Lessons learned from a growth team designer
Let’s start with some honesty here - when I joined Atlassian, I was a complete newbie to growth design.
In previous roles, I had experience with graphic design, UX/UI, and a touch of product design. Landing in a team laser-focused on metrics and goals was a big change.
By the end of the first week, I’d googled so many new terms (about 1000 tabs across 10000 windows) - “drinking from the fire hose” couldn’t have been a more accurate description.
I’m sharing a few of my learnings, what excites me about working on a growth team, and how I’ve learned to balance a growth mindset with design strategy. I believe these learning are applicable to all teams — any designer can benefit from the fundamentals of growth design.
I hope these reflections can help others who are new to, or are considering working in a growth team.
What is product growth?
Let’s start from the beginning and unpack what a growth team does. A great resource on the topic, productled.org states:
Product-led growth (PLG) is a business methodology in which user acquisition, expansion, conversion, and retention are all driven primarily by the product itself. It creates company-wide alignment across teams — from engineering to sales and marketing — around the product as the largest source of sustainable, scalable business growth.
Source www.productled.org
We collaborate cross-functionally to align business value, with user needs. The team consists of:
- data analysts who understand business opportunities and product managers who align this to strategy.
- designers who visualize hypotheses through driving strategy, vision, user research, and experience design.
- engineering who executes work as experiments built specifically to validate (or invalidate!) a hypothesis.
Three lessons from working within growth as a product designer
Lesson 1: Paint your strategy as a north star experience
Early on in growth, there was some tension with the way the teams ran experiments that were short-lived or hyper-focused on moving a metric. Our leadership team encouraged us to think of the bigger picture and to envision a north star experience.
Once we painted this picture, the team was able to break down parts of this journey into smaller experiments and experiences, ensuring everything we worked on ladder up to an end-to-end customer journey.
The end result was a cohesive, meaningful experience that also delivered business impact. We started working closely with partner teams across the organization, allowing us to deliver better experiences to customers.
How we built a north star experience to support business goals
- Diagnosed the problem and formed a coherent strategy — following the process outlined here by design leads in growth.
- Collaborated with the team on an end-to-end journey, told as a story from the customer's perspective.
- Ran ideation workshops and prioritized opportunities using data insights.
- Refined opportunities into their simplest form, tested as an experiment to get a clear signal.
By shaping a north star experience, we were able to build a culture of growth that was customer-centric. Check out this template for documenting a north star journey.
Lesson 2: Balance the quantitative, the qualitative, AND your design intuition to make decisions
Growth teams move fast and optimize for learning. We constantly need to make trade-offs, move quickly and make data-informed decisions. Having access to quantitative data helps us make smarter decisions: as designers, we strive to balance this with qualitative insight.
However, an analytics dashboard alone will not tell you what to design. And relying solely on customer insights won’t tell you what users will actually do when they are using your product.
This data is simply a means to an end so the designer is constantly tapping into their intuition to help navigate complexity and optimize for learning.
What is intuition?
Intuition is the sum of your experience, what you’ve learned, with a dash of your instinct (your “gut feeling”).
Strategies for surfacing intuition
- Time-box it: if the project deadline was suddenly shortened to the end of the day, what path would you take?
- Critique your own work: if you presented this to someone else, what feedback would they give you, and what questions would they ask?
- Empathize with the customer: think of the last user research session you were in. Close your eyes and visualize their response.
Tip - here is a framework for visualizing balanced decisions.
Lesson 3: A growth mindset always wins
Running experiments means we are modifying parts of the customer experience and analyzing results to see if there is a statistically significant change. Being super goal-orientated means it’s easy for the team to become disappointed when the needle isn’t moved in an expected way.
Recently an experiment came back with inconclusive results; it was not successful in moving the primary metric. To overcome feeling discouraged about why our experiment “wasn’t successful,” we returned to a growth mindset. As a follow-up to the experiment, we ran customer interviews to ask questions and learn about user behaviors and motivations (something which the quant data alone wasn’t telling us.)
Instead of moving on from the inconclusive result, we were able to tell a story about why the feature didn’t have the impact we expected. The experiment results were inconclusive, but opened up opportunities for our team to continue to iterate and learn!
How to build a growth mindset
- Use hypothesis-driven design. Learn how to write a solid, customer-focused hypothesis. Here is the framework we use.
- Frame everything around what you’ve proven or disproven, instead of wins and losses.
- Map data insights along a customer journey.
- Use the feedback as a foundation for the next iteration of future projects. Don’t let these insights get lost!
- Add insights from inconclusive results to a repository — to inform future hypotheses to test.
Adopting a growth mindset has meant letting go of expectations and judgment. This has also helped us become customer-centric as we are constantly finding ways to improve the user experience in the most impactful way for the business and users.
Grow, as a team
Building experiences that span multiple products, teams, and time zones aren’t an easy feat. Designing for a growth team also means constantly engaging with stakeholders through regular face time and async communication tools. It also requires a high degree of trust within the team and encouragement for everyone to adopt a growth mindset.
Product-led growth is a team sport, so make sure you invest time in building out the right relationships and bringing people along on the journey.
To help you get started, I have compiled these approaches into a Figjam template. Check out the growth design toolkit and let me know how you decide to use it! I hope that sharing our reflections and learnings, has helped, and that these templates work their way into your design process.
Now it’s over to you: growth designer or not, how can you apply these lessons to your team? How can you build a customer-centric culture of growth?
