After spending more than a decade as a marketer at companies like Google, 

 has assembled a collection of tested strategies and essential advice in her marketing toolkit. And luckily for the readers of the Review, she isn’t afraid to share the goods, whether it’s a 

simple, but powerful framework for positioning

a set of essential brand building exercises

As First Round’s Marketing Expert in Residence, Jackson works directly with early-stage founders on a wide range of marketing projects, from shaping how they’ll talk about their products to crafting an effective launch strategy. But as her working sessions and deliverables start to stack up, the same question eventually crops up: 

Is it time for the startup to hire a full-time marketer of its own?

And even after more of these first marketing hire conversations than she’d care to admit, Jackson still finds herself surprised by just how quickly they can go off the rails.

“I've heard founders say, ‘I need to hire a marketer to handle our launch in two weeks.’ I’ve read job descriptions that include everything from running social media to spearheading pricing, all in one role. Multiple folks have told me they were looking for a VP, and when I point out that someone like that may be too senior for the work they need done, they start talking about hiring an intern instead,” says Jackson.

As she navigates these discussions to level-set expectations and help more technical founders course-correct to find the 

 marketer for their startup, Jackson finds that she’s often repeating the same advice — so much so that she set up a canned response in Gmail — and figured others could benefit from similar guidance as they look to fill this important role.

In this exclusive interview, Jackson gives early-stage founders a playbook for nabbing their first marketer, sharing strategies for sidestepping common timing pitfalls and approaching the hiring process more thoughtfully. She offers a crash course on the essential elements of marketing to help founders figure out what kind of marketer they need, as well as five candidate profiles and helpful vetting tactics to use during the later stages of the hiring process.

THE WHEN AND THE WHY: GETTING THE TIMING (AND THE RATIONALE) RIGHT

The right time to add a marketer depends on 

whether your go-to-market strategy is more marketing- or sales-intensive

. “If you're trying to create a consumer brand or your primary path to conversion is a marketing-driven event — organic, paid, PR, content, and so on — then it makes sense to bring on a marketer sooner, somewhere around the time you hit 10 people,” she says.

It’s different with an enterprise SaaS product. “Typically, you want to get a repeatable sales model in place first and then layer on marketing to crisp up the story and start using new channels to drive leads,” says Jackson. “Usually that’s around the same time you’ve solidified the go-to-market motion and started looking for a sales leader to take over for the founder.”

To further fine-tune the timing, startups should rely on these guiding questions 

 kicking off the search for a marketing hire:

Do you have multiple marketing challenges that you as the founder cannot tackle well?

First, consider whether there are enough marketing problems to solve — and whether 

 hiring someone is in fact the better move. “

Founders don’t always have a great answer for 

. Often they say it’s because they want to ‘grow’ or because a board member or investor recommended it. It can be a knee-jerk reaction,” says Jackson. "You need to think through the actual issues this hire would tackle."

Another consideration is whether those marketing challenges warrant full-time help. As a general rule of thumb, if you have a discrete marketing activity or a project with a clear scope, it makes more sense to hire a freelancer or an agency, whether it’s running an online ad tests or something as fundamental as 

. “Some founders are totally comfortable with naming or they happened upon a name and that's great. If you do want help, you don’t have to hire someone for a one-time activity like this when an expert can come in on a project basis,” Jackson says. “Yes, a naming firm may cost $25,000, but that’s cheaper and more turnkey than hiring a full-time marketer.”

But keep an eye on how these projects start to multiply. "Managing all these freelancers can become a huge time suck — and it might get close to or exceed the salary for someone to take on some of that work in-house and handle it for you,” she says. “Plus, you don’t want your marketing efforts to look uncoordinated because you worked with five different freelancers who weren’t talking to each other.”

Is marketing going to play a major role in the success of your launch?

best practices for releasing new products

 and the early-stage team needs to figure out how marketing fits into the equation.

“Companies building a physical product should start thinking about this earlier, especially if you're dealing with hardware that has a high price point and requires distribution partnerships, packaging, pricing and more before launch,” Jackson says. “Founders focused on getting the product right don't have the bandwidth to manage this marketing work themselves.”

As a prime example of the power of bringing a marketer on board pre-launch, Jackson points to 

, one of the companies she’s advised. “While I was helping them with their initial messaging, I wrote down the full list of everything that needed to happen before launch, and when I gave it to the founders, they were like, "Oh shit, you're right. We’ve got to hire someone ASAP,’” she says.

