UX + PLG: 5 principles to multiply your value
How linking design and business can bring more value in 2024
Last year gave us a lot of mixed signals — boom of AI, more companies are interested in PLG, continuation of lay-offs, increasing competition in a red ocean. In The State of UX 2024 report authors share plenty of new opportunities that can open up:
Eliminating manual tasks from the designer’s plate;
More strategic design thinking;
Higher autonomy and accountability with fewer layers of management;
Higher visibility of design work and opportunity to demonstrate business impact;
Advocate for users in a results-oriented market, designers need to feel comfortable asking new types of business-related questions, and more.
It all shows us that in today’s world, designers must make smart and informed decisions that not only make customers happy but also help businesses grow in times of economic uncertainty.
To navigate this new landscape, I’ve taken another look at the Growth Product Design discipline that I published in 2023 and added some fresh perspective. In this article, I’ll expand on its value, explore its evolution, and provide actionable advice in the form of 5 principles with accompanying action items. By applying these tactics, I hope to eliminate the biases around this discipline and help companies find value in developing Growth teams and Growth Product Design.
Who is a Growth Product Designer today?
Growth design is not as new as it sounds. I remember my conversation with Lex Roman in 2018 when I found her fundamental article where she unpacks who is the growth designer. The basic definition remained the same:
Growth designer is a full-stack Product designer who knows how to connect user needs to business goals, validate assumptions, and achieve impact on business metrics.
Looking at this definition today in 2024, I’m surprised at how deeply it resonates with the needs of the market. I also got inspired by the concept of 10x engineering and tried to apply it to design.
A growth designer is a 5x designer who combines skills such as [1] Product design + [2] Data analysis + [3] UX research + [4] Impact prioritization+ [5] Speed of iteration. If this combination can be found in one designer, it can be an invaluable “team of one” for any business.
Since 2015 and the emergence of Product-led Growth, this discipline has become popular in companies like Slack, Dropbox, InVision, Pinterest, and many more. These companies started building Growth teams and experimenting with new business models, virality, and engagement with the primary goal of sticking their users to the product, and hence earning bigger revenue through the self-serve model.
Being ex-Head of Growth Design at Miro, I joined the company in 2017 as the company’s first Product Designer for Growth. In my role, I covered design as an individual contributor for Acquisition, Activation, Engagement, Monetisation, and Community-led growth. Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to learn many lessons through hundreds of experiments and hire and grow people within the company. Later on, I built a team of 10+ Product and Content Designers for Growth who supported the entire self-serve business. Currently, as a Growth Advisor, I’m helping companies uncover growth opportunities and create excellent user experiences through the combination of Product-Led Growth and UX.
In this article, I’ll share the refreshed 5 principles that can help any designer strengthen their skills and marketability, as well as companies who want to achieve a bigger impact through Growth and Design disciplines together.
Why PLG + UX is needed right now?
This year showed us that Product-led Growth is a highly demanding discipline, and companies are trying to achieve a bigger impact with smaller teams. Companies want to find a person who can multiply the success of the business, and achieve with limited resources a bigger impact, and you can find hundreds of open positions for that job.
In The State of UX in 2023 I found the following:
Within the design discipline, the rise of the Growth Designer role — a designer who is focused on acquiring new customers and bringing in immediate revenue — shows that companies are being more pragmatic about the Return On Investment (ROI) when making hiring decisions.
In a new version of The State of UX 2024, I found the continuation of that theme:
To be able to advocate for users in such a results-oriented market, designers need to feel comfortable asking new types of questions…In 2024, designers will be expected to become even more business savvy.
ROI and connection to real impact remain to be important factors. Traditional UX design used to have a more spacious room to envision the best possible future: start with great foundational research, go step by step through double-diamond, and end up with holistic redesign and steady development. I’m afraid didn’t have this luxury in 2023. But by minimising the effort in manual tasks with AI the companies can find more space for deep strategic thinking.
