Growth Design Primer

I have something in the works for you. Hint. Hint. 😉

“This is so ugly,” I said. “Why not fix it all?”

My Product Manager looked at me blankly. “Because then we’d have no idea what the improvement was.”

“The entire experience could be better!” 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

— Sera

That’s right I’m outing myself. So you may wonder, a great UX and visuals are wrong? What is she on about?

Here’s the thing. We’re not artists. Well we are, but we’re aren’t.

We’re 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 don’t 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.

Let’s come full circle with this story. I was wrong because if we changed the entire page for the user, our team wouldn’t be able to understand where the impact was. Let’s say we did change the entire ux. How would we pinpoint what gave us a positive or negative impact?

We couldn’t! It’d 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! 🎉

What is growth?

Growth design is the intersection of growth hacking and product design. Growth hacking is strategy to rapidly accelerate business growth. Let’s be real. In most of the world, an organization’s number one focus is profit. I do want to talk a bit more about this point in this newsletter and in the future so we’ll 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?

Here’s 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,

“What is the opportunity here that will have the highest point of impact for the business?”

— Growth designer

Still following me? You’re doing great! 😊

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. It’s 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

💡 Disclaimer: Just because you have a north star metric, doesn’t 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 let’s give further language to this customer experience through the lense of a customer lifecycle.

AARRR framework

AARRR funnel

First, let’s talk about the OG growth framework, created in 2007. The AARRR framework monitors a customer’s lifecycle and allows designers to track Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue (AARRR). Say that out loud and now you know why it’s 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. It’s not. So let’s talk about the right way to look at growth.