Designing for Impact: The Growth Design Flywheel

Hi Growth Designers,

In this edition of our newsletter, we're diving into the art and science of designing for impact by harmonizing user experience with business objectives. In my experience working on and with growth teams, we often laser focus on business outcomes but forget about the key moments in a users experience with a product that lead up to those moments.

How we affect a users emotions and motivations across their lifecycle with our products is key for being successful at getting them to experience, adopt and share our products value. So how do we effectively look at growth through a dual lens that connects the dots between user experience and business objectives? Allow me to present - The Growth Design Flywheel with some case studies from my time at Vidyard.

Get growing!

Chase Denomme, Head of Product Design at Disco & Co-Facilitator of Growth Designers Community

Understanding the Growth Design Flywheel

The Growth Design Flywheel is a framework that aligns business goals with user experience, enhancing a user's motivation and their ability to succeed with our product throughout their lifecycle journey. This method transcends the typical growth funnel by integrating key business objectives into a user-centric journey.

Components of the Flywheel

1. Lifecycle User Experience: Understanding the stages users go through while engaging with our product and building their confidence and expertise.
2. Business Goals: Aligning user experience enhancements with overarching business objectives.
3. Lean UX Design Process: The process for how we approach growth design. Employing a lean, scientific design process to iteratively improve and align the product with both user needs and business goals. This outer flywheel happens at each individual stage of the inner components of the flywheel.

The Flywheel in Action

Let's break down the flywheel into its core stages. To put into action, I’ll highlight case studies from my time at Vidyard and how various product-led growth teams approached designing for growth. For each stage we can use behavioral design tactics to help progress them to the next stage of their lifecycle with the product.

Acquisition: From Strangers → Evaluators

• User State: Experiencing pain in their current workflow, frustrated with current tools, maybe seeking solutions, or newly exposed to our product.
• Key Goal: Creating a moment of perceived value.
• Tactic: Use viral UGC (user-generated-content) loop of user sharing a video to show value of product with social proof that sparks initial interest while building trust. Increase motivation for signup with a question prompt triggering the bandwagon effect.

Activation: From Evaluators → Beginners

• User State: Trying the product, searching for value, exploring its capabilities.
• Key Goal: Leading users to the 'aha' moment of experienced value.
• Tactic: Personalize the onboarding experience based on the user's job-to-be-done identified in onboarding. This can make the 'aha' moment more relevant and impactful. It also helps decrease the time-to-value by removing workflows that are not relevant for them. Increase motivation by using gamification to lead straight to moments of value.

Retention: From Beginners → Regulars

• User State: Growing confidence in the product, exploring further possibilities and forming habits.
• Key Goal: Encouraging repeated value realization and adoption.
• Tactic: Increase ability through habit formation by implementing features that encourage regular interaction (e.g., prompts, notifications, etc. At Vidyard, we used our Chrome Extension to insert the Vidyard icon in common tools our customers used to help them build a habit of video creation.

Monetization: From Regulars → Champions

• User State: Product is integrated into daily workflows, seeking to solve more problems and discover more value.
• Key Goal: Scaling value through paid conversions and referral.
• Tactic: Give perceived value by highlighting premium features behind paywall. Use anchoring to present several options and visually draw attention to the desired plan.

Conclusion

The true magic in growth design happens at the intersection of user experience and business goals. This method focuses not just on hitting short term business goals but on nurturing our users journey to become champions of our product and drive sustainable growth.

If you’re interested in learning more about the flywheel, watch the replay from our FREE live event Growth Design Crash Course, or join our upcoming Growth Design School Spring Cohort (registration ends in 48 hrs!). Together, with a group of other top tier designers we will do deep dives into each stage, where we'll unpack strategies, tools, and real-world examples to illustrate how to effectively implement the Growth Design Flywheel in your projects.

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Until then, happy growth designing!

- Chase

About the Author

Chase Denomme is the Head of Product Design at Disco, and a co-facilitator of the GrowthDesigners.co community. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

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