Gardenscapes Update Needed

[Anjali Reyome]

Wecontinue our desire to learn in order to grow our ability to assist homeowners and businesses in our area. Our list of landscaping services is not limited to the following seen here. If you have another need that is not listed here, call Mike to see how he can help or get you the help that you need.

The landscape design process starts when a change is needed. Whether reclaiming the beauty that once was, or making a vision happen, you will have the opportunity to meet with Mike one on one and he will develop a plan onsite and provide a free estimate. The end result will have your wishes, expectations and demands mixed with all of the proper care needed to have your ideas become real.

Most gardeners are familiar with these iron stakes sold at garden or home improvement stores. They go by a myriad of names such as shepherd staffs, hanging basket stakes, garden stakes and so on. As a staple of any well-tended garden, they serve a multitude of functions. I have them all over my property and use them for a host of purposes. Plant stakes, tree stakes, chicken wire stakes, lattice board stakes, plant hangers, and so on. I lost count of how many I have years ago. As a decorative accent to any landscape, the uses are endless. But for the purposes of this post, I am going to show you how you can use these little wonders to add a pop of color to your Gardenscapes or backyard. Typically sold painted an iron black or dark charcoal, they can be painted to fit any preference.

My favorite colors are pink and purple. Armed with a can of hot pink spray paint, I formally endorse, adding a pop of color to this garden accent. Situated in my blueberry row adjacent to the Grape Arbor, it stands out against the backyard colors bringing a bit of personality to the berry row.

Approaching the Grape Arbor, I transition to another color to add a pop of personality to the Pergola. A fitting color for a Grape Arbor setting is a bright purple. Situated around my Pergola are numerous plant stands, garden accents and flower basket hanging staffs. Armed with a can of purple spray paint, I work my magic adding a pop of color to the Arbor setting.

Another hack I have discovered, the repurposed use for chicken feed bags. Hanging plant baskets are usually displayed with coco basket liners. These coco basket liners are pricey and do not retain the essential water needed by the plants. Using empty chicken feed bags, I cut small drainage holes in the bottom, fill with soil and use as liners for the hanging baskets. Feed bags are tough, made of a thick material sufficient to contain 50 pounds of chicken feed or more. As hanging basket liners, they are perfect. They are tough, weather well and do not break down like the coco basket liners. Additionally, they retain the crucial moisture needed to adequately keep the plants hydrated. They add the perfect accent to a backyard farm setting.

Even a garden bench when painted can be used as an outdoor dining tray. Painted the same dark purple as the repurposed plant stands, these accessories add to the overall fun atmosphere of a backyard garden.

Got a beloved outdoor decor item that is looking a little bit rough around the edges. A can of spray paint to the rescue. Breathe new life and love into outdoor decor items while coordinating them with your garden setting.

The final look of the Pergola Grape Arbor is stunning!! With a can of spray paint and a bit of imagination, you can transform your garden or backyard setting into a lively atmosphere. In addition to adding a pop of color to your backyard garden, spray paint with added primer will protect your garden accents for years to come.

I hope that you have found some of these hacks useful and can implement them into your own Gardenscapes or backyard setting. Adding a pop of color to your garden adds a bit of fun and personality to your space. Have fun with it and remember, there is no limit to creativity.

Armed with a short presentation I co-created with our chief designer, we were able to get just enough buy-in from the rest of the executive team to create a new team, the Gamification Team. The team consisted of an engineering manager, an engineer, a designer, an APM, and me.

We implemented the feature and hoped our second attempt would be more successful. Instead, new users increased by only 3%. It was positive, but not the type of breakthrough we needed. Still, the team doubled down and pushed through, shipping iterations to the referral program and making some other bets, but no avail.

