Growth has long been a vital discipline in the tech industry. Most companies have growth leads or growth teams and acknowledge on some level that they need growth expertise in house to help, well…grow the company.
Meanwhile, design has been an afterthought in the growth discussion. Growth teams often work without dedicated product, engineering or design resources, left to beg for scraps of time from the “core product” work. Countless startups have hired one person, called them a growth hacker and waited for a magic rain of users and profit.
(Sidenote: This may sound obvious, but you can tell a team understands growth because their company is growing exponentially. This is, apparently, not obvious to many companies who sustain non-functioning growth orgs for years.)
Virality comes from value
Companies that understand growth are leveraging designers (by title or not) as strategic contributors. Successful companies like Uber and Tinder have always intertwined growth with product. Both achieved scale through offering better, faster ways to do things. As growth has matured, there’s been much more thought into how to best integrate it into an organization. But many founders and product leaders continue to wrestle with where design fits in. To this day, it still seems to be the last consideration for most companies.
And yet, growth depends on design.
Think about companies we know and love — Airbnb, Lyft, Netflix, Squarespace, Dropbox, MailChimp, Shopify, Intercom. Their secret is that they’ve found ways to deliver value to customers in ways that fuel virality. They are not just throwing a ton of money at Facebook ads or changing a landing page button from green to blue. They are using system-wide design thinking to find levers they can pull to drive massive growth.
Right now, it seems that most of the growth design work is falling onto founders, product or marketing leads. They may pass off the UI work to a designer, but the actual design strategy is coming from a non-designer. Handing a designer a wireframe to paint is not growth design. And if you’re not designing for growth, you’re probably not growing.
How to hire a Growth Designer
Before hiring a growth designer (or any growth role), consider the biggest opportunities your company has and how critical it is that you get growth right. The level and type of opportunity will determine who you need on your team. For example, if you’re losing everyone after their first purchase, you probably need Product, Design and Engineering to focus on retention and reactivation. You may also need pricing or content strategists.
(Another sidenote: if high growth is not critical to your company’s success, you probably don’t need a growth team. Every business has optimizations and efficiencies to gain but these do not necessarily require dedicated growth resources. See Bo Burlingham’s book Small Giants for more on how to stay intentionally small.)
Designers can have depth in any area of practice — research, visual, motion, visual, branding, etc. Growth belongs in that set. As I write this post, Headspace, AngelList, VSCO, Atlassian, and Turo are all currently hiring Product Designers dedicated to growth (also known as Growth Designers). Dropbox, Pinterest, Hulu, Netflix, Coursera and many other companies have Growth Designers, too.
Growth Designers are full stack Product Designers which means they can:
- Run customer development and develop deep customer understanding
- Think through a system and visualize the experience
- Identify problems in the system
- Design solutions (from interaction flow to user interface)
What makes them Growth Designers is that they also:
- Actively identify and drive growth outcomes — they are not mere participants in the growth process but continually seek high impact work. This may take shape in the form of customer research, in new idea development paired with validation plans, or in prioritization discussions.
- Balance business growth and customer problems — as designers, they are focused on problem solving but not just for the customer alone. They understand that you can’t solve customer pain if your business goes under. They also believe great design is valuable and they can prove it.
- Understand how to validate and de-risk a design — through concierge or feature fake level experiments or with more complex AB and multivariate tests. They also have experience and ideas about how much design is enough to ship. Not everything needs validation and sometimes you can over-experiment— they have experience and perspectives on this challenge.
- Care deeply about the impact of their work — they know a substantial amount about metrics and tracking them. They value getting things into the hands of customers so the impact is clear.
While growth design may include some marketing work, growth and marketing are not the same thing. Marketing tends to be acquisition focused while growth can happen at any point within the experience. Also, the above four things could also apply to Product or Engineering. I think of growth as an expertise on top of a core role. (Similar to how you might look for a Frontend Engineer or an Android Engineer.)
How growth design fits in a team
If you’re looking to leverage growth design, here are a few ways you might go about it:
Empower every designer to work on growth
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.
Pros:
- Higher potential for results with more people contributing
- More informed questioning of opportunities and execution
- Easier to strengthen and systematize growth practices
Cons:
- Time-consuming to train everyone
- May cause a fractured user experience if all teams run with growth ideas (though it’s unlikely everyone in your company will take to growth at equal levels of enthusiasm)
- May not make sense for every team (e.g. if there are not that many opportunities)
Implementation ideas:
- Define what skills matter for your company’s growth practice
- Assess current aptitude and interest for the growth skillset
- Plan workshops and discussions with both external and internal experts to cross-train the team
- Start integrating it as part of real work as soon as possible
- For teams newer to growth, start very, very small — with a simple optimization test
Add designers to the growth team(s)
For teams that have one or more teams focused on growth initiatives, hiring designers with growth as a specialization make may sense. In job descriptions, this is often listed as Product Designer (Growth), Growth Product Designer or Growth Designer.
Pros:
- Faster to get results
- Build on existing experience rather than starting from scratch
- Easier to ensure designers want to be doing growth work (rather than “forcing” everyone to)
Cons:
- Growth Design can become cut off from the cohesive product experience thinking
- Can be challenging to integrate learnings from growth work back into the product
Implementation Ideas:
- Dedicate design to growth outcomes rather than having growth be a side project
- Empower design to guide the right level of fidelity for validation and experimentation
- Establish clear owners for the growth backlog, product analytics, AB testing, experiment QA and anything else important to get right
- Evaluate your data toolset and practices early and often (product analytics, data pipelines, AB testing, marketing automation). You’ll rely on this foundation to make sound decisions.
Use growth experts as internal consultants
For teams that currently have a dedicated growth team but want to spread some of that expertise around, this model could work well. It would involve building an internal consultancy of cross-functional growth practitioners (likely Product, Engineering and Design) and embedding them with teams that need their expertise on a project.
Pros:
- Pairing deep product area expertise with growth expertise could have stronger customer experience benefits
- You’ll train up your team with these collaborations
- Might be the most cost-effective option
Cons:
- These projects will likely take a long time and it may be unclear when they are finished and when the growth team can move on
- May require much more involvement from management (evaluating biggest opportunities across the organization)
- Process, tech and design practices by team may be challenging to reconcile and could slow projects down considerably
Implementation Ideas:
- Identify the biggest opportunities for company growth
- Assess which teams need additional support to go after these opportunities
- Establish clear project outcomes, ownership and how everyone will know the project is done or when to move on
- Surface any potential risks early (like teams using different tech stacks or extremely long deployment cycles)
Before you build growth design or any specialization in, it’s important to think through how your organization supports growth. The jury is still out on whether separating growth and product make sense. Whatever you decide, it probably makes sense to question it if you don’t see results in a matter of weeks or months.
Growth is much more than Facebook ads and drip campaigns. It is reliant on true understanding of customer needs and the ability to solve those better and faster than your competition. Designers are uniquely equipped for that mission. Pairing the traditional design toolkit with a growth skillset is a powerful recipe for sustainable gains.
Growth Designers are out there. Find them, leverage them, empower them. If you won’t, your competition will.
If you’re interested in growth design, check out the Designing for Growth Facebook Group or find me on Twitter @calexity.