If your consumer hardware product is launching in a month, you needed a marketer yesterday. If you have a sales-driven enterprise startup, then take the time to lay that go-to-market foundation first before hiring anyone.

Does your headcount budget line up with your marketing budget?

Remember that hiring a marketer isn’t just about headcount dollars, but overall marketing budget as well. It’s critical to make sure your planned marketing spend matches the candidate’s expectations. “If someone’s used to running a 15-person team and a $50 million marketing budget and your startup offers no team and no budget, that's a hard sell at best and a recipe for disaster at worst,” says Jackson.

Especially in the arena of paid marketing, Jackson encourages founders to ensure that they’re putting their dollars to good use. “When a founder tells me they want to hire someone to run $10,000 worth of Facebook ads, I push back. You're going to take on the costs of a full-time hire just to spend $10,000 on a few tests? 

Think about your working and non-working dollars. It doesn’t make any sense

,” she says. A better case for hiring? Leveraging early learnings from these ad tests to experiment with three to five other channels such as direct mail and podcast advertising — and having the budget to do so.

Jackson is quick to note that a small budget doesn't necessarily rule out the possibility of bringing on a full-time marketer. If marketing efforts will be centered around 

, then it can make sense to hire even before you have a lot to spend. She points to 

“I haven’t worked with them, I’m just a customer, but it seemed like they had a marketer fairly early on, working on the website, running their social channels, doing local community engagement. That’s similar to how it was back when I worked on Gmail,” says Jackson. “Right after we opened sign-ups, we had a very small budget for advertising. We focused on engaging power users, writing for the blog and running cross-promotions with other Google products. These efforts take time and skill, but they’re not as budget intensive as something like paid marketing.”

Are you willing to spend the time it takes to find the right person?

“In my experience, unless you’re nabbing a friend or former colleague with whom you have a strong established relationship, 

hiring the first marketer at an early-stage startup takes about three to six months

,” says Jackson. “Not everyone accounts for this — I’ve had founders in November say that they want a full-time marketer to start before the end of the year, which is crazy. If your marketing needs are truly that pressing and immediate, working with a freelancer or an agency as a stop-gap might be a better route.”

THE WHAT: END THE SEARCH FOR A UNICORN BY UNCOVERING WHAT MARKETERS ACTUALLY DO

The next step is to spell out what this first person to don the marketing hat would do at your startup.

“When someone tells me they want to hire a marketer, I always ask them, ‘What do you want them to do?’ And more times than not, the answer is ‘Uh, I don't really know,’” says Jackson. “That doesn’t end up working out all that well. What if you hire someone who's really good at paid acquisition, but what you really needed was brand strategy?”

Too many times a startup’s first marketing hire ends up not working out because he wasn’t the right kind of marketer. You wouldn’t hire a back-end engineer who specializes in scaling systems to build you a beautiful front-end UI, so don’t make that mistake in marketing.

, there’s a lot a first marketer could potentially take on — but not a lot of understanding around that fact. 

“Marketers are pretty bad at ‘marketing’ marketing,” says Jackson. “Part of the problem is that marketing is a super broad field that covers so many different kinds of activities that the day-to-day of what we do can be entirely different.”

To provide a quick crash course that helps founders narrow in on the particular flavor their startup needs, Jackson organizes essential marketing work into four main groups (noting areas of overlap):

“Founders looking at this list may recognize tasks they’ve already taken care of and maybe didn’t consider to be marketing: defining the audience you’re serving, writing an email about your product to a prospective customer, hiring a designer to make your logo, approaching a partner,” says Jackson.

But even with a lay of the land and an understanding of the broad swaths marketing can cover, when it comes to deciding what to order from this marketing menu, there are still other traps founders can fall into. 

Here are Jackson’s tips for spotting — and avoiding — three common mistakes:

“Often times when I look at a founder’s initial marketing job description, it’s a laundry list of almost everything on that list of activities. And I know very, very few people who are strong across all of those buckets,” says Jackson.

Most marketers who aren't new to the field specialize in either the so-called “soft” or “hard” sides of marketing, focusing more on brand and communications or growth, analytics, and channel optimization. “Even CMO-level candidates typically tilt more heavily in one direction,” she says. “I’m not sure where this desire to have it all in one package comes from — you wouldn’t expect an engineer to be amazing at front-end and back-end, but unfortunately this expectation exists for marketers.”

The marketing hire who’s equally proficient in product, performance, creative and comms is a rare sighting. If you find one, great. But it’s more likely that you’ll need to trim your job description and start prioritizing.