However, the biggest question for businesses remains the same: how to deliver business value with fewer people, less time, less confidence, and higher uncertainty.
Let’s look at some data that showed us some ROI references even years ago. In this extensive paper by Ronny Kovahi, you can find interesting facts like:
Netflix considers 90% of what they try to be wrong;
Airbnb had only an 8% successful rate on search changes according to his experience;
Google had only about 10% of the controlled experiments leading to business changes.
How often have you analyzed this ratio for your product? How often as a designer did you try to run an experiment with the design before investing a bigger time into execution? This year is the best opportunity to start doing that to maximize your value and your business's success, together with bringing user-centric thinking.
To re-emphasize this connection, I want to refer to the article from David Hoang The Future of PLG is Design:
PLG is good design: Great Self Serve and PLG is all about fostering the best customer experience possible, resulting in successful outcomes for the business.
Before we start applying it to action, let’s look through the evolution of Growth Product Design to make sure we’re extracting its best values.
Evolution from “hacking” to value-based Product Growth
Some of us might be familiar with the term “Growth hacking” which was introduced around 2012 in Silicon Valley and originally comes from Growth Marketing. For us as designers, the biases towards this are coming from its association with a data-driven approach, rapid iterations, and over-optimization.
Sometimes it led to “dark patterns” that are not associated with a great product experience. Most popular patterns come from checkout journeys in e-commerce or airlines where various “hacks” are used to maximize potential revenue.
However, some companies are learning the lessons from the over-optimization approach and making less overwhelming experiences for users. For example, the Booking accommodation page was full of noisy and interruptive over-communication about discounts, which probably didn’t lead to a dramatic conversion rise. The current experience seems to be less noisy and shows positive iterations.
What I’m trying to say here is that Growth Product Design is not the same as Growth hacking. Over the years, companies shifted from Growth hacking to a Product-led growth model. Elena Verna defined Product-led Growth as a discipline here:
"Product led growth is all about product's ability to activate, engage, and convert that usage to a monetization opportunity." The goal is to bring users to a "aha" moment and help them find value in your product, leading to monetization, whether direct or indirect.
If we just take a moment to reflect on the examples of products that achieved real success, these products have both components: intuitive User Experience and ethical PLG strategies. I don’t think companies can be successful by compromising UX or using “unethical growth hacks”. What are the examples of these companies?
📌 Notion: great UX for content organization + PLG freemium;
📌 Figma: advanced functionality in a browser + PLG network effects;
📌 Canva: variety of use cases for creators + PLG for individuals and teams;
📌 Miro: focus on intuitive experience for non-designers + PLG from early days.
As a UX or Product Designer you can create products with excellent user experience, and your power and responsibility is in making the design decisions the right way that will maximize the company’s KPIs and ROI. Let’s explore how you can start doing it.
5 principles of multiplying your value through PLG + UX
1. Start with data, know your hypothesis, and optimize for the end-user.
At the beginning of any project, you need to have multiple design assumptions. Before jumping to a solution, keep thinking critically and curiously dig into data. In the kick-off of the project, ask data questions like:
What primary business metric are we optimizing for? How we will measure success?
What guardrail metrics do we have in mind? Which risks do we need to mitigate?
What do we already know about user behavior in this journey? Where the biggest drops are happening?
Your hypothesis is the best navigator throughout the whole design project. The hypothesis can be informed by existing quantitative or qualitative data and can connect a problem with an assumption. The structure that I found in this article in 2017 seems to be still handy:
We believe that creators don’t publish their content because they fear disclosing confidential company materials.
With these inputs, you can start exploring potential solutions by informing them of your data and hypothesis.
🎯Action item: ask 1 data question to become more business-savvy and create a clear hypothesis for your ongoing project. Share 1 new UX heuristic with your PM to help them be more user-centric.
2. Fail forward to learning better, and iterate smart.
As we already know, only about 10% of all experiments lead to a successful outcome. That means that if you don’t experiment, you’ll never know if your design or team effort investment is worth it.
