How working in growth made me a better designer
10 lessons from my time at Prodigy Education
Let’s start with honesty. When I was hired at Prodigy a year and a half ago as a growth designer, I wasn’t completely sure what I was getting myself into. The words “experiments” and “quantitative data” rang a stiff chord in my ears. The panic bells began to sound: Will I have to rely on that one statistics course I took in college? And Reforge isn’t a men’s body soap?
My impostor syndrome was brimming to new heights. While I had a few years of UX design experience under my belt, I remained naive about what it meant to design for growth.
I hypothesize that a majority of you reading this are unsure as well.
Here are some learnings I’ve gathered, having designed for growth at Prodigy Education, one of Canada’s fastest-growing software companies. My goal is to share lessons unique to growth design that could help designers elevate their practice, as well as illuminate a potential career path in growth design (whether as a lens to product design or a discipline in its own right).
What is growth design?
Designing for growth is all about connecting product value to your customers as quickly and as often as possible. When we take a look at brands like Netflix, Uber, or Amazon, they have found viral and scaled success by delivering remarkable value propositions early and often. While product design seeks to build core value inside the product, growth design aims to optimize and connect more people to said value. I use an oversimplified metaphor of an art museum to illustrate the difference between the two roles: product designers create the artwork on display, and growth designers help visitors find and enjoy those artworks. Lex Roman has an excellent essay detailing what growth designers do that I encourage you folks to check out.
Working on revenue growth at Prodigy Education challenged me to elevate my core competencies as a designer. Here are ten quick learnings I took away from my time there.
1. Be scrappy and fleet-footed
Growth designers have to learn how to be iterative in their design approach, unattached to their design solutions, and creative with their problem-solving. For most of us, success is contingent on how adaptable we are. That’s how I would define scrappiness. I’ve learned to adopt a creative mindset when problem-solving to overcome blockers quickly. What happens if you need to optimize an onboarding flow, but your team hasn’t set up a robust platform to run in-product experiments? A growth designer will work with their cross-functional team to explore solutions that will enable you to learn even when you don’t have all the tools or answers (i.e. A/B testing onboarding emails).
Angel Steger (Growth design leader previously at Pinterest and Dropbox), said, “Successful growth designers understand what tools are needed to use to solve a given problem — and are ready to build their own if that’s what it takes.”
2. Ship to learn
The antithesis to growth design is to build a few, measure very little, and learn in long cycles. Cultivating a bias towards progress is essential. Designers in growth must be comfortable designing in extreme velocity, which means intuitively knowing how to prioritize and optimize for learnings. In the design process, having a crystal clear experiment hypothesis and metric to create a minimum testable design will enable working fast and nimbly. The motto is to ship frequently, measure a lot, and learn quickly. Good growth designers will also work with their product managers to define a followthrough plan both if an experiment wins or loses. I’ve learned that while we ship to learn, we must avoid short-termism and consider the larger picture: how will a winning variant scale and work with other systems?
3. Know how to write proper hypotheses
I made the mistake of waiting too long to reach out to my data partners to improve the way I craft and design experiments. The one learning that consistently choruses in my head is that your experiments are only as good as the hypotheses you write. When the dust settles, running high-quality experiments is all about finding statistically significant evidence that modifying A will lead to B changing in a certain predictable way. Ensure that your hypotheses explicitly state an independent variable (i.e. variant A/B), dependent variable (i.e. click-through rate) and the expected outcome of manipulating the independent variable (i.e. variant A having a higher clickthrough rate than variable B by X% ). Prioritizing clear documentation starts with writing a clear hypothesis, which will enable you to communicate experiment results more effectively to your stakeholders. After all, designing for growth is not always about launch speed but clear execution.
4. Build trust with your teammates
As much as we are business-centric, we also are stakeholder-centric. Put it simply, be curious about your teammates. Designing for growth involves problem-solving that traverses past one platform and into the entire user experience to ensure your users succeed. Given that design is a discipline relatively new to growth, it’s crucial to build trust with your Product, Eng, Data, and Marketing partners to create high impact solutions. At Prodigy, I assumed I was “building relationships” with my data partners by attending our recurring growth team syncs. Yet, I realized way later in the process how much common interest my data analyst had in furthering a design OKR I worked on a quarter prior. To prevent these missed opportunities, open a personal 1:1 conversation with your teammates outside your regularly cadenced meetings to build trust.
