September 2020
Dear Readers,
What do Welsh rugby and growth design have in common? Well, we like them both A LOT. Rugby is a tough sport, hard on your body. Growth design is a tough sport, hard on your mind. Both can leave you feeling battered and bruised. The well-capitalized competition and the demanding environments drive a high burnout rate in both rugby and growth team members.
Wales is a tiny home nation obsessed with this relative niche sport. Their strategy and a traditional emphasis on strong defense have allowed Wales to compete internationally despite inequalities in money and population.
Growth design is still a micro-discipline in the global design scene, and yet this burgeoning field of practitioners makes headlines and contributes to business beyond what would be expected from such a small community.
Given everything that’s going on in the world, we wanted to talk about the mental game of growth design in September’s newsletter. Welsh Rugby player Jack Dixon said, “If you focus on results, you will never change. If you focus on change, you will get results.” So we’ll talk about the changes in perspective and process towards a more sustainable pace and longevity in the field.
Your fellow fatigue fighters,
Will & Molly
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Reflections from Will
The Reality Check
When I first started in my tech career, I thought being part of the product team was like being a part of the A-Team. I'd come in as Hannibal and would have access to a big budget to conduct experiments, user interviews, and have an entire team at my disposal. After starting the job, my assumptions were proven wrong.
I learned not all companies have access to vast buckets of capital you can throw towards acquisition costs and product development. In reality, you have budget constraints, product debt, internal politics, and pressure trying to deliver on either new or existing metrics continually.
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One Is Not Like the Others
Remember not to compare yourself to companies such as Uber, Lyft, or Postmates. These companies have vastly different operating models and millions of dollars backing up their tech teams. These companies have set an unrealistic culture around growth as they use growth tactics without considering how it might affect people negatively. Yes, it's excellent that a $5 coupon improved retention by X%, but at what cost? Who ultimately had to eat that cost? Was it the small business that's already losing 30% by filling Postmates orders?
Small and Steady
Comparing yourself to them is just going to lead to burnout and set unrealistic expectations. You can still make an impact as a growth practitioner at a smaller scale; it doesn't mean you need the backing of millions of dollars or exploiting your customer to make a meaningful impact and improvement to the business. This can happen by starting small, and here are a few tips.
- Audit the product. Figure out what parts you can immediately focus on with limited resources and budget. Identify what value you can bring to the customer while improving business growth.
- Set up a scrappy but repeatable testing framework. If the product team resources are limited, setting up a reusable CMS such as Unbounce or Webflow will pay out dividends. This will empower you to test without needing to pull in development and impacting resources.
- Look for the tiny wins. Specifically, what are some low effort, high impact wins you can tackle? Implementing numerous tiny wins can have a significant impact over time for both the business and customer. One of my favorite examples is Joe Califa's story, who leads design at Github.
Impact as a growth practitioner can happen on any scale. You don't need a mountain of cash or an army of designers and developers. You don't have to compromise your ethics or health. Just take a step back and remember that growth can happen gradually over time.
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Reflections from Molly
I wrote my first book UX Design for Growth in 2018 and then the second edition two years later and renamed it Design-Driven Growth. The main question I get is, “What has changed in growth in the last two years?”
One of the primary shifts has been heightened expectations for growth’s impact on business. For practitioners, there has been a resulting burnout generated by the demand for more outcomes delivered at an accelerated pace.
New tools have made product experimentation much easier and more accessible. As a consequence, expectations have never been higher to deliver big numbers as quick wins. The pressure of working in growth is amplified by tightening market conditions and the demands of simply existing as a human during a time of extreme turmoil. So how do we make working in growth more sustainable?
Tips for Your Sanity
- Focus on enablement of colleagues rather than doing it all yourself.
- Invest in repeatable processes so you can follow your own playbook and simply modify templates for project and research plans. (Bonus: Give your process a really pretentious name like “Growth Design Loop” to make it seem more like A Thing™️)
- Connect to the purpose of your growth, what good in the world are you enabling? How do you share that and draw energy from it?
- One word: Automation.
- Embrace the long-term nature of change built on incremental wins.
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Team and Self-Compassion
We must have empathy for ourselves as growth practitioners. Because growth never ends. Once targets are met, new ones are set. We need to be patient with ourselves and our colleagues while we plan, execute, and iterate measurement and optimization frameworks.
It took me six months as the head of design for a data company to instrument the onboarding and checkout funnel so we could even measure where customer drop-off was occurring. And we are a company focused on collecting and organizing data. (Indeed, sometimes the cobbler’s children are the worst shod.)
Identifying the critical user journeys and measuring the drop-off rate between each step is the necessary precondition for design experimentation. How can you optimize if you don’t know the baseline? It can take many months (or longer) to get the institutional focus and infrastructure to unblock the fun work of actually running growth experiments.
If you can, invest in a data backbone for the product as early as possible. If you can’t, it’s never too late. And if you’re not there yet, have some patience with yourself and colleagues. The reality is that running design experiments is the last 1% at the end of a journey, not the first step.
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Editor Bios
William Quezada is a Growth Designer with a background in product management and UX Design. Currently at VirTrial building clinical trial software.
Molly Norris Walker is a serial head of design for high-growth startups currently at InfluxData. Author of Design-Driven Growth. Oxford Internet Institute, IDEO, Pivotal Alumni.
Interested in being a guest editor for our monthly-ish newsletter? Write to newsletter@growthdesigners.co - We're all ears 👂
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Tools of the Trade
It’s not the tools—it’s how you use them. However some tools radically simplify the job at hand with minimal setup. Here's some that Will and Molly recommend under the banner of "making life easier."
Instapage
The core of Instapage is a landing page builder with a powerful segmentation engine that integrates with ad networks. Robust personalization at scale is tricky business, so it’s great to offload all of that into a tool and out of your brain/spreadsheets. (In fact, print and burn the spreadsheets.) Instapage also has easy to use and powerful variant testing baked into the landing page builder.
Canva
If you thought Figma and Sketch were quick ways to ship design wait until you try Canva. The focus of Canva is channel creative not apps and websites. If brand and marketing design is part of your job description, I recommend this tool for setting up templates for non-designers to modify.
Things
Let’s get real. We all handle notes and reminders in a chaotic matter. This goes for deadlines for both work and personal. Things is a task manager that helps you organize your tasks and with the ability to automate some of your workflows. It’s polished design to enter or complete tasks will make it feel like second nature. Gone are the days of lost colored stickies floating around your desk.
Miro
On the very surface is a collaborative whiteboard platform. Yet the product offers so much more with its robust feature, templates, and collaboration tools. You can use this to create user flows, task flows, or any type flow you can think of! Miro is a simple enough tool that it can be used without issue with stakeholders.
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Join the Growth Designers Slack
Connect with growth designers in our Slack channel. Share ideas, discuss challenges and learn from each other.
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Looking for Work? Hiring?
Well have we got some resources for you! Check out our Jobs page and our Growth Design Directory.
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