Question 1

How should a three-person growth-driven design pod be structured?

Accepted Answer

Give each person one part of the improvement cycle to own, and give one of them the final say on what gets worked on. The split we'd recommend is a strategist who owns research, priorities and coordination, a designer who owns design and content, and a developer who owns implementation and measurement. The method's cycle calls for a cross-functional team, and this is our suggestion for covering it with three people.

Question 2

Which tools help teams plan, test, and collaborate on growth-driven design?

Accepted Answer

Tools are useful in growth-driven design for four jobs: keeping the plan, its owners and the discussion in one place, watching what visitors do, comparing two versions of a page, and recording what was decided. A work manager such as Asana, or a shared document, can hold the plan and the record. Microsoft Clarity records sessions and draws heatmaps. HubSpot's page A/B test splits visitors between two versions, on Content Hub Professional or Enterprise. A team doesn't need all of them to start, and some changes go ahead without a split test.

Question 3

How should teams organize the hierarchy and roadmap for growth-driven design improvements?

Accepted Answer

Our recommendation is a hierarchy of four levels: the outcome the business wants from the site, the obstacles you suspect stand between buyers and that outcome, the changes proposed to remove each obstacle, and the work scheduled for the current cycle. The roadmap is then the proposed changes in ranked order. Rank them by expected effect, confidence and effort, and adjust that order for dependencies and for work that has to happen whatever its score.

Question 4

How much does growth-driven design cost, and what drives the price?

Accepted Answer

Lean Labs' article on the three stages of growth-driven design lists $30,000 to $70,000 and up for the first build, called a launchpad, and about $5,000 a month for the improvement work that follows. That is one arrangement: a one-time fee, then a monthly one. An agency can also bill the whole engagement as a monthly retainer, with no separate build fee. In either arrangement, the price follows how much the first build covers and how much work each month buys.

Question 5

How does growth-driven design work from strategy through launch and continuous improvement?

Accepted Answer

Growth-driven design builds a website in three stages, and each stage supplies what the next one needs. A strategy stage sets the goal and ranks the ideas for reaching it. A launchpad puts a smaller working site in front of visitors. The team then improves that live site in repeated cycles, and what visitors do on it informs the choice of the next piece of work.

Question 6

How does growth-driven design work for B2B websites?

Accepted Answer

On a B2B website, growth-driven design follows the same three stages it follows anywhere: a strategy stage, a launchpad and repeated improvement cycles. Where the site's job is to start sales conversations, the difference is in how a change gets judged. A demo request isn't a sale, so the team uses CRM records to see whether the leads from a changed page were qualified and whether deals followed.

Question 7

What are the core principles of growth-driven design, and what evidence supports them?

Accepted Answer

Growth-driven design asks a team to research its audience before designing, launch a focused first site, improve that site in short measured cycles, and share what it learns with the rest of the company. The method's own pages tell you what those principles are. Usability research from before the method existed supports the reasoning behind iteration. Agency case studies report what happened on particular sites, and the one discussed here is a before-and-after account without a control group.

Question 8

When should a company run growth-driven design in-house versus hiring an agency?

Accepted Answer

Run growth-driven design in-house when your own people can cover the skills the cycle needs and have hours each month reserved for it. Consider an agency when a skill is missing, or when the people who have it are already committed elsewhere. A mix is also an option, and then the question is which parts of the work sit on which side.

Question 9

What are the disadvantages of growth-driven design?

Accepted Answer

Growth-driven design asks for a continuing commitment of money and people, and that's its largest disadvantage for a team that can't sustain one. The others are narrower. Testing is slow on pages with little traffic, and priorities can drift when nobody has the authority to hold them. An existing site with a lot of content also needs a migration plan, which a small first release doesn't supply by itself. Which of these matter depends on your situation.

Question 10

Is HubSpot the best platform for growth-driven design, and what are the alternatives?

Accepted Answer

HubSpot is a strong candidate for growth-driven design when your team already runs marketing and sales in HubSpot's CRM and needs to read page results against lead records. It isn't the best platform for every team. The method doesn't require a particular platform, and WordPress and Webflow can both host the same cycle of small changes, measurement and testing. The choice comes down to which platform your own team can change and measure without waiting on someone else.

Question 11

What is the difference between growth-driven design and conversion rate optimization?

Accepted Answer

Growth-driven design is a way of running a whole website over its life: plan it, launch a focused first version and keep improving it. Conversion rate optimization, or CRO, is the work of getting more visitors to take a measured action, such as requesting a demo. The two overlap. CRO can be part of growth-driven design whenever the work targets a conversion, and it can also be done on a site that was built any other way.

Question 12

What are the three stages of growth-driven design, and what happens in each?

Accepted Answer

The three stages are strategy, the launchpad and continuous improvement. Strategy decides who the site is for and what gets built first. The launchpad is the first release: a usable site that replaces the current one and covers the pages that matter most. Continuous improvement is the recurring work of changing the live site according to what you learn from it.

Growth-Driven Design