That’s why ruthless prioritization is key to crafting a job description that attracts the right species of marketer.

“One of the forcing functions for thinking through the job description is the ‘If you had to choose’ game. Yes, if you can find someone who's truly great at everything, more power to you,” says Jackson. “But let’s assume you can’t. 

If you had to prioritize one area of marketing over the other, how would you stack rank them? And

 Remember that the first marketing hire can always supplement their skills in other categories by eventually hiring people (either above or below) and working with external agencies or consultants.”

To rein in a marketing job description, Jackson recommends digging deeper into what the startup needs and how to frame it. “When I worked with 

, for example, the creative side ended up being more important. That didn’t mean the other areas didn’t matter — we wanted someone who could use a spreadsheet or figure out how to run an Instagram ad,” she says. “But those skills were secondary to what really mattered, which was great storytelling chops, experience working with designers and an ability to write really well.”

•For the founder looking to craft a posting of their own, take inspiration from 

this real-life job description that netted Alma

(a First Round-backed company) its first marketing hire.

Mistake #2: Putting the cart before the horse.

Another issue Jackson frequently sees is job descriptions that put the cart before the horse, focusing on the wrong specific set of responsibilities prematurely. “Often times you think you need something, but you really need the thing that comes before it,” says Jackson.

“If you say you want PR, but can’t answer questions about what you want your ideal headline to be, what kind of reporters would be interested in telling your story, then you 

,” she says. “That’s because you don’t need someone skilled in media relations yet, you need 

, messaging and product marketing first, which means you need a different breed of marketer to help you set the foundation before you start talking to reporters.”

Mistake #3: Setting the wrong seniority level.

When advising founders on how to determine the number of years to jot down in the job description, Jackson often runs into the VP-versus-intern debate she mentioned earlier.

“There's an option between these two extremes,” she says. “Founders are tempted to hire someone really senior. But marketing work at an early-stage startup is frequently down in the weeds, a place a VP-level candidate hasn’t visited for a long time — they aren’t always going to want to write copy or get into the mechanics of setting up an ad campaign, for example.”

If you’re wondering whether you need a VP or an intern for your first marketing hire, that’s a sign you haven’t put enough thought into the role.

The interview is the place to get a sense of whether a candidate has the right level of experience — and hunger — for a startup. “I interviewed a head of marketing candidate with about 20 years of experience for one of the startups I was advising recently. In these cases, I make sure to ask things like ‘

’” says Jackson. “Communicate that you’ll need them to do some pretty tactical stuff and see how they respond, asking follow-up questions such as ‘How do you feel about doing that? Walk me through how you’d approach it.’”

Another flag is if a more senior candidate focuses too much on future plans to scale the function. “There was another candidate who had been VP of Marketing at a relatively late-stage company, and she spent a good part of the interview talking about how she structured her team, which is certainly something the startup would eventually need if they end up being very successful, but it wasn’t relevant at their very early-stage,” says Jackson.

Being the first marketing hire at a startup isn’t about building a team right away — it’s single player. It’s a hard job. If a candidate was the first marketer elsewhere, make sure she still has the appetite to start back at square one.

There’s also risk in hiring too junior of a marketer. “If a candidate’s resume says ‘Drove growth by XXY% using Y channel,’ dig a little deeper and figure out which part of that they were responsible for. Because if it turns out that they just wrote ad copy and they don't know how to actually run a campaign, that might not be the person who can own that channel end-to-end for you,” says Jackson.

look for someone with around five to eight years of experience for the first marketing hire.

 “They’re still going to dive into the weeds without question, but they’ve also probably become an expert at the one or two areas of marketing you need the most help with,” she says. “A great candidate at this level will uplevel your company right now, while they grow their own skill-set and potentially rise into a VP-level role in the future. If they end up not being ready for that step, you can still hire someone over them when the time comes.”

As for assigning the appropriate title, Jackson favors “

” to start. “‘Director’ is fine too. If you give out the VP title too early, that can be a little limiting,” she says. “You want someone who is an up-and-comer and not super hung up on getting that fancy title now, but knows they still have a shot at earning it if they kick ass over the next couple years.”

THE WHO: PROFILES IN MARKETING TO HELP YOU FIND THE RIGHT FIT

After determining the type and level of marketing work the first hire will be focused on, the next task for the early-stage founder is find the exact person who fits the bill. To help narrow in on the best match for your startup, Jackson identifies a handful of personas that might work well, depending on what you’re looking for your first marketing hire to do.

