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HubSpot defines growth-driven design as a way to build a website in three stages: a strategy stage, a launchpad site that goes live early, and continuous improvement based on what visitors do. It announced a free certification in 2017, and by 2018 it taught two courses, one on the method and one on the agency business. HubSpot Academy has since retired both of those courses. The method's own website still publishes the definition and the three stages.
HubSpot's overview of the method lays out three stages in a fixed order. Strategy sets the goals and builds an understanding of the people the site is for. The launchpad is a first working site, released so the team can learn from real visitors. Continuous improvement then repeats a cycle of planning around one metric, building, learning from the result and passing the findings to other teams.
The overview attaches a model schedule to those stages: 10 to 14 days for strategy, 60 to 90 days for the launchpad, then 14-day sprints. Those numbers describe HubSpot's model, and a team can keep the stages while changing the lengths. We walk through each one in the three stages of growth-driven design.
Luke Summerfield, who wrote HubSpot's announcements of the certification, dated HubSpot's original internal idea deck for the method to April 29, 2015.
HubSpot announced the certification on August 8, 2017, for designers, UX strategists and marketers. The announcement says the course teaches what to build and why, and that it doesn't teach how to code it. Its listed subjects were website strategy, user research, using data to guide design decisions, agile process, conversion optimization, personalization and running experiments. We describe the curriculum in more detail in what HubSpot's growth-driven design certification covers.
The three stages describe how a team decides what a website needs next, and the course taught those decisions. Coding the pages is a separate skill, and the announcement says the course didn't teach it.
How the two courses divided the material
| Course | Who it was for | What it covered | When |
|---|---|---|---|
| Growth-Driven Design Certification | Agencies and marketers | The method itself | Relaunched February 2018 |
| GDD Agency Certification | Agencies | Packaging, pricing, selling and servicing the method for clients | Announced May 29, 2018 |
Running a strategy stage and an improvement cycle is one skill. Selling that work as a continuing service is another, because a client may be asked to pay for cycles before their work has been chosen. The 2018 announcement of the agency course gave each skill its own course and described each as around 4.5 hours long at the time. We cover the selling side in how an agency should price and sell growth-driven design.
The 2017 announcement states that learners don't need to be HubSpot users and calls the content "tool agnostic." HubSpot defined a process and left the platform open. A team can run the three stages on WordPress or Webflow, and the choice of platform comes down to practical questions such as who can edit pages and where results are recorded. We compare the options in whether HubSpot is the best platform for growth-driven design.
Summerfield's April 2018 post credits Lean Labs and Media Junction with helping build GrowthDrivenDesign.com, the site that still publishes the method. Lean Labs' current growth-driven design program keeps HubSpot's stages and the first two model lengths, with 10 to 14 days of strategy and a launchpad in 60 to 90 days. It runs improvement sprints of 30 days where HubSpot's model shows 14, and it builds on HubSpot CMS. So the agency holds the stages fixed and treats the sprint length and the platform as its own choices.
HubSpot Academy's page for the Growth Driven Design course and its page for the Growth Driven Design Agency course each carry a notice that the course has been retired.
The method's site still has a certification page that describes free, on-demand training in video, written and audio form, with no coding experience required. It lists modules on strategy, the tool stack, research, the launchpad, the performance roadmap, the improvement cycle and experiments. With those two Academy courses retired, we'd read that page as an outline of what the training covered.
HubSpot
“Growth-Driven Design is a smarter approach to web design that eliminates all of the headaches and drives optimal results using data.”
Growth-Driven Design
“Agencies that used GDD on HubSpot Websites (vs. Wordpress) reported seeing 14.34% more leads after 6 months. Based on the “2017 state of GDD” survey responses.”
HubSpot Academy
“This HubSpot Academy course has been retired ... we've retired the Growth Driven Design course.”
HubSpot Academy
“we've retired the Growth Driven Design Agency course.”
HubSpot Academy
“This HubSpot Academy lesson has been retired ... we've retired the Growth Driven Design Fundamentals lesson.”
HubSpot Academy
“1-12 of 215 results: growth-driven design ... Join over 250,000 other HubSpot Academy certified professionals now.”
Growth-Driven Design (dba of HubSpot)
“Access to our Slack Community and collaborate with 1,500+ GDD-certified professionals ... over 1600+ other GDD certified marketers.”
HubSpot
“In a 2017 survey, 350 agencies across the world reported the impact their clients have seen using Growth-Driven Design vs. traditional web design. ... You do NOT need to be a HubSpot user and the content is tool agnostic.”
Growth-Driven Design (HubSpot)
“We split the content into two, shorter certifications - (around 4.5 hours each) ... “GDD Agency Certification” = All of the agency specific content around packaging, pricing, selling, and servicing GDD with clients.”
Growth-Driven Design (HubSpot)
“Special shout out to Media Junction and Lean Labs who helped build GrowthDrivenDesign.com ... Starting mid-may, I will be shifting the majority of my time to ... the “HubSpot CMS Developer Advocate”.”
Growth-Driven Design
“2017 STATE OF GROWTH-DRIVEN DESIGN AGENCY EDITION ... Data you can use in your prospect pitch decks, talks and marketing.”
Agency Management Institute
“we did a State of Growth-Driven Design survey. We had 350 of our agencies fill out the survey ... on average with traditional design was 108 days ... With Growth-Driven Design, we found the average was 60 days.”
Internet Archive
“Capture returns the academy-public-ui application shell with no rendered course content.”
Lean Labs
“The launchpad, including strategy and build, runs $30K to $70K+ depending on complexity, with a timeline of 9 to 13 weeks.”