Questions on Growth Design
Q: Can you tell me how Growth Design is different from Product Design or design in general?
Where a product designer is focused on the holistic experience of a product or service, the Growth Designer is focused on finding levers for growth. A Growth Designer is a Product Designers that is - for lack of a better term - “full stack”. They care about the impact of design on business on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. They care equally about business success and customer experience and they measure it.
Q: Why is a designer the best fit for contributing to growth?
Designers are particularly equipped for understanding customer / user needs and growth is dependent on this. Growth can not happen with social media ads and drip campaigns alone If a designer can pair their traditional design toolkit with the growth skillset it’s powerful recipe for sustainable gains.
Q: Is the Growth Design Lead the primary role in the growth process?
Yes. They lead growth outcomes continually by playing a primary role in the growth process and actively seek high impact work.
They also:
Run the customer development and cultivate a deep understanding of the user/customer
Identifies problems that may live in the system
Think through a system and bring a visualization of the experience to life
Design the solution which can include methodology, process, UI screen flows, Interaction
Design and run experiments to validate hypotheses or assumptions
Q: What is the difference between quantitative and qualitative data and do you help business understand the value of bridging the two? *
This is actually a common question that I get. A common way of thinking about difference is; Quantitative is the “what” your user / customer is doing and the Qualitative is the “why”.
Q: How can companies de-risk design?*
A good Growth Designer can do this through experiments like concierge test, feature fake level experiments or complex AB and multivariate tests. Growth Designers have experience in knowing when to experiment before shipping and how to avoid excessive experimentation and knowing when to learn after shipping.
Q: Where do companies struggle when it comes to growth?
Today it seems that most of the growth design work at organization is being done by founders, product, or worse, marketing. Their process as non-designers may be to simply pass off UI design work to designers and leave real designers out of the design strategy. This is counter intuitive to growth simply because if your design strategy is not designing for growth you can be pretty sure you are not growing.
Q: You mentioned marketing is not a good role for handling growth, can you explain why?
Marketing IS a part of growth work and it should include some marketing, but growth and marketing are not the same. Marketing is focused primarily on the acquisition lever while growth can happen at any point across the entire experience of a product or company.
Q: What is the biggest challenge for companies to incorporate growth design?
Build growth expertise across disciplines by training everyone or a range of contributors on growth. Then, all teams can work on growth initiatives or at least de-risk their more innovative ideas.
Q: What companies are currently hiring a Designers that also have a growth skillset?
From what I currently understand Dropbox, Pinterest, Hulu, Netflix, Coursera, Headspace, AngelList, Turo have, and many other companies have hired or are looking to hire Designers dedicated to growth.
Q: It seems even today company struggle with UX maturity never mind trying to understand how designers fit in with the growth conversation. How can companies increase the maturity of their UX Team?
Begin by rewarding people for designing better products and not just reward for releasing products fast. The desire to increase design maturity comes more often than not from panic as a reaction to seeing design as not being leveraged to the fullest. This is where a UX strategy helps utilize the resources you have along with the team's knowledge and expertise. Leadership should empower your designers to work strategically.