Growth Designer – who they are and where they live

Lately, so much new design-wise terminology has emerged that I’m sure that nobody has time to keep up with them. Sometimes I get a newsletter with a headline like “DesignOps: the questions you’re probably asking yourself now” or “Content designers: you’ll wonder how you coped without them.” When I see these headlines, I’m confused and feel that I’ve fallen out of context. Usually, I ignore them.

But with growth design, something caught my attention, and I decided to figure things out. This term is coming up too much lately. People are calling themselves that; companies are posting vacancies; conferences are being dedicated to this topic. So what this term means, and how can companies benefit from this kind of person?

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Who is a Growth Designer, and what is the outcome of his work?

Essentially a growth designer is any designer who focuses on achieving business goals and crazy about all kinds of data. He/she understands the business terminology and communicates his/her solutions through it. He/she can translate overall business goals into design goals and always tracks the progress.

With all that said, a growth designer doesn’t take business’ goals above customer’s goals. Without customers, there is no business at all, as evident as it sounds. And if happy customers mean happy business, a growth designer can’t neglect customers’ needs. He/she looks into the customer’s experience through the lens of the business’s goals.

A growth designer needs to figure out this “boring” business stuff. To learn how to collect, measure, and draw conclusions from the data.

So what is the outcome of this remarkable creature’s work? A growth designer produces products (or product features), basing the whole process on lean principles. There are specific frameworks that he/she uses to come up with a feature/product, find the right solution, validate it, ship, and measure the results after shipping.

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Does every company need a Growth Designer?

I really want to say yes. But I understand that not every budget can afford a seasoned growth designer who already has all the valuable and confirmed with experience skillset.

So maybe every company doesn’t need a growth designer per se. Still, companies should stop underestimate the value of design and start trusting their designer to act. And if the company believes and applies lean principles, they need to share the business goals and all the metrics and analytics with their designers. It’s a good practice to come up with the solution together as a team. (Rather than create a task for a designer and go about your day.)

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Growth Designer vs. Product Designer

This part interested me the most at the beginning of my research. By the end of it, I came up with these core functions that distinct a growth designer from an average product designer.

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Product Designer

Works with user’s needs in mind.

Often uses holistic experience to develop features.

After shipping a new feature is ready to move on to the next one.

Growth Designer

Works with a business goal in mind passing user’s needs through its prism.

Bases all the decisions solely on precise data.

Learns the results of implementing a new feature and measures it against the initial goal.

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Looking at the second list, I’d expect that all designers would be like this. But there is a real world where designers don’t always have power and/or desire to own the product on the same level as more traditional business-oriented teammates.

I need to mention that Growth Designer, for now, is rarely a particular position in a company. Instead, it’s the way a designer can describe their skillset so people would distinguish you from the traditional design approach. However, if more designers with this skillset are calling themselves Growth Designers, more companies will start looking for them exactly. So there is hope.

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