The Crucial Role of Growth Teams
A growth team is a group of professionals within a company dedicated to driving rapid and sustainable growth of the company. It's a cross-functional team that combines the expertise of multiple disciplines and with its growth mindset achieves exponential growth.
The growth team focuses on avoiding the product death cycle. The growth team identifies problems and obstacles that hinder a company’s growth, and then analyse and experiments to solve those problems.
A growth team either focuses on improving all parts of the product funnel (AARRR metrics) or takes a deep dive into one funnel part at a time.
Steps of a Growth Process
Step 1: Collect & analysis data:
Growth marketer & DA collect and analyse data to identify improvement areas and growth opportunities. Growth PM with his growth team will identify which part of the product funnel to focus, on and which metric is required to improve and will set different product improvement goals based on the insights generated from the data analysis.
Step 2: Generate hypothesis:
Brainstorming various solutions/hypotheses which will best achieve these goals, based on the existing data.
For example, there are a lot of drop-offs during onboarding, based on that, one of the goals will be to optimize the user onboarding process.
For this hypothesis: Users abandon onboarding because it’s time-consuming and the instructions are unclear. Breaking down the onboarding process into smaller, more manageable steps filled with gamification will improve engagement.
Step 3: Design & implementation:
Includes design experiments to test hypotheses. Testing can be A/B testing or multivariate testing depending on what they are testing. The next step is to plan and execute experiments to just a subset of users to easily measure the impact of the proposed changes in a controlled environment.
Step 4: Analysis result:
This includes analysing how users are responding to the experiment, and carefully tracking the key metrics. If the experiment is successful, the design experiment will apply as a long-term change. If the experiment doesn’t achieve the required results, then the insights from the process will support future experiments.
Growth team experiment at UBER
CTA content change Refer Ube to Get free rides The experiment had a significant increase in referrals, so the “get free rides” wording was retained as a long-term change. The growth team explained the reason as shifting from describing the action to describing the value of the feature significantly increased the number of people who invited friends.
Growth Design & Growth designer
After understanding this process, we know growth design is iterative and is a data-informed decision. Growth designer focuses on creating a seamless user experience that encourages users to take specific actions that lead to growth.
Growth designers possess some additional skill sets when compared to traditional or specialized UX, UI, or product designers which are business acumen, business processes & functions, and they have more strategic alignment with business objectives and growth goals.
Giving here some differences between Growth designer & traditional UX/UI designer
Traditional UX/UI designer:
Partner with DEV team, PM, and research to define detailed requirements & kick-off deep discovery process. They design features that could take up to 6 months to launch in a QE environment, can try new or outlandish designs & create value for the users by designing seamless features of the product and working on overall features or product experience
Growth designer
Primarily partner with research, analytics & PM to define experiments & kick-off iteration strategies for multiple rapid follow-ups. Design experiments that take a couple of weeks to launch to a testing environment, need to consider development efforts. They connect the value of the product to more and more users/customers and work only where there is an opportunity for User Engagement, Conversion, or Retention.
Growth designer at Netflix
Netflix TV app landing old design has a grid of boxes with enticing titles of popular movies and shows. This collage is dynamically generated and filled with localized titles. The hypothesis was video is a more compelling medium for persuasion than static content. From interviews with prospective customers, it was learned that concepts that were more informative about Netflix’s service performed better. Also, showcasing the breadth of content helped participants better understand Netflix.
A range was more compelling than a significant focus on a particular popular title. With this info, they decided to do quantitative variant tests with Concepts against the current grid homepage as a control. Concept B was the winner it used video to show a huge library of content and text with voice-over to describe more information about the Netflix service itself. It was cheaper to maintain since it relied on dynamic content generation and voice-over versus a more produced video ad concept.
In conclusion, the role of a growth team within a UX design company is pivotal in driving sustainable growth through iterative experimentation and data-informed decisions. By harnessing the expertise of growth designers, who seamlessly integrate business acumen with UX/UI principles, companies like Netflix and Uber optimize user experiences to achieve remarkable results
Article By: Akshi Shah
