Francesco Polizzi is the former Head of Core Experience at Discord, where he led a complete overhaul of the company’s mobile apps. He has also held roles as the Head of Product at both Outschool and Photomath (acquired by Google in 2023), and served as a PM at Dropbox and a growth engineer at Mozilla earlier in his career. Francesco recently left his role as a product executive to start his own stealth AI startup.

Key Takeaways

• When Francesco first joined Discord in late 2021, the company had a thriving community of avid gamers, but it was struggling to expand to a broader, more mainstream audience because new users tended to find the product confusing.
• After product-driven growth efforts began to demonstrate diminishing returns, Francesco and his team realized they needed to more fundamentally redesign the company’s mobile apps to expand their appeal and make them more accessible to new users who felt overwhelmed by Discord’s complexity.
• For inspiration, Francesco and his team downloaded every single messaging app they could find, compiled best practices, and cross-referenced these ideas vs. feedback from Discord users to identify high-potential opportunities.
• This led to a wholesale redesign of Discord’s iPhone and Android apps, including:
  • A voice messaging feature that increased overall message volume
  • A username change that increased the success rate of outbound friend requests by making it easier to find a friend by their username
  • An update to the profile tab that increased customization, paving the way for additional monetization opportunities through Discord’s Nitro and Nitro Basic premium subscription plans, as well as ad hoc purchases
• Ultimately, these changes simplified Discord’s mobile apps, improved the new user experience, fixed a couple important bugs, and accelerated revenue growth

Francesco Polizzi:

• Website: https://discord.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/francescostl/
• X: https://x.com/Francescostl

Phil Carter:

• Website: https://www.philgcarter.com/
• Substack: philgcarter.substack.com
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/philgcarter
• X: x.com/philgcarter

Podcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io/