âThis is so ugly,â I said. âWhy not fix it all?â
My Product Manager looked at me blankly. âBecause then weâd have no idea what the improvement was.â
âThe entire experience could be better!â I said frustrated.
This was my first encounter ever with growth thinking. I was fresh out of a bootcamp and I wanted to optimize for visuals and a great user experience.
I WAS WRONG
â Sera
Thatâs right Iâm outing myself. So you may wonder, a great UX and visuals are wrong? What is she on about?
Hereâs the thing. Weâre not artists. Well we are, but weâre arenât.
Weâre also scientists! Especially when you are a growth designer or become more senior and learn to exercise business thinking.
Advancing your career as a designer
An important and inevitable part of your career growth as a designer is learning to think from a business perspective. You donât need to be a growth designer or be on a growth team to apply growth principles. I promise it will make you a better designer.
Letâs come full circle with this story. I was wrong because if we changed the entire page for the user, our team wouldnât be able to understand where the impact was. Letâs say we did change the entire ux. How would we pinpoint what gave us a positive or negative impact?
We couldnât! Itâd be impossible. This is why designers need to make incremental changes in order to measure and understand impact for the users.
Growth Primer
I know a lot of you are not familiar with growth. This will be a quick primer for you. Even if you are, you may discover a new perspective here. I have also gotten requests for a growth course and I have that in the works for you! đ
What is growth?
Growth design is the intersection of growth hacking and product design. Growth hacking is strategy to rapidly accelerate business growth. Letâs be real. In most of the world, an organizationâs number one focus is profit. I do want to talk a bit more about this point in this newsletter and in the future so weâll come back to it. Anyways, here are some quick principles for growth hacking:
product centric
data driven
rapid experimentation and testing
agile and scalable
sustainable
How does this differ from pure Product Design?
Hereâs a quick visual to understand how a growth designer may differ from pure product.
My earlier example is so pertinent because sometimes designers assume a goal is to improve the entire user experience, when in fact, often the goal of the business is actually to find levers to increase user activity that converts to profit.
This means a growth designer would look at a user experience and say,
âWhat is the opportunity here that will have the highest point of impact for the business?â
â Growth designer
Still following me? Youâre doing great! đ
Identify core value for the user
The good news is most tech companies you work at, even start ups, will usually have their success levers defined. As designers, we have to understand what the business is actually trying to achieve. The most important growth lever is often called the north star metric. The north star is the guiding principle for the entire organization; it aligns teams and efforts towards this common goal. Itâs the one key metric (KPI) that delivers the most value to the customer.
For example:
Whatsapp - number of messages sent
Airbnb - number of nights booked
Ebay - gross merchandise volume
đĄ Disclaimer: Just because you have a north star metric, doesnât mean this is the only thing you will measure. There are many KPIs, such as success rate, time to completion, conversion rate, NPS, CSAT, and more. What you measure depends on the goals.
How to understand growth
Designers are pretty damn good at mapping a user flow and understanding the customer journey. Keep that in mind and letâs give further language to this customer experience through the lense of a customer lifecycle.
AARRR framework
First, letâs talk about the OG growth framework, created in 2007. The AARRR framework monitors a customerâs lifecycle and allows designers to track Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue (AARRR). Say that out loud and now you know why itâs also called the pirate metric framework.
Acquisition: What channels do new users come to a product from?
Activation: What percentage of new users have a satisfying initial experience?
Retention: Do users continue to come back over time?
Referral: Do users like the product enough to recommend it to their friends?
Revenue (Monetization): Can user behavior be monetized?
The Problem with the OG Framework
The thing about AARRR is it operates as a funnel, when in reality we should think of growth as a loop, not a linear progression. AARRR also implies that the first customer touchpoint, acquisition, is the most important starting point. Itâs not. So letâs talk about the right way to look at growth.
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