14 (mostly free) resources to improve at growth design ✏

Published in

UX Collective

8 min readAug 21, 2018

Jobs for Growth Designers have been bubbling up over the past couple of years rising in popularity and demand. Growth is an excellent area of opportunity for designers. It’s not a far cry from what we do now, and it adds measurable value to a business.

If you’re interested in focusing more on growth design, this list of resources will help get you started. The best way to develop your skills is practice but if you can’t pivot to a growth job right now, there are ways to focus more on growth wherever you are.

Before we get into the (mostly free) resources, Timothy Li and McLean Donnelly share a couple tips!

Timothy Li, Product Designer at The Score advises focusing on business goals and analytics: “Start considering business goals just as much as user goals in your work. Dive into the analytics of your work to help justify your hypothesis. Everything is an experiment; be willing to let quality go for the sake of speed. It’s tough, but I’ve learned to deal with that.”

Timothy recommends: The Product Designer’s Guide to Growth and Mobile Growth Stack, a framework for strategic mobile growth.

McLean Donnelly, Founding Partner at The Makery Group urges designers to think about the big picture: “I think designers need to be able to grasp the larger financial objectives of growth strategies.”

Mclean recommends: Statistics and Probability at Khan Academy, as well as The 5 Deadly Diseases by Edwards Deming and the following books! Competitive Strategy, Good to Great, and The Effective Executive

There is information all over the Internet about growth hacking and tactics for growth. Having done some research in this area lately, I combed through my findings and put together a list of the best resources I found.

Just as growth is not one person’s sole responsibility; it’s an organization-wide one, anyone in any role can use the resources on this list. However, if you’re a designer and you want to learn more about growth, these resources in this post will help you start!

The list! 🌟

Growth.design

Growth.design by Dan Benoni and Louis-Xavier Lavallee hosts a collection of Growth Design Case Studies. These case studies can help designers, product leaders, and marketers build better experiences for their customers.

“We believe that sharing meaningful experiences makes the world better. Growth Design helps organizations across the world craft better products and experiences.”

➲ Growth.design case studies

Julian Shapiro’s Growth Hacking Guide

Julian Shapiro writes concise, in-depth guides to help increase mastery in specific areas and he has one for Growth Hacking. This guide includes eight sections spanning from Landing Pages to Ad Channels and Content Marketing.

“In reality, growth is not a series of “hacks.” It’s a rigorous methodology consisting of experimenting, collecting data, and leveraging human psychology. All in pursuit of directly maximizing revenue — not raising brand awareness or generating buzz.”

➲ Growth Hacking: Advanced Guide to Acquiring Users

The Growth Handbook

The Growth Handbook by Intercom is a comprehensive, beautifully designed and free handbook for growth with contributions from the industries finest! You’ll want to carve out some time to spend reading the guide, which covers the following topics: acquisition, activation, retention, monetisation, testing and optimization, metrics and measurement.

“Growth isn’t a game of silver bullets or one size fits all solutions. It’s about connecting more people to the value of your product, so they become loyal, long-term, paying customers, who share it with others. The Growth Handbook features industry-tested advice for doing just that”

➲ The Growth Handbook

A Guide to Landing Page Optimization

This guide, written by Neil Patel and Sherice Jacobo for Quicksprout breaks down the entire process of creating stellar landing pages from scratch and is done in seven easy-to-read chapters. The guide also includes many links to other helpful resources!

“Landing pages are about much more than just creating a simple design and slapping up an email subscription form or download button. They’re about carefully combining just enough persuasive content to get the reader’s attention, while combining it with an unbeatable offer and a ‘visually digestible’ design.”

➲ A Guide to Landing Page Optimization

The Definitive Guide to Growth Hacking

This guide, written by Neil Patel and Bronson Taylor for Quicksprout, unfolds over ten chapters. The guide starts by talking about what Growth Hacking is and continues with information about getting visitors and activating and retaining them.

