Designing for Growth

Designing for growth requires a different mindset from that for a traditional product design. I see a lot of product designers struggling in understanding the nuances of growth design and “unlearning” a few key concepts while designing for growth, which are otherwise often considered sacrosanct.

Following is a note that I recently shared with my team, calling out a some of these nuances.

1. Get clarity on metric to be impacted and understanding on the hypothesis. This is different from solving for user pain-points and needs. The “need” for your intervention will often arise from certain metrics to be improved and not necessarily from a “problem” your users are facing.
2. Optimise for quality and speed of learning. Don’t over polish at the cost of shipping. Decide on the right amount of execution details for required learning. Say NO to unnecessary perfection. This is different from making decisions in haste; don’t let it be a cover for a broken experience.
3. Focus on highest impact. This can be different from focusing on the “best / optimal” user experience. Be cautious of introducing dark patterns in order to achieve the highest impact.
4. Be informed by cognitive psychology and user behaviour patterns. Leveraging and being aware of user behaviour patterns and cognitive biases will often be your sure shot answer to the problem. Can you make the choices fewer? Can you associate information and action triggers better? Are you isolating the key information / trigger visually distinctive enough?
5. Think in variants. This can be different from the one right way to solve a problem. Variants empower you to learn by presenting and testing different approaches to the users. Ensure variants are backed by clear hypothesis and ensure definitive learning. The more delta in variants, the better.
6. Understand the impact in numbers. Get a clear understanding of what worked and what didn’t; and have actionable learnings.
7. Build relationships. Most often you will touch areas of the product that will be owned by someone else on your team. While you do that, ensure you partner with respective owners to move faster and deliver conflict free experiences.