The difference between Product Design and Growth Design

From an Adobe Growth Designer

My formal title at Adobe is Senior Growth Designer, but I’m fortunate enough to get the opportunity to play many different roles. Sometimes I play Product Manager and draft roadmaps, sometimes I play Marketer and come up with GTM (go to market) strategies, and when I am lucky, I get to play Product Designer and design new features.

Recently, I have been very lucky (and by luck, I mean working really hard). For the past couple of months, I have been the lead designer for a feature being released across all Lightroom surfaces at Adobe MAX 2023. Yes, in feature work we start working on features months, and sometimes years before they are released.

While I am still only a few months into a long journey designing this feature, it has shown me how different Product Designers (also known as feature designers) and Growth Designers have to function given how their work differs. I want to document as I learn about how these roles differ, hopefully, this will be helpful for those looking to get into growth roles or product roles.

Scope

This feels like the most obvious comparison. In my growth design practice, I am designing an experiment for no longer than a month. We have quick turn-around times and try to release new experiments monthly. This means a lot of small and fast iterations. While doing this, I have to be conscious that the engineers/QE (quality engineers) will have no longer than 2 months to get the designs to market — so while designing I need to consider the effort it will take them to code my designs.

In comparison, for feature design, I have been encouraged to go very wide in my design work. Consider all the possibilities, try outlandish designs, and put things together that don't belong. The timeline for design work is nearly 8 months — meaning I am returning to the same work every day for 8 months. I am also creating net new assets, not optimizing work at all, so the engineering team is not expecting an optimization because what I am designing is net-new.

While growth design is short, small, and iterative design work, feature work is fully consumed for many months. Development effort, while taken into account, is significantly less of a consideration during design work.

Stakeholders

In growth work, I have more stakeholders than I can point to on one hand. Marketing, GTM (Go to market), Growth Product Managers, Product Owners, Data Science, Finance, Growth Engineers, Core Engineers, and I’m sure there is more that I am missing. While having this many stakeholders ensures we are getting many perspectives on the design work, it also makes for a lot of feedback. In growth design, I have to be very deliberate in incorporating feedback that does not add scope or design time to projects. Essentially, a growth designer needs to move quickly and not become the bottleneck. If growth engineers are waiting on design, we have a problem.

In feature work, I have significantly fewer stakeholders — pretty much just R&D engineers that are developing the feature, Research, Product, and the Design Team. What I have found very interesting, is the design team is much more involved with feature work — looking for me to present my work nearly weekly for feedback and updates. Overall, while feature work has fewer stakeholders, the stakeholders who are involved are significantly more invested and have stronger feelings toward the designs.

While growth design stakeholders value the design, they also highly value the speed and engineering effort it takes to get the work in front of users. Feature design stakeholders hold much more emotions about the design and significantly reduced concern about engineering effort/time.

Success Metrics

In growth design, my work generally starts with success metrics. Asking questions like
- What is our hypothesis here?
- Is this experiment for Engagement, Conversion, or Retention?
- Is there a target goal we are trying to hit?
- What are our guardrails for failure?
There are always clear answers to these questions before I start on my design. Success metrics are one of the data points that drive my design work in growth.

In feature design, I have yet to hear anything about success metrics, especially involving any quantitative goals. I hear things like “We want users to enjoy the feature, and we want users to easily use the feature” but not any ways to quantify this. Currently, it feels much more like feature designers trust their gut and product sense to release a feature.
(note: the feature I am working on releases October ’23 so my current understanding of this may change as I get closer to this date)

While growth designers live within quantitative data, quantitative success metrics, and really.. a quantitative world, feature designers are able to hone in on their user empathy — designing with only qualitative (and many times anecdotal) feedback from their core stakeholders and user research.

I plan to continue developing my understanding of the differences and between growth design and product design at Adobe as I get the opportunity to straddle both of these worlds. Is there anything that I missed — let me know in the comments (: