Sometimes brand just isn’t enough. Leadership assumed Duolingo was too beloved to need a community team, so they cut it. They were wrong, and the internet let them know.

This is the story of what happened next: rebuilding a community function from scratch, turning a 600,000-person subreddit from a liability into a listening post, and moving sentiment from 35% negative to 17% in under two years. Not by silencing criticism, but by finally showing up for it. Katy Romdall, Duolingo's Head of Community, shares how she built a two-way bridge between community and product, why "brand love" is a metric worth defending against short-term growth KPIs, and how a 2,000-person chess event in Central Park taught her more about earning trust than any dashboard could.