Tips for your next growth design interview

In recent years the number of design job listings focused specifically on “Growth” have become more and more common. Based on my experience as a candidate and an interviewer, the following tips will be helpful as you prepare for a Growth Product Design interview.

Have a growth mindset

Since Growth Design is very much about learning through doing, consider showcasing a learning-oriented mindset from the very start of your presentation.

As you’d normally do, start your portfolio presentation with an intro about yourself but this time highlight what you’ve learned from each past experience rather than solely what you’ve done.

If you’re early on in your career and don’t have previous work experiences that’s ok! Focus on learnings from school projects; like working collaboratively with peers or delivering projects under tight deadlines.

Tie those learnings back to the role you’re interviewing for and explain how the things you’ve learned in each past experience (both soft and hard skills) makes you a great fit for this role today.

1. Talk Data

Data can be scary, especially as designers! The reality is that data can actually be yet one other tool in our toolkits.

As designers, we bring our users’ perspective to the proverbial table, and quantitative data is simply another facet of that perspective (a quite “measurable” one in fact). Data will tell you how users are interacting with your product at a large scale. When quantitative data is combined with qualitative data like user research insights, it can be incredibly helpful in guiding your design decisions.

Although this might be considered Product Managers’ domain, it can be helpful to show that as a Growth Product Designer you actively seek the most useful data to help inform your hypotheses and guide your design decisions.

How to showcase this

A few ways to show that data is part of your process are: 1) to infuse data into your problem statements, 2) to include data in your user journeys, 3) to call out which data has informed your design decisions and why.

If you have existing analytics for the surfaces you’re designing for, it’s great to dig into the data and dissect it to find patterns in users’ behaviors that help reduce ambiguity around the space you’re working in.

If you do not have existing tracking and logging events for the surfaces you are designing for, work with your analyst and engineering partners to implement these events as soon as possible so you can begin collecting data to help inform future design decisions. If you do not have those resources available to you, tools like Hotjar are quite simple to integrate and help you gather insights into users’ behaviors (e.g. scroll rate, click rate) in easy-to-digest ways.

Ultimately, as a Growth Product Designer you should be comfortable talking about data and incorporating it into your design process. Doing this will enable you to be an even more active contributor to defining your product’s strategy.

2. Have a hypothesis

At the core of Growth is experimentation. According to the Merriam-Webster English dictionary, an experiment is “an operation or procedure carried out under controlled conditions in order to discover an unknown effect or law, to test or establish a hypothesis, or to illustrate a known law” (source).

Within Growth product teams, it’s the norm to seek to validate or invalidate hypotheses through experimentation. A hypothesis is a statement you can test through an experiment; it includes a prediction you make on the possible outcome of that experiment.

Similarly to problem statements, you should have solid hypotheses for the designs you’re showing in your portfolio presentation. Leverage existing knowledge like data, both quantitative and qualitative, to better inform your hypotheses (and to show that you’re data-informed).

How to do this

Example: imagine you’re a designer for a social app and your data is telling you that users start creating new posts but ultimately aren’t getting to the end of that flow…

This simple framework is useful for writing hypotheses: “If we do Y, then Z will happen (more often)”. In the first part of the hypothesis you’ll define which change you’re making in the user experience. If we assume the core problem might be the length of the existing flow, then our hypothesis might be: “If we reduce the number of steps to create a new post…”.

In the second part of the hypothesis you’ll be predicting what might happen due to the change you’re making in the user experience (i.e. the outcome). The outcome should not be a surprise since we’re being intentional from the start; so it will look something like this: “…then users will create new posts more often”. Your hypothesis will look like this: “If we reduce the number of steps to create a new post, then users will create new posts more often”.

Having hypotheses is valuable because it shows that your process is empirical and your designs are carefully crafted to unlock specific learnings and ultimately validate (or invalidate) the hypotheses.

3. Present learnings

End each project or experiment with the results you measured (i.e. metrics) and most importantly with the learnings you have unlocked by shipping to your users.

If your hypotheses were invalidated and the outcome isn’t what you had predicted, that’s perfectly fine! What really counts is that you conclude an experiment having uncovered something you didn’t know before doing it. Equally important is to show that what you’ve learned can inform future direction (e.g. a roadmap).

Showing how individual learnings can inform future direction demonstrates you can think strategically and shows how each experiment is part of a macro system that builds on knowledge to shape a usable and performant product.

Conclusion

As a Product Designer preparing for a Growth interview, you will benefit by showcasing:

• An aptitude for seeking out data and interpreting it to identify unexpected and/or unintended user behaviors.
• Contribution to setting product and design direction through this unique point of view.
• An eagerness to learn from the designs you ship.

Best of luck with your interviews!

Illustration credits: Cover illustration by Paolo Ertreo — made with: hand photo by Jude Beck on Unsplash, Microscope photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash.