Before scaling paid acquisition, invest in a robust brand system. A well-defined brand DNA (art direction, voice, tone) is not a vanity project; it's the necessary infrastructure to efficiently generate the thousands of cohesive creative assets required to test and scale performance marketing campaigns successfully.

Duolingo's team achieves its speed by operating under the belief that 'fear is incredibly expensive.' This mindset empowers them to be their own approvers, accepting the small risk of having to delete a post in exchange for the immense creative and engagement upside that comes from moving at the speed of culture.

To maintain its creative edge, Duolingo employs an external writer's room of comedians and admired writers. Their job is to 'roast the brand' and pitch SNL-style skits, pushing the internal team to explore new lore, find blind spots, and walk the line without crossing it.

Instead of treating legal and compliance as departments that add friction, Robinhood PMs get them to buy into the product's vision. When legal partners are excited about the product, they become effective problem-solvers who find ways to enable the best customer experience, rather than blockers.

The viral 'Dead Duo' campaign originated from a product team's A/B test of new app icons. When both icons performed equally, marketing was given seven days to build a campaign around the 'dead eyes' version. This demonstrates extreme agility and opportunistic collaboration between product and marketing.

In AI-native companies that ship daily, traditional marketing processes requiring weeks of lead time for releases are obsolete. Marketing teams can no longer be a gatekeeper saying "we're not ready." They must reinvent their workflows to support, not hinder, the relentless pace of development, or risk slowing the entire company down.

While brand consistency is a benefit, the primary business impact of a well-built design system is operational efficiency. It drastically accelerates speed to market for new features and slashes onboarding time for new hires because the system's intelligence is effectively self-documenting.

For enterprises, scaling AI content without built-in governance is reckless. Rather than manual policing, guardrails like brand rules, compliance checks, and audit trails must be integrated from the start. The principle is "AI drafts, people approve," ensuring speed without sacrificing safety.

Instead of traditional strategy, Duolingo's team applies principles from improvisational comedy. Core tenets like 'yes, and' (building on ideas) and 'commit to the bit' (going all-in on a concept) create an environment that encourages bold, reactive, and consistently creative content without internal blockers.