Creating a Growth Vision (Growth Design Monthly)

Nov + Dec 2021

Dear Readers,Over here at Pinterest, the Growth Design Team is in the thick of it this time of year. As we close out the year, we reflect on our accomplishments and learnings, and we begin to shift our focus towards planning for an inspiring 2022. We’re running both tactical brainstorms for the year ahead but also setting multi-year visions from a Growth first perspective.In this newsletter, I will share three Growth vision case studies that delivered between 5-8% increases in sign-ups and engagement metrics. I will be chatting through these examples in a live chat with the community on December 2:

Go forth and envision,Allen JordanLead Product Designer, Pinterest

Hold Up. Can Growth Design Set Product Visions?

Growth Design can be just about running a lot of scrappy experiments. This type of work is about ideating incremental product changes prioritized by expected business impact. When you’re stuck in this mode, you’re going to start wondering, “where are all of these one-off experiments taking us?”At Pinterest, Growth Design attempts to answer that by visualizing and setting a North star for the team to follow. We lay out a holistic strategy to ensure our Growth teams are focused on business success through the lens of user success. 

So yes, Growth Design can lead product vision work! And I’ve come to learn it is a necessary foundation for performant Growth teams. I even predict it will be how Growth Design will provide the most value in the future as surfaces and experiences become hyper-optimized and hit their “Local Maxima”... And there just isn’t any more juice to squeeze from running small experiments and Growth teams learn they need to take on bigger risks and big bets.

Wait, What Exactly is a Product Vision?

Good question! A vision can be an aspirational design, flow, presentation, or it can even be as simple as a bold statement describing a future version of your product that solves both user and business problems. Growth teams often jump right into tactics and experiments, but having a vision sets a destination to guide all short and long-term work.Below are some examples of recent work by the Pinterest Growth Design Team that show a range of approaches, timeframes, and outcomes for vision work.

Case Study #1

Reimagining the Logged Out Experience

Vision: 1-2 year outlookApproach: Multi-week brainstorm and aspirational presentation share out Method and outcome: Design leads Joana Monteiro and Michaela Tedore ran an immersive two week sprint similar to Google Ventures Design Sprint. Four breakout teams brainstormed based on user problem prompts and personas generating ideas in Figma with digital Post-It notes. Then, the teams took the individual ideas and paired them with themes and flows creating rough wireframes.We reimagined a logged out vision that seamlessly transitioned to a logged-in experience upon signup. We added flesh to the previous barebones Pinterest landing pages that gave value to the user before they even signed-up.   One experience that shipped was having regular features such as “Save” and “Follow” on our logged out landing experiences. We did multiple follow-up experiments across several teams that ultimately unlocked “Save” and “Follow” as a drivers of 5% sign up growth. 

Aspirational designs for Pinterest logged out experience

Read two more case studies on GrowthDesigners.co

Concluding thoughts

Pitching and getting your Growth team or team at large on board to establish a short or long term vision can be a daunting task but it is totally worth the effort, since both your users and business will benefit from it in the long run. Try to figure out what kind of vision makes sense right now for your team, try to map the approach, vision timeframe and method when pitching as well. Sometimes you gotta just plant the seed of doing a vision and then find the right opportunity like during roadmapping to make it happen.  

About the Author

Allen Jordan is the lead product designer for Growth Activation at Pinterest. This is his latest stop on the Silicon Valley circuit including past design roles at Opendoor, Google, Apple and Facebook. You should get some kind of badge for hitting all these big guys! You can find Allen drawing on this wealth of experience and helping others in the GrowthDesigners.co Slack community. 

Bonus: Live Chat with Author Allen!Dive into these case studies of Pinterest’s growth vision work with author Allen Jordan. As a bonus within a bonus, we’ll also breakdown Jordan’s famous experiment framework for foundations, investments, and big bets. It’s a good one! As always, we’ll keep it casual and interactive with the community. 

Thursday, December 2, 10:00 AM PT | 1 PM ET | 17:00 GMT

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