Growth Design for Product Managers
I attended a growth design workshop with the one and only Lex Roman. For the ones who don’t know her, Lex identifies herself as a Growth Designer. She primarily focuses on the impact of the design, rather than the output of design artifacts. How?, by driving key product metrics such as retention, conversion rate, churn rate, etc, informed by product analytics. She is an expert in early stage experimentation, and worked with giants such as: Macys.com, Toyota, Nissan, etc.
What is a Growth Designer?
As Lex defined it in her blog: A Growth Designer is a person who approaches product design through the dual lens of customer experience and business impact.
When I heard that definition, I’ve just fell in love with it. Why?, because as a Product Manager, I’m a big fan of every technique, mindset, or practice that cares about maximizing the value of a product (more on this topic in my next article), in order to create products people love to use and adopt.
On the other hand, it is trendy to talk about user centric approaches: user centered design, user research techniques, ethnography systems of evaluation, etc, to really know and understand first who are the users of a product, to then understand which are the pain points they are experiencing, and turn them as opportunities. So far so good, but what about the business?, how a product can be successful if we don’t care about the profit it brings to the company that created it?. Just for blending both worlds, I loved the concept of a growth designer.
Key takeaways for Product Managers
Early stage experimentation and curiosity
Everything is an experiment.
Seems to be obvious, but to acquire an experimentation mindset is not an overnight task. We’re programmed to get it right. In our education, we focus on getting the right answer so we can earn good grades. But experimentation is a totally different game. It is about exploring get wrong and continue exploring different ways to make it better. I personally believe that curiosity is the very first step to adopt an experimentation mindset. Never feel satisfied by an answer, look for alternatives, don’t be afraid to get it wrong.
Metrics and funnels
Another exciting topic that is always floating around product manager literature is how to use metrics to measure success. Growth designers are not an exception. In order to make better decisions, they rely on user behavioral data. Growth not comes only for acquiring new users, but to retain users that use the product already. In some cases, the cost of acquiring a new user is even more expensive than retaining existing users. So how can we measure their behavior to unveil pain points and improve their experience?. Growth design uses metrics and funnels to analyze user paths and predict behavior. More on funnel analysis.
Growth loops
And lastly, a concept that blew my mind away: Growth loops.
How does your product grow?, that’s a big question to ask, that sometimes can differ in answers depending on the stakeholder asked. As Reforge define growth loops:
Loops are closed systems where the inputs through some process generates more of an output that can be reinvested in the input. There are growth loops that serve different value creation including new users, returning users, defensibility, or efficiency.
The image shows how a growth loop works for Pinterest. The loop starts with Pinterest packaging the content for search engines using quality signals, and the output of the loop is a user repining or saving existing content which drives to quality signals, so the output feeds the input and the loop starts to work. Loops can be really helpful to drive acquisition, retention or efficiency. Many big companies are putting together growth teams that create and monitor these growth loops in order to grow the product fast.
