Hello! I’m Zan (pronounced like “Zanzibar) and I work on combining psychology, games and tech to improve education.
One way I do that is as Director of Product at Duolingo, where I co-created Video Call, a way to practice speaking foreign languages with conversational AIs. I now co-lead the 35-person org that works on making Video Call more fun and more effective. Before that, I spent almost a decade at Duolingo working on user growth (new user experience, retention, Asia).
I also started Royal Jellies, a Substack series of taste portraits of curious people.
I was born in London, grew up in Karachi, and live in NYC’s oldest Chinatown (my favourite neighborhood in my favourite city). These days, you can find me playing soccer and jianzi, researching urban design, volunteering at Elizabeth Street Garden, and trawling the depths of Tiktok and Wikipedia.
Want to chat? Come say hi in my open hours! Otherwise, email me here: [email protected] or dm me here Instagram
My favourite books and authors
🐝 My own Royal Jellies profile
video call: real chats with lily (Duocon, 2024)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdOO5G1vEYw
🦉 interview with Luisito Comunica (2025)
🦉 building Video Call (Mind the Product, 2024)
🦉 learning from and with ai: duolingo’s zan gilani (MIT Sloan, 2023)
🦉 international growth at duolingo: lessons from asia (Product School, 2020)
🦉 3 takeaways from duolingo's product culture (UXDX, 2018)
🦉 growing duolingo to 200M users, one habit at a time (canvas, 2017)