game dev career.

Joining Duolingo might sound like a surprising move for indie game devs, but actually there is a lot more in common than people think.