All five of the anonymized profiles below are representative of marketers she knows personally, and provide a sense of the broad skills and backgrounds that can lead to the makings of a successful startup marketer.

•Started out as a Product Marketing Manager in Microsoft’s training program

•Became a Product Marketing Lead at Pinterest

•Left to become the second marketing hire at an early-stage startup

For Jackson, learning the ropes in smaller roles at bigger companies is a great way to work up to bigger roles at smaller companies. “This is where I fit in. I started at Google, where I went through the 

 program, then to Square, and then to a tiny startup,” she says. “People with this kind of background are probably the safest choice for a startup’s first marketing hire — they are well-versed in tech, they know how to work cross-functionally and they’ve held multiple roles across different sized companies. And probably most importantly, they understand big company fundamentals but thrive in the ‘get your hands dirty’ type of startup environment — otherwise they would have stayed on at a bigger company.”

Jackson notes that founders should be wary of candidates that have only worked in Big Tech. “You don’t want someone who’s only comfortable and familiar with staying in their lane, so that’s something to tease out in the interview and reference process,” she says.

•Began as an Associate Brand Manager at Unilever

•Took on a Senior Brand Strategist role at Johnson & Johnson

•Joined Patagonia as Brand Director for North America

Consumer brands, companies with physical products, and startups that rely on retail and distribution partners may want to explore hiring someone straight out of a consumer packaged goods (CPG) company that’s hoping to make their way into tech.

“I love this background,” Jackson says. “Early in my career I spent some time at Procter & Gamble in their associate brand manager training as part of an exchange program sponsored by Google. I learned more about fundamental brand strategy in those days than I did in years in tech product marketing,” says Jackson.

In her experience, these candidates tend to be more brand than acquisition oriented, but they know how to use both sides of their brains. “Of course, they’ll have to learn tech, which often moves faster than where they’ve been, but if they’re passionate about it, then it’s a reasonable bet to make,” she says.

•Marketing Associate in the early days of Stripe

•Paid Marketing Lead at Gusto, reporting to the VP of Growth

“I love seeing someone who learned the ropes working for a stellar marketer and now wants to go do their boss' job,” says Jackson. 

“Two acquisition marketers I know from Square fit this profile. One of them started off as the second in command, working for the excellent head of user acquisition who had mastered the field at Netflix. When she left, he took on her role and the guy who worked for him moved up to become his right hand man. Now both of these former right hands run paid marketing at different companies.”

•Investment Banking Analyst at Goldman Sachs

•Performance Marketing Manager at Airbnb

“I wouldn’t hire someone straight out of consulting or banking as your first marketing hire,” says Jackson. “Look for someone who took on those roles earlier in their career and then pivoted to tech. They tend to be more on the left brain side than right brain, so they might be a better fit for roles focused on the performance side of marketing, but these people typically work incredibly hard.”

•Started out as an Account Executive at Oglivy Mather

•Spent several years as a Strategist at Wieden + Kennedy

•Shifted into tech as a Brand Marketing Manager at Spotify

“Agency life provides great training ground for marketers since you get to work on a variety of projects for different clients. Agencies use very different titles, so a basic understanding of how their job titles map to tech marketing roles can be helpful,” says Jackson. 

"For example, what the agency world calls ‘strategists’ are probably closest to brand or product marketers. Media buyers might offer a parallel to paid marketers or channel marketers in tech, but aren't always direct response oriented."

THE HOW: TACTICS FOR FINDING AND VETTING YOUR FIRST MARKETER

With a defined role, crisp job description, and profiles in mind, it can be tempting to think the bulk of the work is done. But at this stage, Jackson always reminds the founders that there’s still plenty to do. “Don’t put up a job description and hope the right candidate finds you. This is the time to lean on your network and invest in a LinkedIn premium subscription,” she says.

Here are four of her tips for supercharging the rest of your search:

 “People often reach out and ask me, ‘Hey, know any good marketers?’” says Jackson. Instead, get specific with your asks when tapping into your network. “‘Do you know any growth-oriented marketers who have experience in direct mail?’ is a far more targeted question.”

Find the person who’s out of your league.

 “Find the perfect senior candidate, the person who would almost never come work for you. I want to see their LinkedIn profile. Then look through their previous roles to find people like them a few years ago. Or try and see if you can poach their right hand,” says Jackson.

