3 Tips for Growth Design Job Seekers

Hi Readers,

There's a contradiction for growth design job hunters. This specialty is both really in demand and still relatively niche.

Growth design is most established in big, Silicon Valley tech companies, which are already super competitive to get a foot in the door. So I knew I was going to have to hustle hard when I decided to move on from being a growth designer at OpenTable's B2B team.

After looking for one month, I was able to choose from four growth design offers, and I accepted a role at Dropbox where I start this month.

Let's go,

Treyce Meredith, Growth Designer, Dropbox

Tip #1 - Finding the right role

Finding the right role is a combination of three factors. You should prioritize which is most important to you, I recommend that you have at least two of the three factors.

“Right People” - Does the growth or design team collaborate and communicate in a way that speaks to you. A prospective team might be focused on visual design, where you care about something else.

Interesting sectors - Does the growth team work on something that interests you? Would you be excited to get more people using what you are working on?

Interesting work - Will you get to work on projects that interest you? While not every project will be your absolute favorite, will you be learning, further honing your skills, broadly does it fit with your personal development goals?

Other questions to consider once you think about the factors above:

What stage is this growth team? Just started? Well-oiled? - Growth teams come in all sizes and stages of maturity. Consider if you want to be on the ground floor of a new team, establish a growth practice, or join a more mature team with lots of ongoing projects.

What part of the funnel do you want to impact? Common areas of focus for growth roles include activation, acquisition, revenue growth, retention. Your day-to-day projects will vary with the focus of the role. 

Tip #2 - Creating a growth case study

When interviewing for a growth role you will likely be asked to present a case study. For mine, I presented two projects for contrast. The first one was a very typical growth project where my team redesigned three different upsells highlighting my process, specifically data analysis, design iterations, experimentation, and launch. 

My second project was slightly more complex for B2B users adopting a new feature. I walked through how I came up with the ideas for experiments by creating a North Star vision, breaking that vision down into hypotheses, and launching and learning from A/B tests. Here are some tips when creating your case study. 

Speak about data confidently. Make sure to start with baseline metrics/goals and how you're measuring them. Data fluency is a key skill that sets growth designers apart. You don’t need to be a stats wiz, but you need to know enough to design experiments and comfortably have a conversation about quantitative research outputs.

Express a point-of-view on experimental research methods. Talk about your design process and how you designed your experiment. Your assessors will care about the process as much as they care about the outcomes of the experiment. 

Always talk about outcomes. It doesn't matter how well your experiments did. Total failures are okay! Be open to discussing why you think they failed and what you might have done differently. As a growth designer, your work will always tie to metric, you have to discuss how your experiment impacted that metric. 

Tip #3 - Asking the right questions

It’s important to ask questions that matter to you during your interview. 

Grill your manager - You have to make sure your manager is someone you want to learn from and someone you would be comfortable getting support from. If you scared or intimidated to ask for help, you won’t do well. If you direct manager is not part of the interview process, make sure you at least have one conversation with them. 

Examples: 

• Why is this role open?

• What do you think is more important visual design or user research?

• How do you lead your team?

• Can you tell me about a time your approach failed? 

• Can you tell me about a recent conflict on your team and how you resolved it? 

Trust your gut! - If you hear something that makes you uncomfortable, or you feel like you might not be a good fit; don’t force it. Chances are that feeling won’t go away. There have been times where I was so excited about a company or opportunity that I ignored red flags. The best way to trust your gut is to articulate what are no-gos for you and not to take opportunities that meet those.   

Think about the stage of your career - What is your “professional North Star,” meaning what is the one thing that matters to you most at this point in your career:  do you want to be a manager, is being a thought leader important to you, are you dreaming about working on high profile features? Don’t take a position that doesn’t align with your goals. 

About the author

Treyce Meredith is a goofy, creative, and upbeat human. Currently he is a product designer at Dropbox. Treyce also speaks about accessibility and inclusive design, his talk "Designing for Learning Disabilities" has been given internationally. Treyce also teaches design at San Fransisco State University.✍🏼 🎨 Art and editing by Molly Norris Walker.  Pitch us: [email protected]

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