In both of these situations, we had borrowed successful features from other products, but the wrong way. We had failed to account for how a change in context can impact the success of a feature. I came away from these attempts realizing that I needed a better understanding of how to borrow ideas from other products intelligently. Now when looking to adopt a feature, I ask myself:

In other words, we needed to use better judgment in adapting when adopting. Being more systematic in just this area would have made a big difference in what gamification mechanics we chose to pursue. And we would have probably been dissuaded from focusing on referrals altogether. I was committed to making sure our next attempts would be more methodical. We needed to be better at basing our decisions on data, insights, and foundational principles.

My time at Zynga and MyFitnessPal gave us inspiration on how to segment and model our users by engagement level. Zynga separated their users and measured retention based on the following weekly retention metrics:

I hypothesized that we could use these metrics at Duolingo as a starting point to create a more sophisticated model, and use that model to identify a North Star metric. Working with the data scientist and the engineer manager in the Acquisition Team, we came up with the model below. We used the same retention rates as Zynga and MyFitnessPal, but we tweaked from a weekly view to a daily view and we added several more metrics.

The blocks, or buckets, represent different user segments with different levels of engagement. And every single user who has ever used the product is in one, and only one, bucket on any given day. That means the buckets in the model are MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive) in representing the entire base of users who have ever used Duolingo. The arrows measure the movement of users between the buckets (these include CURR, NURR, RURR, and SURR, but evolved into daily retention rates rather than weekly). Combining the buckets and the arrows, the model creates an almost closed-circuit system, with new users being the only break.

The fact that DAU, WAU, and MAU can easily be calculated from these buckets made it easy to model them over time. This is a key feature of the model. Additionally, by manipulating the rates represented by the arrows, we can model the compounding and cumulative impact of moving these rates over time; in other words, the rates are the levers product teams can pull to grow DAU.

With the model created, we started taking daily snapshots of data to create a history of how all of these user buckets and retention rates had evolved on a day-by-day basis over the past several years. With this data, we could create a forward-looking model and then perform a sensitivity analysis to predict which levers would have the biggest impact on DAU growth. We ran a simulation for each rate, where we moved a single rate 2% every quarter for three years, holding all the other rates constant.

This produces a compounding effect, which means that CURR is much harder to move, but when it does, it will have a greater impact. Based on this analysis, we knew that CURR was the metric we had to move in order to get that strategic breakthrough we wanted. We decided to create a new team, the Retention Team, with CURR as its North Star metric.

One of the biggest benefits of focusing on CURR was deciding not to work on things that seemed paramount before, especially new-user retention. This was a huge mindset shift for a company that had tremendous success spending years running the bulk of its growth experiments on new users first.

The Retention Team was completely energized to find more mechanics to keep current users engaged and motivated to practice every day. One area they started to look into was push notifications. Based on substantial A/B testing in prior years, Duolingo had established that notifications can be a big vector for growth, but that impact had plateaued for us over the years. With a re-energized team full of new ideas, we felt it was the right time to revisit this vector.

With this constraint in mind, we decided to give the team a lot of freedom to optimize on dimensions like timing, templates, images, copy, localization, etc., but they could not increase the quantity of notifications without strong justification and CEO approval. Over time, through countless iterations, A/B testing, and a bandit algorithm, the team was able to generate dozens of small- and medium-size wins that have amounted to substantial gains in DAU year after year.

In the search for even more growth vectors, the APM on the Retention Team started exploring whether there was a strong correlation between retention and usage of particular Duolingo features. He discovered that if a user reached a 10-day streak, their chances of dropping off were reduced substantially. Clearly, a lot of this was simply correlation and selection bias, but we felt the insight was interesting enough to start investing in improving this feature again.

Streaks work for a number of reasons. One of those is that a streak increases user motivation over time; the longer the streak is, the greater the impetus to keep the streak going. When it comes to user retention, this is the exact behavior we want in our users. Each day that a learner comes to Duolingo, they care a bit more about coming back the next day than they did the day before, hence increasing retention and DAU. As a meta-lesson, our success with the streak mechanic further showed us that we could squeeze major wins from existing features. We could see the value in both big breakthroughs and in fast optimizations. And an A+ team often has a mix of both.

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