 Branch out from there and make a list of companies where your ideal candidate might work. “For example, if you’re a mission-driven brand trying to introduce a new category, find a similar, more established company that got it right. Are you a subscription service targeting new moms? Then marketers from 

 might be a good fit,” she says. “This is also helpful exercise if you’re looking for candidates with specialized experience. For example, if you’re an early-stage healthcare startup, companies like 

 Adding another perspective on your interview panel can better equip you to assess marketing talent. “Every founder probably knows someone they respect in marketing, whether they’re an advisor, investor or a friend. They don’t have to interview every candidate that comes through the door, but they can serve as a gut check or final conversation with your top contenders,” says Jackson. “One of the founders I was advising said ‘We love this candidate and think she might be the one.’ But in talking to her, I found some red flags. She did have relevant experience as a VP of Marketing in their industry, but she didn’t actually develop that company's brand — most of it was in place before she joined, as they had already worked with an agency on the fundamentals. That’s why you have to dig deeper. What can sound impressive to a founder might set off a marketer’s alarm bells.”

Arielle Jackson photo.jpg

As First Round’s Marketing Expert in Residence, Arielle Jackson often helps early-stage founders navigate the search for a full-time marketer of their own. From the when and the why to the who and the how, Jackson offers a crash course on every aspect of the marketer hiring process to help startups figure out what they need and avoid common pitfalls as they fill this important role.

So You Think You’re Ready to Hire a Marketer? Read This First.

But like all early-stage startup disciplines, the world of design is constantly evolving and maturing. Subspecialties spin out while best practices, different approaches and new tools emerge. And lately, we’ve had our eye on one recent development in particular: the rise of the small-yet-mighty community of 

 counts herself as a member of this new breed of designers. As 

’s Director of Growth Design (and former lead within the same function at 

) she routinely deals in both the fast and the thoughtful, tapping into the oft-cited left and right hemispheres of the brain to scale the business while staying in tune with customer needs. And as an architect-turned-designer and former senior product manager, she’s particularly well-equipped to operate at this cross-section of two different disciplines.

But as far as intersections go, growth design is still the unmarked exit, the off-ramp into the unchartered territory of fledgling startup domains. While many companies have assembled a band of engineers, product folks and marketers who furiously experiment to acquire, retain and engage users under the banner of growth, this subset of design is a burgeoning role that’s still being shaped — and in Steger’s eyes — overlooked.

“It’s not a very formalized field yet, so I think there’s a certain amount of mystery and misunderstanding,” Steger says. “Growth conjures up this idea of hacking, of running fleeting or off-putting experiments. There’s some truth there. It is about rapidly expanding the number of engaged users, and, of course, applying a mindset of learning as quickly as possible. But when startups do it right, 

growth is about so much more than momentary wins.

 We have a responsibility to create and optimize a sustainable experience that nets more long-term engaged users. That part doesn’t get discussed enough — and that’s where growth design can play a leading role.”

In this exclusive interview, Steger serves as our guide on a trek to better understand this emerging speciality. She covers all of the essentials, detailing why it’s a role with runway for impact, sharing insights from how she’s approached growth design in her roles at Dropbox and Pinterest, and outlining tactics for sourcing, interviewing and setting up new growth designers for success. Let’s dive in.

TALES FROM THE FRONTLINES OF GROWTH DESIGN

 to find a growth team inside a tech company. That’s a far cry from 

, when some folks wondered out loud what a growth team actually did and if it was even necessary. But despite its ubiquity, there isn’t a standard manual for putting a growth team together. Some groups are distributed, while others are more centralized; some pull in marketers and data analysts to work alongside growth-focused engineers and PMs, while others opt for leaner configurations.

In Steger’s experience, no matter the structure, design is typically the building block that’s poorly understood, and subsequently, not leveraged enough. Some growth groups bring in design resources on an ad hoc, as needed basis, while others skip it altogether in an attempt to get experiments out the door even faster.

“What you’ll often hear is ‘Does this really need design? It’s just going to slow us down.’ Almost every designer has encountered a strain of this pushback from PMs or engineers,” she says. “

When people ask me if they need a growth designer, I always say ‘Only if you want your business to be successful

,’ which is admittedly laying it on kind of heavy. But skipping the detail work to get something out faster can hurt your learning and make it ineffective. Muddled tests, poorly defined problems, a lack of data — these are all issues that result from failing to fold in design at the very start of the growth process.”

Clearer experiences make it easier for users to act quickly, which gets growth experiments to statistical significance faster. You might think you’re “saving time” by trimming design details, but it can add weeks to the process.

