By Patrick Coffee

Zaria Parvez, longtime senior global social media manager for language-learning app Duolingo, announced this week that she would be leaving her job after more than five years.

Parvez helped make Duolingo one of the most effective brands on social media, with 16.7 million followers on TikTok. Headline-grabbing campaigns and posts under her watch included an extended back-and-forth with pop star Dua Lipa, a 2023 tweet that seemed to mock the anti-vaccine community and a campaign earlier this year in which the brand's owl mascot Duo appeared to die after being hit by a Tesla Cybertruck only to ultimately live and post another day.

Twenty-six-year-old Parvez has become a star in her own right, accumulating followers and drawing crowds at conference appearances. She also made missteps, like a 2021 Duolingo post joking about the hate that actor Amber Heard was getting on TikTok as she fought her ex-husband Johnny Depp's defamation suit.

CMO Today spoke with Parvez about her past five years, her decision to leave and her experience with the anxiety that comes with managing a highly visible company's online presence.

The conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

CMO Today: Are you leaving this job to write a book and start a consultancy? Am I way off?

Zaria Parvez: You're not completely off. But I actually will be taking a new role that I'll be announcing next week. I want one more experience under my belt of making a bigger brand social-first, and then I will launch my consultancy and write a book. That is my five-year plan.

CMO Today: How did you move from Zaria, the social media manager to Zaria, the personality?

Parvez: The biggest gift I gave myself was when I went on LinkedIn back in 2021 and took credit for my work. That was the start of building Zaria, the personal brand.

CMO Today: You recently developed a "writer's room" for Duolingo's social team. How does that work?

Parvez: I really wanted to make Duolingo like a content house. I finally got the buy-in and the budget. So we brought in people who are comedians, and they started to build out different versions of Duo and different experiments. We only got one thing piloted, unfortunately, before I left. It was a Duolingo "Severance" spoof parody.

CMO Today: Whenever a social post blows up, you see so many people writing something like, "The intern behind this account deserves a raise." What are they missing about how social media managers' jobs work?

Parvez: What they're missing is the story of how we were able to get that post live. People think it's just like a quick little turnaround thing that happened and everything was fine and there's approval and there was no, like, back and forth.

CMO Today: In 2023 Duo officiated some weddings, and you said that the project was inspired by Duolingo user comments. Are there any other campaigns that came directly from the users?

Parvez: The Dua Lipa lore. Everyone knows that Duo loves Dua Lipa. That actually came from a viral tweet back in 2013 before I even started, about somebody accidentally tagging us instead of Dua Lipa. It blew up. Wait a minute: Dua Lipa, Duolingo. They just sound alike. This is actually a bit that we can build on.

I always say, your comment section is your social brief.

CMO Today: You recently wrote that no social media manager wants to hear a CMO say "make it go viral." What other social marketing phrases need to die?

Parvez: "What's the ROI?"

Obviously return on investment is important. You have to build that brand awareness from social before you're gonna hit the ROI. Being OK with that slow burn is important.

CMO Today: So marketers should stop trying to connect engagement on social to sales?

Parvez: You should all start with just brand awareness and understand it's an investment and a down payment. And, eventually, the mortgage will pay itself off if you have the right strategy.

CMO Today: How did your own key performance indicators evolve during your time at Duolingo?

Parvez: When I first started, it was just follower growth, R.I.P. What changed is when it became impression-based.

All of a sudden, virality became what we had to do where, like, one million impressions over 24 hours was kind of seen as normal.

And then eventually it was having new user goals.

CMO Today: How big was the death-of-Duo campaign, exactly?

Parvez: It was 1.7 billion impressions just from that campaign alone.

We're like, alright, we're gonna do this, we're gonna post Duo's funeral, and then we're gonna show that the other mascots died, and then we'll just bring them back to life. But then people were like, "Holy crap, the owl is dead," and it blew up.

Then we're like, wait, there could be a merch component here -- let's sell coffins for our plushie. We had influencers from all over just doing content for free. MrBeast posting a video about us for free was crazy. I feel like that was the mountaintop for me.

People thought Duolingo the company had died. My mom's like, did you lose your job?

CMO Today: How do you determine where the red line is as a social manager?

Parvez: You don't know where the line is until you cross it, and I've done five years of this, so now I know where the line is for Duo. It's a lot of testing and learning and being OK getting canceled every now and then. That's how you learn.

CMO Today: What did you take from instances where you or the brand had to apologize for your posts?

Parvez: During the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp trial, I commented on a TikTok post, "Do you guys think Amber watches TikTok?" TikTok users were fine, but then Twitter found it and was upset about it, naturally, as they should be. Our PR person's like, you're not canceled if you're still talking on stages. But I made a mistake.

All these little lessons now, I think, are building into me and how I want to bring in the next generation of social talent. What are things to be careful of when it's always on?

CMO Today: What was your most vulnerable moment?

Parvez: Last year when I went on medical leave. I was really confused and exhausted. It got to the point where the anxiety of running such a big account and having to be always on was so on my shoulders. I would get three hours of sleep at night. I would be incessantly trying to figure out, how do I be creative in all the best ways? How do I do this on my own?

I might be Zaria from Duolingo, and Duolingo has all the success, but there's also parts of it that are scary.

CMO Today: How do you manage this persistent anxiety?

Parvez: I love to create. I don't need to always do it on a platform. I can do it on a smaller space where things feel in Zaria's control, and it's judged on the creative value, it isn't judged on how viral it went. Building that in for me has been really helpful to push myself away, and ultimately led to this decision to leave this job as well.

CMO Today: Do you have to set up strict guardrails to separate your life from your work?

Parvez: Yes. There was a lot of, "I'm not gonna check Slack after 5. I'm going to actually work a 40-hour week."

But I will say, when I didn't separate my life from my work, I succeeded far more in my role. That's a hard truth.

Write to Patrick Coffee at patrick.coffee@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 20, 2025 16:59 ET (20:59 GMT)

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