How to Unlock Product Success Through Growth Design
Unlocking product growth and revenue requires more than just a well-designed user experience; it calls for a growth-driven approach that marries design with business goals.
Kate Syuma has spent her career advancing this concept. Previously the Head of Growth Product Design at Miro, Kate is on a mission to evangelize the role of growth product design as the founder of Growthmates. She is also the author of The Holistic Growth Playbook: Building High-Quality Products and Team Culture, which distills insights from over 100 companies into actionable product-led growth strategies.
In a recent AMA with founders and designers in the Designer Fund community, Kate shared her practical insights on adopting a growth design mindset, along with what companies can gain from putting it into practice. We also covered the qualities that make for a successful growth designer, and ways to prioritize user experience while pushing for growth.
🔍 Key questions covered:
What is growth product design?
Growth design blends product design with growth strategy, creating product experiences that drive user acquisition, activation, and retention. It serves as the bridge between UX and business goals. According to Kate, growth designers are essentially full-stack product designers who focus equally on crafting high-quality experiences and driving business impact through user success.
Designers often fall into the trap of being too laser-focused on experience and craft, which can be especially risky at early stage companies where resources are tight and rapid iteration is critical. If design isn’t seen as a driver of value, it’s harder to gain resources, leaving teams stretched thin and reactive instead of strategic—ultimately leading to poor design and perpetuating a negative cycle. Understanding growth design principles can empower designers to influence product decisions more effectively while communicating their impact on the business with confidence.
Growth designers are generalists by nature. They bring a mix of skills, from data literacy to user research and impact prioritization. They understand what the metrics are, how to measure them, and how to connect all of these dots. It’s not just about moving fast—it’s about learning and iterating smartly.Kate Syuma
What steps can anyone take to think like a growth designer?
Whether you're a designer or a founder, anyone can apply a growth mindset to building products. Here are a few places to start:
1. Start with product design basics
Approach every challenge with the goal of creating a clear, high-quality user experience that solves real problems. Even if you’re not a designer, prioritize clarity and usability in every product or feature, ensuring that each interaction is intuitive and adds value for users.
2. Understand behavioral psychology
Sustainable growth design goes hand-in-hand with understanding what motivates users. Familiarize yourself with basic principles of cognitive psychology and behavior design to create products or processes that encourage positive engagement and are naturally aligned with user behavior.
3. Adopt a data-informed mindset
Data is essential to the growth design approach. Use data to guide every decision, asking critical questions and validating assumptions along the way. This applies to everyone—whether you’re gathering customer feedback, analyzing metrics, or refining team workflows. Also, get to know your users through feedback, interviews, or observing behavior. These learnings are essential for shipping products that genuinely resonate with them.
4. Prioritize speed and frequent iteration
Growth designers know that learning often requires quick, repeated iteration. Embrace failure as part of the process, with the understanding that many initial assumptions won’t hold up. Only about 50% of experiments yield measurable impact, as Kate notes, which underscores the importance of iterating fast. Aim for smart, focused experiments over perfection, allowing you to adapt and optimize based on real results.
Say no to unnecessary perfections, don’t over-engineer where you don’t have to, but say yes to a new, interesting idea you haven’t tried before. Growth design is as much about learning quickly as it is about moving quickly.Kate Syuma
5. Measure and take accountability for success
Define clear success metrics for each project and connect your actions to measurable outcomes. Whether it’s driving revenue, boosting user retention, or increasing engagement, regularly assess and adjust your efforts to align with these goals. Taking accountability for impact helps reinforce the growth-driven approach, ensuring each project contributes meaningfully to both user satisfaction and business growth.
Traits to look for in a growth designer
If you're looking to hire a growth designer, here’s a sample of the criteria you should look for:
Growth-oriented generalists – In a small, early-stage team, growth designers should be adaptable generalists who understand various growth levers, including activation, retention, and acquisition. Look for someone who has a wide-ranging skill set and is comfortable working across different growth areas, rather than narrowly specializing too early.
Collaborative approach – Since growth design is cross-functional by nature, strong candidates are those who can work fluidly across teams, from product and marketing to data and engineering. Look for designers who are effective communicators and thrive in collaborative environments, as this is essential to align their work with shared business goals.
Bias towards action – Early-stage growth designers should have a proactive, hands-on approach to tackling growth challenges. Look for candidates with a proven track record of taking initiative, setting up small experiments, and testing ideas even with limited data or resources. This action-oriented mindset enables them to make immediate contributions in a high-growth environment.
What do growth design principles look like in practice?
