Growth Design is Dead. Long live Growth Design

"So you think you can do it?" he asked with a hint of hopefulness. "Can you untangle this mess and make it look good?"

At that point, I wasn't entirely sure what I was looking at. He just talked at me for five minutes, walking me through this complex enterprise platform, with half of his presentation going through one ear and leaving through the other. Mind you, at this point I had no idea if I was competent enough for the job. But I had Richard Branson's voice ringing through my head: "When someone asks if you can do something, even if think you can't, always say yes and figure it out later." Sound advice.

"Yes, I can. I can make it look good," I muttered.
"Great. The job is yours," he said. First interview, hired on the spot. Makes for a good story.

So I went ahead and made it look good. Because you see, more than ten years ago Design was seen as a way to do just that—make products look good. If you could make it look good, whatever 'good' meant to your stakeholders, you were qualified. It's why so many graphic designers transitioned into product design seamlessly; their main skill was at the top of the wishlist for employers. Fifteen years ago a solid visual portfolio could open doors and set you apart in interviews. The industry wasn't mature enough, so it used the only visible signal to differentiate between designers—does the work look good or not?

To an extent, good visual work still does that, but less so. Today, you need to master so many more skills. You need to speak the language of Product. You need to liaise with engineers. You need to learn how to manage your stakeholders. You need to understand how to balance the speed of shipping and quality of work. You need to know how to work within the constraints of a Design System. You have to wield AI effectively. There's a lot you need to be able to do. But the one word that seems to make everyone's ears perk up these days is growth.

Don't get me wrong, the need to design good experiences is still there. But businesses have clued up: designers can do more. Rather than just improving the customers' experience for the sake of it, wouldn't it make sense to do it in tandem with what the business needs? When we talk about speaking the language of the business—understanding activation, retention, conversion, engagement, churn, leading metrics—Design can be an agent of change rather than a bystander. This is all good news for us!

With the AI pace of development, it's now clear that our jobs will change. Whatever we'll do five years from now—however Design will look like—it will be different than what it is today. It's naive to think that all these other jobs are changing—engineering, marketing, product—but that ours, and only ours, is so special that it will stay the same. If that's the mentality you're walking around with, it's likely you'll be out of a job soon.

What we don't know for sure is how the job will change. But it's entirely possible that the first change will affect the visual side of our work. AI, for now at least, can't think on its own. It searches through its entire training data and replies with something based on that knowledge. So when it comes to design, all you have to do is train a model on data from Dribbble, Pinterest, Mobbin, and Awwwards, and these models will be able to spit out close-to-top visual work in seconds. It will be able to explore several visual directions for the same problem. Feed it some constraints—maybe some components and variables, a brand styleguide, some internal UI examples—and it will get even closer. I don't know about you, but I'd rather spend 2 hours polishing some details than a week exploring something from scratch.

Others will tell you that the real value Design has to offer is craft. But let me challenge that for a moment. That might be true for 5-10 companies in the world, but if we're being really, really, really honest, when it comes to visual work, what we do most often is remix. What's the first thing you do when you start an exploration? You look for inspiration. You bring those into Figma and use them as a starting point. I don't think it's that farfetched to believe that AI will take over the part.

It's difficult to imagine this happening and some days I have a hard time accepting it too. But we have to move with the times. As an example, I don't recall the last time I've used a stock image. I generate everything I need with AI, specific for my use case, prompted into perfection over three minutes. Five years ago that notion was laughable. But it's here now. My bet is that visual product design will soon suffer the same fate. Maybe AI will not be able to innovate. Maybe it won't be able to do the deep thinking and problem-solving that a team of six rockstar designers can. But in reality, most companies don't need innovative design. They just need to keep up with good design fundamentals, long-lasting trends, and best experience patterns and for that, my bet is that AI will be able to do the heavy lifting.

If what I'm saying turns out to be true, expectations from designers are about to change again, just like they have away from 'make it look good.' I believe that what we call growth design today is what we're going to call product design in 3-5 years. Once companies understand that some designers can help move numbers, they will crave more and more of them. You can hire a designer with a beautiful portfolio, or you can hire one whose visual skills are fine, but who understands the mechanisms of getting users to activate, onboard, engage, and stick around. Which one would you chose when you're in charge of a company that needs to grow? I know where I'd place my bet.

On a daily basis, I don't think the job of a growth designer is much different than the job of a product designer. There's a difference in approach, speed of shipping, and focus, but the fundamentals and principles of the job are the same. What will change is how we'll spend our time. After heavy machinery was invented, a farmer remained a farmer, but their focus has shifted from manual work to planning, logistics, and technical oversight. We're about to embark on a similar change.

We'll be expected to be good at thinking. We'll be expected to understand how to set up experiments. We'll be expected to take the work that AI does and polish it on the way to the finish line. We'll move fast and, more importantly, we'll move together with the business. Design is about to become more important for the companies that understand what it can do. We've said that for a while, but I don't think we've had a smoking gun. I believe that now, we do.

Growth Design is dead. We won't be using that job title anymore soon. We'll just call it Product Design. And, if you want to stay relevant, you'd better learn the fundamentals and start applying them at your current job, before you're left behind.