Introducing the Designing for Growth Facebook Group, a community for anyone who designs products with a focus on business growth.
I believe the future of design is dependent on designers proving the value of their work. Some designers do this implicitly while others make it hard to miss. Regardless of how vocal you are, if you are designing things for other humans to use, you too believe your work contributes value. Often, this value goes under-communicated within an organization. My mission is to help more designers communicate that value in the languages spoken by business, marketing and sales — aka money.
A couple years ago, I heard this term in passing at a lunch talk we had at Carbon Five:
Growth Designer noun
A person who approaches product design through the dual lens of customer experience and business impact.
I immediately loved the idea of a term for designers who blend UX thinking with metrics, experimentation and — for lack of a better term — growth hacking. I felt like there was room for more designers like this, but without a name and differentiation, they would blend into more traditional design roles. This kind of role focuses not only on satisfaction and usability (qualitative feedback) but also on the tangible impact (quantitative data). Framing this role as something more specialized than Product or Interaction Design calls to attention the need for a different set of skills.
Imagine my disappointment when I learned that almost no one calls themselves Growth Designers.
And then, all of the sudden, I started seeing job postings for “Growth Design Lead” and “Product Designer, Growth” and “UX Designer, Acquisition.” It’s not that people have not been doing this work. It’s that they were not labeling it loudly. If we don’t differentiate it, how will new designers entering the field know to learn it? How will more designers take on this mindset?
Designers who do growth work have different conditions for success than other designers or members of the growth team. Often, they care deeply about the functional and aesthetic value they are crafting in addition to what metrics it should be driving forward. They are involved in every aspect of the product and yet, they are probably not obsessing over where the descenders hit the underline on a link. This presents a core challenge — time spent iterating on designs internally versus time spent testing designs with customers. The growth team is used to faster, smaller changes while the design team needs to think more holistically about all the parts. A successful Growth Designer is able to balance speed with quality. Easier said than done.
The intention of the Designing for Growth Facebook Group is to bring together people who are doing this work and those who would like to be to share practices and learnings. Whether or not you call yourself a Growth Designer (or even a Designer), if you share this mindset, please join us.
Join the group on Facebook or tweet me @calexity if you have questions.
