Duolingo's ex-head of product says the best performers are not always the people with deep experience (www.businessinsider.com)

Albert Cheng, former head of product at Duolingo and Grammarly and now chief growth officer at Chess.com, told Lenny’s Podcast that in the fast-moving world of AI “high agency” often beats deep experience. He argued that seasoned habits can become a crutch as foundations shift rapidly, so top performers tend to be people with high “clock speed,” energy, curiosity and a beginner’s mind. In hiring, Cheng looks beyond résumés and rubrics — paying attention to the questions candidates ask, whether they’ve used the product, how they set up interviews, references and the energy they bring — as signals of initiative and adaptability. The takeaway for the AI/ML community is practical: technical pedigree matters less than the ability to learn, iterate and discard outdated practices when models, tools and workflows change. Leaders from DeepSeek and LinkedIn echo this, prioritizing creativity, initiative and rapid learning over traditional experience. For teams building or deploying AI, that implies hiring and evaluation processes should emphasize experimentation, product curiosity, and learning velocity, and product workflows should favor people who can quickly adopt new tooling and pivot as architectures, datasets and best practices evolve.