Growth Design vs. Product Design
What growth designers and product designers actually do
Hey Tina,
Before we get into today's essay, a quick update: I've been neck-deep in building the Growth Design AI Prompt Library for the past few weeks so that more product designers can leverage AI to apply growth thinking to their projects.
It takes a lot of time to vet and organize the prompts that I’ve used over the past years that are actually valuable. So I've been testing the product with other designers and learning tons about what could make this product more approachable.
Writing quality prompts takes time, trial, and error. This library helps you skip the learning curve, offering you ready-to-use prompts and examples.
I'm launching this on August 14. So if this sounds useful to you, click here to join the waitlist and be the first to know.
Growth design is still relatively new, and there's tons of overlap with traditional product design. I’ve always seen it as a specialization.
Think of user research. There are user research teams that have very clear responsibilities from product designers in big companies. When it’s a small team, most likely, you would wear both hats in the organization.
Very often, growth designers are laser-focused on one area of product impact. While core designers aim to add more value to the product, growth designers need to connect this existing value to the customers. That is why the nature of their job is more data-informed, as they need to see a tangible difference.
There is a common misconception that growth design is about adding hacks on top of your product, but it’s a very outdated view resulting from the boom of the growth hacking concept.
A good growth designer will certainly discover their fair share of loopholes and know how to use them, but the real work to be done is building a portfolio of growth strategies that is as diverse as possible.
Growth design practice is rooted in the psychology of human behavior and focused on sustainable and scalable long-term value. It isn't just about optimizing what you already have. It's about finding levers to make the product grow itself.
Growth designers ask: "What are repeatable systems where product use drives more product exposure (and new users) without external effort?"
Take Notion's template system as an example. Every time someone creates a useful template, they're essentially creating marketing material for Notion. Users discover these templates, duplicate them, customize them for their needs, and often share their improved versions publicly. This creates an endless cycle where Notion's users are constantly generating new reasons for others to try the product.
Notion didn't have to pay for this content creation or distribution. They just designed a system where creating and sharing templates felt natural and beneficial to the user.
The Small Company Dilemma
Most resources about growth design assume you have a data team, thousands of users, and dedicated designers. But what if you're a 40-person startup and one person wearing the "design" hat between customer support calls?
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, especially after talking to product designers who feel locked out of growth design principles because they don't have the "right" setup.
Yes, at big companies, growth becomes a department. But at small companies, it lives as a mindset.
Every design decision you make is still a hypothesis, even if most product designers don't think of it that way. How many great ideas die because we think we need permission to experiment?
When you choose the element placement, you're hypothesizing that it will drive more clicks than the alternatives. When you redesign your onboarding flow, you're betting it will improve activation rates.
The difference is whether you treat your work as a hypothesis or a hope.
You don't need perfect data to start. You need to pay attention to the data you already have.
Whether you're building a newsletter, a SaaS product, or a creative business, the fundamentals of growth design apply:
Start with one clear goal (not five)
Find your biggest drop-off point (where do people leave?)
Form a hypothesis about why (what's confusing or missing?)
Test the smallest possible change (what's the easiest fix?)
Measure what matters (did the specific number move?)
Ask yourself 3 questions:
1. What am I trying to prove? Before you open Figma, define your hypothesis. "I believe this new checkout flow will increase conversion by X% because Y."
2. How will I measure success? Pick one primary metric and 2-3 secondary metrics. Make sure you can track them (if you have no experience, ask for help from the PM or the data person)
3. How will I know if I'm wrong? Set clear criteria for success and failure. "If conversion doesn't improve by 5% after two weeks, I'll try a different approach."
Gaining technical skills
Want to go full growth designer? There are specific technical skills that separate growth designers from traditional design roles:
Analytics fluency: Start by learning how to read user behavior beyond basic pageviews. Growth designers understand funnels (where users drop off), cohorts (how different user groups behave), and attribution (what actually drives conversions).
Product funnels: You need to map out your entire user journey and identify the micro-conversions within each step. The AARRR framework (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, Referral) gives you a good structure to think about this.
Growth loops: The real magic happens when you design growth loops – systems where user activity creates more users. Think viral loops like Dropbox's referral program, content loops like Pinterest boards that attract new users, or network effects where the product becomes more valuable as more people join.
Experimentation: Learn to write good hypotheses that are specific, measurable, and based on user insights, not gut feelings. Growth designers know how to run experiments and iterate fast, understanding sample sizes, test duration, and when results are meaningful. A/B testing is just one method; there are many other ways to measure impact. The key is knowing when and how to integrate experiments to generate learnings that inform your next steps.
Behavioral psychology: This is the fun part. Growth designers study why people click, sign up, or share. Start by reading real case studies and understanding psychological triggers (reciprocity, social proof, scarcity) and cognitive biases (anchoring, loss aversion, the paradox of choice). The growth.design website has excellent breakdowns of how successful companies use them.
Good news is that these skills build on each other. Once you understand user behavior, you'll design better experiments. Once you understand experiments, you'll ask for better analytics.
In the end, you don't need to become a growth designer. You just need to become a designer who grows.
Talk soon,
Tina
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