5. Clean as you cook
Just like any chef, get used to keeping your station and sleeves clean. The biggest struggle I had working in the experimentation kitchen of a high-growth company was that I did not have enough time to clean up experiment design files, conclude VLRs, and disseminate learnings. Poor project documentation can be detrimental to the experimentation process and lead to experimentation duplication and the burying of learnings and data. Avoid this at all costs. Designers must understand that design quality is on par with documentation quality. The success of a growth team’s process is much determined by how organized and well-managed your experiment documents are. I recommend discussing and delegating documentation ownership with your team, like handling VLRs and communicating learnings. It also doesn’t hurt to brush up on your writing skills. As a suggestion from Lenny Rachitsky, On Writing Well is a great book to learn how to write more clutter-free.
6. Designing for growth still means designing for humans
Our goal as growth designers is to fight for both users and the business’s best interests. Even when “growth” prefixes “designer,” it is still fundamental that your process is rooted in human-centred values. Your unique contribution to the growth field is to make space for responsible and sustainable growth to happen through an unyielding focus on humans. Avoid getting tunnel-visioned with metrics by balancing quantitative data with the experience’s emotional and delightful components. One of the biggest challenges as a growth designer is preventing dark patterns and metric pushing. Realize that qualitative research remains a valuable part of your growth design toolkit. I recommend continuously conducting problem interviews and implementing feedback surveys as a part of the growth team’s process to nuance the data you’re getting from experiments and bring humanity into the process.
7. Ground experiments in research rigor
There are occasional exceptions when experiments are launched based on big bets or intuitive hunches. However, to drive sustainable growth, ground hypotheses in customer insights, data analysis, and market research. Often, nascent growth teams adopt a “throw it at a wall and see what sticks” mentality, which impedes scientific and research rigour. Growth designers must work with their teams to strategize and generate thoughtful, well-reasoned hypotheses to reduce scattershot experimentation. I’ve found Spotify’s thoughtful execution framework an excellent starting point that operationalizes how to get from insight creation to hypothesis development.
8. Understand how the business works
One habit I’ve cultivated at Prodigy is to continuously review org-wide strategy plans presented at all-hands to observe the blueprints for the next five years. Understanding your competition, growth levers, and long-term strategy determines the level of clarity you have when designing for growth. Frequently equipping yourself with the macro knowledge of where the business is going helps remind you of your team’s purpose when dealing with constant experiment failure. By grasping the company’s and product’s contours, you will be able to comfortably dance between designing for the business and the user while not losing sight of the end goal. I’ve found joining product communities and following product Twitter accounts the most helpful in elevating my business acumen and product thinking (plugging Lenny’s newsletter here!), as well as establishing feedback loops with my product managers.
9. Love creates growth, not the other way around
Avoid inflating product value in your efforts to drive metrics. Chetana Deorah (Design leader at Coursera, Netflix, and Scribd) put it aptly when she said that growth designers live and breathe in the intersection of how to make businesses money but not at the customer’s cost. The key is to continuously connect value to customers in integrated and authentic ways instead of bloating or exaggerating value that isn’t there. At its core, before growth can even exist, you have to build a product that people love. Only then can we talk about virality and optimization.
10. Establish a culture that normalizes risk and failure
Growth design is a high-risk discipline that punctuates failure daily. Not all folks have the privilege to say they are comfortable visibly failing, especially if they’re coming from a background of trauma. In a recent growth design webinar hosted by Adobe, Molly Norris Walker and Krystal Higgins brought up a great point that to encourage more growth designers to join this community, companies must have reward systems in place that celebrate learnings over failure and outcomes over output. Building resilience begins with meeting designers where they are, sharing knowledge for an unformalized field, and establishing a culture where teams celebrate failure and recognize small wins consistently and visibly.
To sum it up, growth design is an expanding discipline dedicated to elegantly understanding product value and consumer behaviour. I’m often reminded of a quote Chetana once mentioned during a talk, “Think like a businessman, execute like a scientist, and solve like a designer.” I believe that motto rings true to the core tenets of what growth design upholds: business-centered goals, scientific rigour, and user-centered problem solving. I hope these takeaways will give some folks a launchpad into the field of growth. And no, Reforge is NOT men’s body soap.
I hope you find this helpful. Thanks for reading! Follow me on Twitter for more content. I’ll be posting more about growth design this upcoming year.
Shoutout to Martina Montero and Lavinia Manea for helping me with these reflections. :)
Some helpful resources about growth design:
Join the Growth Designers Community
Design-driven Growth by Molly Norris Walker
Ask Me Almost Anything (W/ Chetana Deorah) — On designing and leading for Growth
Lex Roman’s Growth Design blog
Defining Growth Design: The Guide to the Role Most Startups are Missing