Earlier this year I shared the story about “The Evolution of Miro’s Onboarding” with Kyle Poyar . It shows a story of a 5-year iterative approach that can help you uncover the impactful experiments that eventually can be not in big bets but in smaller wins. And the secret to that is “smart iteration” — you need to fail at least once to do the right thing. And with additional attempts, you can do the right thing well.
Uncovering this 10% of successful changes is a real art, it requires stamina and courage to do many things wrong. Create a safe space for that in your company, and you’ll master that skill.
🎯Action item: run 1 experiment and re-run it with 1 new iteration. Always run a second iteration.
3. Use cognitive psychology to inform your solutions.
Originally, designers knew how to extract the right user problem to solve. The next level is to uncover the real root cause of the problem. The Growth.design as the masters of user psychology collected 100+ cognitive biases that you can use in user research to uncover solutions that should impact Activation, Retention, or Monetization.
One of my favorite examples is “Hick’s law” which shows that with several options, the effort of decision-making is increasing. It leads us back to the overwhelming experience on the Booking accommodation page that improved over time with a minimized number of options.
🎯Action item: apply 1 new cognitive bias to your next design exploration. Make opinionated decisions through a combination of data and UX heuristics.
4. Optimise for quality and speed of new learnings.
Sometimes we’re hiding design from the real users trying to make it better and achieve some perfection. If we’re over-polishing the solution for months, we’re holding ourselves back from learning.
User testing is a great method, but not always applicable. Most reliable and high-quality learnings can be received when we give our solution to users' hands to explore it in real environments. Don’t be afraid to cut unnecessary edges to validate it faster.
🎯Action item: say NO to one unnecessary perfection to move faster, and say YES to one idea that can help you learn something new next sprint.
5. Have a shared accountability on impact in a team.
During a conversation with Willie Tran (ex-Growth PM at Dropbox), we explored how the definition of success for a designer has evolved. It’s no longer just about creating a beautiful and consistent solution — designers are now also judged by the impact their work has on the product. In other words, a great design is not enough; it must also drive meaningful results for the business.
Getting back to a fresh report “The State of UX in 2024” we can see a new opportunity opening up for a design discipline:
More accountability also means greater visibility for your work and, with it, more opportunity to demonstrate impact within your org.
Sometimes you can find impactful improvements that might require no design at all but rather remove some unnecessary functionality. In that case, impactful design is the absence of design. Don’t underestimate the value of these quick wins, and don’t hold yourself back from executing them.
🎯Action item: look at your current project and connect it to the real impact you want to achieve. Uncover 1 quick win and prioritize it right now.
What’s next — apply it!
A growth mindset is not just about particular design principles, it’s also about openness to new ways of working and experimentation. Thinking about the next project, try to think what might be one of the principles you’d like to take with you and give it a try.
If you’re ready to dive even deeper and take it into action — start with these 5 call-to-actions 🎯
Ask 1 data question to become more business-savvy and create a clear hypothesis for your ongoing project. Share 1 new UX heuristic with your PM to help them be more user-centric.
Run 1 experiment and re-run it with 1 new iteration. Always run a second iteration.
Apply 1 new cognitive bias to your next design exploration. Make opinionated decisions through a combination of data and UX heuristics.
Say NO to one unnecessary perfection to move faster, and say YES to one idea that can help you learn something new next sprint.
Look at your current project and connect it to the real impact you want to achieve. Uncover 1 quick win and prioritize it right now.
In the end — think big, start small, and iterate smart 🙌
Dive deeper
UX Collective | The state of UX in 2024
David Hoang | The Future of PLG is Design
Lex Roman | What is a growth designer?
UX Collective | The state of UX in 2023
Tal Raviv | That’s not a hypothesis
Growth.design | The Psychology of Design
Great article. Love that you highlighted the risky and negative aspects of dark patters. Optimizing for long term revenue growth and good and clear UX is a must!
Great read, I loved the action items that are small enough that it's difficult to say "I can't do that". Thanks for that!