While growth design encompasses many stages of the user journey, onboarding stands out as one of the most crucial. Focusing on onboarding can yield immediate, measurable improvements in user activation. After all, it’s the first real impression users get of a product’s potential. It can also accelerate adoption and retention, ensuring that users not only understand the product but are motivated to continue engaging with it.
To illustrate how growth design principles come to life in onboarding, Kate points out three examples from Notion, Canva, and Linear—companies that embody quality user experience and strong product-led growth.
Notion → “Reduce distractions and ensure ease of use"
Notion's growth design approach centers on delivering immediate, clear value to users. Branded as an “all-in-one workspace,” Notion’s team understands the importance of living up to this promise from the outset. Their onboarding experience is simple yet effective, featuring a straightforward checklist that introduces users to core product features without relying on tutorials or pop-ups. This checklist-based approach allows users to explore Notion’s functionalities organically, creating high activation rates through seamless, integrated onboarding.
Canva → "Visualize product value and personalize experience using data"
As a highly visual tool with a broad user base, Canva personalizes the onboarding experience using data to tailor templates and resources to each user’s needs. The interactive onboarding doesn’t just introduce features; it showcases the product’s core value by enabling even non-designers to create professional-quality designs. By analyzing user preferences and offering relevant content upfront, Canva creates an engaging, accessible experience that drives both adoption and long-term engagement.
Linear → "Aim for clarity. Simple first, then powerful"
Linear focuses on simplicity and clarity across its product experience. Known for its streamlined, efficient interface, its user invitation process is refreshingly simple, offering just two options for inviting others: by link or email. This clarity extends throughout the product, supporting Linear’s goal of “simple first, then powerful” design. By reducing friction and over-complication, Linear keeps users engaged, enhancing both activation and virality for its collaborative features.
đź’ˇ For more examples, check out Kate's article on High-Quality Principles to Support your Product-Led-Growth.
The components of an effective onboarding experience
In The State of Product Onboarding report, Kate outlines strategies for designing effective user onboarding, focusing on simplicity, engagement, and continuous learning:
Balance simplicity with essential information – Keep onboarding straightforward by limiting each screen to key actions—no more than seven questions. Focus on what’s essential to help users quickly experience the product’s core value.
Onboarding doesn’t end after the first session – Design ongoing engagement strategies that bring users back to discover new features or complete key actions. Phased onboarding ensures users see value beyond the first experience, encouraging long-term engagement.
Communicate anticipated value clearly – Make sure users know what benefits they’ll gain from the product, starting from their first interaction. Reinforce this message throughout the onboarding journey to build trust and motivation.
Embrace continual experimentation – Since about 50% of initial assumptions may miss the mark, frequent iteration is crucial. Run A/B tests and gather feedback to refine the onboarding experience based on real user behavior.
Consider enhanced onboarding techniques – For complex products, try video tutorials, interactive walkthroughs, or dedicated onboarding specialists. These can provide a more personalized experience and improve activation rates.
How do you balance user experience with the need for rapid growth?
One key challenge for growth designers is maintaining a clear, user-centered experience while pushing for rapid growth. Kate emphasizes that product designers play a vital role in educating teams on UX best practices, ensuring that speed doesn’t compromise usability. For example, she suggests hosting internal sessions to review common UX pitfalls, such as dark patterns, to build cross-team awareness.
Kate also recommends conducting quarterly UX cleanups to remove any friction caused by quick iterations. “A regular cleanup helps remove unnecessary complexity and keep the product aligned with user needs,” she notes, stressing the importance of thoughtful design maintenance as products evolve. “These principles should guide decision-making at every stage. It’s up to design leaders to make sure they’re not just words on a Confluence page but are visible in every design review."
How to make the transition from IC to growth design manager?
We also asked Kate about her transition from individual contributor to manager, which happened through intentional planning and incremental responsibility. She collaborated closely with her manager to outline a career track with clear milestones: “We sat down and designed my career track for the next year,” she noted.
Initially, Kate balanced design work with small leadership roles, guiding a few designers. Within six months, she was managing a team of four and realized she needed to shift her focus entirely to management. “I wasn’t able to do both hands-on and managerial work,” she recalled.
A key to her success was establishing structured, repeatable processes like review sessions and team principles, which made collaboration smoother and fostered a growth-driven culture. Reflecting on the journey, she shared, “Seeing the impact our team could make when working together—that’s what made the transition truly worthwhile.”
Whether you're a designer, founder, or product leader, adopting the principles of growth design can help you build products that adapt and scale, providing real value to users at every stage of their journey. As Kate demonstrates through her work and advice, the true power of growth design lies in combining UX expertise with business acumen—ensuring that product design doesn’t just support growth but actively drives it.