Growth design is a powerful concept. It’s how we bring the goals of product marketing into focus and activate those goals through great design. As Christian puts it, it’s about evolving the areas of your product that grow metrics like revenue and users. But too often, growth design is reduced to a buzzword; to make the most of the practice, you have to consider the context in which you’re working. This episode explores what growth design looks like today, what it is not, and how it takes the best of two product disciplines, PMM and UX, to accelerate change. 

Oh, and we’re trying something new with the show. Today you’ll hear a new voice: our producer Erica is joining the conversation to ask the tough questions and be an advocate for you, our listeners. Want to add your own take? Write a note or record a voice memo, and send it to erica.irish@innovatemap.com to join the conversation. 

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Takeaways: 

• Growth design is about building features that accelerate growth in your product, like increasing revenue and users. 
• At its core, growth design is the intersection of product marketing and UX. 

Things To Listen For: 

[0:30] Introducing our moderator & producer, Erica Irish 

[3:00] Why Christian & Meghan were initially skeptical about growth design  

[4:00] Growth design is a layer on top of UX design meant to help the product accelerate growth, in revenue, users, etc. 

[4:30] Hear more from Pinterest’s growth design team in our 2020 episode

[6:00] Growth design brings product marketing into focus (e.g., microcopy) 

[8:00] Growth design leads to “users supporting other users” (product-led growth)

[9:30] How web3 and decentralization could affect growth design (or not) 

[12:30] Growth design accelerates users who are beyond the “hesitancy phase”

[13:00] Products need a category foundation before they get to growth design 

[14:00] Examining NFTs, community membership…and an NFT vending machine

[16:00] A case study: Coinbase’s experimental Super Bowl commercial 

[17:30] Why “marketing is never responsible for education,” but PMM can be 

[20:00] Growth design as understood through Andrew Chen’s “cold start problem”

[20:30] The early stages of a product should be different from your later stages 

[21:00] The goal of your first stage: figure out if your product is valuable, so you have something good to grow from 

[23:30] How to define and think about “growth design features”