“Those who understand growth hacking will have a competitive advantage that is hard to overstate, and we wanted to provide a robust framework for thinking about it.”

➲ The Definitive Guide to Growth Hacking

Build Better Landing Pages

Justin Jackson appears a lot in this article; he’s creating a lot of great educational material to help people get better at designing landing pages and understanding how to increase conversion. Build Better Landing Pages covers the basics of landing page design and is $99. The course includes 18 videos, step-by-step instructions and tools, and resources.

“My goal is to help you not waste time on a project that won’t get any traction. To make this happen, I’ll help you build a landing page, craft a message, and get some initial traffic to see if your idea has potential.”

➲ Build Better Landing Pages

Landing Page Teardowns

Landing Page Teardowns is a Youtube channel with weekly landing page teardowns by Justin Jackson, and the production quality is pretty mint. Justin has been working with SaaS companies since 2008 and has consulted on marketing & growth for startups in London, San Francisco, Boulder, and Portland. Sign up for his newsletter.

➲ Landing Page Teardowns

Tiny Marketing Wins

Tiny Marketing Wins shares tactics for growing SaaS and software businesses. Specifically, it’s a list of marketing ideas for you to try. Each tactic includes a tutorial video, a PDF handbook, and resources. Get lifetime access for $299 or signup for the free set of tactics.

“Tiny Marketing Wins is a list of 44 marketing tactics, organized into different categories: content marketing, building your email list, landing pages, SEO tips, Facebook ads and paid acquisition, launch tactics, and mastering analytics.”

➲ Tiny Marketing Wins

Essays on tech, growth, and startups

Andrew Chen is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and previously, led growth teams at Uber. His newsletter features long-form essays on what’s going on in Silicon Valley and the articles on his site focus on Growth, Design, Product Market Fit and more.

➲ Andrew Chen

Copyhackers

Conversion Copywriter Joanna Wiebe is the founder of Copyhackers, a site for startup founders, micropreneurs, marketers, and copywriters. The importance of copywriting in digital design can’t be overstated! Copyhackers promises to help you boost conversions using just your words, and contains a plethora of articles across different categories, and there is one specifically for Growth.

“Copy Hackers promises to help you write more persuasive, believable and usable copy sans pixie dust, so you can boost your Website and email conversion rates.”

➲ Copyhackers

A Brief Guide to Designing High-Converting Landing Pages

A Brief Guide to Designing High-Converting Landing Pages by Neil Patel is a great introductory read into landing page conversion. Neil provides links to other tools and resources and it’s all entirely free.

“If you want to capture more targeted leads, then your landing page web design has to convey your message well. But, the truth is that most landing pages don’t increase conversions, which is why most people complain about low conversion rates. You can change the story by following 6 steps to create landing pages that capture conversion rate optimization.”

➲ A Brief Guide to Designing High-Converting Landing Pages

Marketing Resources by Unbounce

Unbounce has a variety of resources from guides to videos, calculators, and reports discussing topics like A/B testing and design. One that caught my eye: “Attention-Driven Design: 23 Visual Principles For Designing More Persuasive Landing Pages.” In this one you can learn “How Horror Vacui causes marketers to build crappy marketing experiences that deplete our mental energy.” 😂

“Explore our ever-expanding ecosystem of free marketing resources, from in-depth ebooks to actionable monthly webinars and more!”

➲ Marketing Resources by Unbounce

In-Depth Insights and Guides
About Customer Acquisition And Growth

Brian Balfour has written an extensive library of articles and offers courses about growth and customer acquisition. Brian is the former VP of Growth at HubSpot, has started multiple companies and grown user bases to millions of daily active users. He sends a weekly newsletter, you can subscribe on his site.

➲ Essays by Brian Balfour

Growth Hacker TV

Growth Hacker TV is an educational resource for founders and entrepreneurs that are trying to grow a startup. GHTV is a blend of videos, community conversations and recipes; recipes are focused on a specific goal and includes steps to take and tools to use to reach that goal.