What does HubSpot's growth-driven design certification cover?

HubSpot announced the certification on August 8, 2017, in a post by Luke Summerfield. It was aimed at designers, UX strategists and marketers. The post says the content teaches what to build and why, and that learners won't be taught how to code it.

The subjects it listed were website strategy, user research, using data to guide design decisions, the agile web design process, conversion rate optimization, personalization and running experiments. The same post says learners don't need to be HubSpot users and calls the content "tool agnostic." So the certification was about a method for running a website project, and it left the choice of platform to the team.

That method has three stages, which we explain in the three stages of growth-driven design.

The method site's certification page lists eight modules: methodology, website strategy, tool stack, user research, the launchpad, the performance roadmap, the improvement cycle and experiments. We'd sort most of them by the method's stages. Website strategy and user research belong to the first stage. The launchpad, the method's name for a first release, is the second. The improvement cycle and experiments make up the third.

Suppose a software company's pricing page gets visits and few demo requests. Under website strategy, we'd have the team write down who the page is for and what the business wants from it before anyone proposes a layout. User research would send the team to find out why visitors leave, through interviews, surveys or session recordings. Suppose the answer is that buyers can't tell which plan fits a company of their size.

The launchpad subject concerns a focused first release, so the team would rebuild the pages that buyer depends on before anything else. The improvement cycle and experiments apply after launch. The team would state the pricing change as a prediction, name the measure that will show whether it held, and compare the result with what the page did before.

Taken together, the subjects describe a way to choose the next piece of work and a way to check it. We cover the research step in how to validate the assumptions behind a strategy and the testing step in how to turn user insights into hypotheses and experiments.

By 2018 HubSpot taught two courses. A May 29, 2018 post on the method's site says the methodology course for agencies and marketers had relaunched that February. The same post announced an agency course on packaging, pricing, selling and servicing growth-driven design for clients. It described each course as around 4.5 hours long at the time.

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. We discuss that side in how an agency should price and sell growth-driven design.

Lean Labs' growth-driven design program shows what applying the method involves. The agency chooses each cycle's work from page behavior, forms, CRM lifecycle stages and feedback from sales. It ranks the candidates by expected effect on pipeline, by buyer relevance and confidence, and by effort. A course can describe a review like that. Carrying it out depends on the company's own data and on people who know its buyers.

Summerfield's April 2018 post credits Lean Labs and Media Junction with helping build GrowthDrivenDesign.com, the site that published the method. The agency's current program keeps the three stages, runs improvement sprints of 30 days and builds on HubSpot CMS. The stages come from the method, and the sprint length and platform are the agency's own choices in applying it.

So a certificate tells you someone studied the method. When you're judging whether a team can run it, the sites they've shipped and improved are the better evidence. Growth-driven design case studies covers how to read that kind of evidence.

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 certification page on the method's site still describes free training with templates and no coding experience required. With both Academy courses retired, we'd read that page as an outline of the subjects. The method's own explanations of website strategy, the launchpad and continuous improvement remain published. HubSpot's wider definition of the method is in how HubSpot defines and teaches growth-driven design.