Everything You Need to Know About Growth-Driven Design

It’s little wonder that your website is the #1 asset to promote your startup. It’s your tireless sales rep that works 24 hours a day without sleep. With this in mind, you want to get the best of the money and time you invest in it.

If you have already put efforts in the development of your website, you might have faced two issues:

• High risk: there is little or no guarantee that it’s worth spending money on.
• Poor results: you make assumptions, do something and then forget.

Today I’m going to talk about the Growth-Driven Design – a smart approach to reduce risks, get faster results, and increase the performance of your website.

In opposite to the traditional waterfall development, it consists of 3 stages: plan, build, and continuous improvement. If it sounds familiar so far, watch out: the perks are in the details.

Plan

The first stage is crucial to overall success. Follow the steps:

1. Formulate the (SMART) goals of your website, aligned with the strategy.
2. Do a user experience research: you need to know how your customers tick.
3. Come up with a list of “jobs to be done”: tasks that a customer “hires” your product for.
4. Make fundamental assumptions about your business.
5. Create customer personas: semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers.
6. Map the customer journey: highs and lows your customers experience with your product.
7. Create a website-specific strategy.
8. Brainstorm how to improve the experience at each stage of the journey.

Build

In the second stage, you need to build the simplest version of the website which is one step better than what you have right now. Practically, you develop the next website MVP (minimum viable product).

Keep in mind, that you can customize and use any rapid development methodology if it works for you. From my experience, agile and scrum have proven themselves to be remarkably effective.

At this point, you also create the missing content for your website. Do it effectively: introduce a standard creation process, automate it, and collaborate within your team.

Once you have a stable process in place, invest time in defeating inefficiencies. For example, build a library of reusable templates, empower your team to accomplish tasks on their own and avoid waiting times, improve collaboration by using communication tools, like a team feed, etc.

Continuous improvement

In the last third stage, you introduce a two-week cycle, which consists of the following steps:

1. Determine the current focus: what is the most critical improvement?
2. Identify the challenges and friction points in the current version.
3. Brainstorm what you can refine, make a list of action items.
4. Prioritize items and pull them into sprints.
5. Formulate user stories and hypotheses.
6. Run a sprint and engage your entire team across functions.
7. Set up an experiment and define metrics of how you will measure success.
8. Once the experiment is done, share the learning with your team.
9. Analyze thoroughly the metrics and changes in the overall customer experience.
10. Make decisions based on your findings.
11. Go to the next focus.

As a result of the growth-driven design, you accelerate the development process and reduce the risks. How? First, you move in short sprints and get instant feedback. Secondly, you validate all assumptions using real data. Finally, you focus only on the high-impact activities that help your business grow.

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Want to know more about the growth-driven design? – Let’s talk!

Source: https://andreiaverin.page.link/gdd-li