Steger’s understanding of the advantages this role can bring to bear runs deeper than most. While she was at Pinterest, the growth design function grew from three to eight. Similarly, her team at Dropbox has grown quickly, from six to more than 20. Here’s her take on 

the five unique strengths growth designers bring to the table

 — and why early-stage founders and growth leaders should bring them a chair.

In Steger’s eyes, a growth designer gets the best of both worlds, drawing on the strengths of the two disciplines that contribute to the role’s name.

“A good growth designer is very strong across the board in product thinking, interaction, visual design and customer empathy. Those details address problems at different layers of customer awareness and interaction,” she says. "Design is also a very user-centric discipline, which isn’t necessarily the reputation of growth teams. Growth designers, as guardians of the user experience, will push the growth team to ensure everyone is focused on business success — through the lens of user success,” says Steger.

In growth design, one side doesn’t overpower the other. It’s an even 50/50 split that allows us to bring the best of both worlds to the startup table.

The first half of this hybrid role’s moniker shines through as well. “Growth design moves incredibly quickly and ships experiments regularly. And because a growth team’s metrics are a little bit crisper and perhaps more focused on a particular objective, that enables them to move faster and also to deliver more concrete results. A product design team that's working on something without specific objectives or user targeting might take years,” she says.

When describing growth design, Steger often references 

. “She says, ‘I'm the perfect servant. I know when they'll be hungry, and the food is ready. I know when they'll be tired, and the bed is turned down. I know it before they know it themselves.’ To me, growth design is exactly that,” says Steger. “

It scaffolds the user to success, behind the scenes

. They don't necessarily feel it. It's like having a really great dance partner that’s leading you where you need to go and making you feel like you can dance well.”

But how does that differ from the broader field of product design? For Steger, it’s a matter of 

“For a lot of designers, there’s a sexiness to working on products where you’re building a specific thing. What’s fundamentally different between growth design and traditional core product design is that product teams often own particular 

. So when you come across a problem, you’ll solve that problem using the surface that you have available, which can limit your approach,” she says.

Growth has an opportunity to determine the fundamental strengths of your product across the entire feature set, which is incredibly powerful — and an important conversation for designers to be involved in.

In contrast, for the growth designer tasked with making users successful, there’s a broader toolkit and almost a permission to think bigger. “Growth design owns 

 more generally. You don’t have to work on one problem. You get to traverse multiple products in order to ensure that users are successful. It's similar to a design systems role, but from a user experience standpoint of, ‘What should the user experience be?’” says Steger. “Growth design is a very scrappy and creative role, even inside the context of a startup. We figure out what a user will need to be successful and then look to see if we have tools that are already available, or if we need to make something new.

As a design lead on growth at Pinterest — charged with deepening user activation and engagement — Steger saw this wider lens and dedication to a user’s success come in handy time and time again.

“At Pinterest, we needed to get users to find content that they liked and then act on it, particularly in a save flow where new users save a pin and create their first board,” she says. “But my team spotted that the save flow was heavily optimized for people who had many, many boards. The flow had a lot of UI cruft, such as ‘Recent boards’ that didn't make sense to a user starting out with zero boards. It added noise that failed to match their context or clarify the task at hand.”

That doesn’t mean removing every point of friction, however. 

A blank slate can be as overwhelming as a series of irrelevant options

. “From research, we saw that creating the name of your own board was important. If we automatically named your board, it took something out of the process and made it less sticky. But still, as a designer, you need to reduce the 

 it takes to create something,” says Steger.

When you're trying to make people understand the core mechanics of your product, you need to get out of their way and make the path incredibly clear. Help your users step into the pool — don’t throw them into the deep end.

“When I was an artist, I used to just make a mark on a piece of paper, just to break the physical tension of the page. The equivalent of that was an experiment we ran to suggest board names. If you were saving a recipe, we suggested 'Recipes' or 'Stuff to Eat' or 'Food,' options that you could claim with one tap. And it significantly boosted the activation rate. It created a ramp for people to work their way into the product — and I’m not sure we would have spotted that opening from a position on a specific product team.”

A missing ingredient from many growth efforts is an understanding of the emotional and experiential components it takes to make a feature or overall product work. “We've all visited those websites that are so heavily optimized, your gut reaction is just to say ‘This is not for humans, this is for a web crawler.’ And that usually doesn’t leave you with a good feeling or with trust in the service. That’s where the design part of the growth designer equation comes in: advocating for the user and what will truly lead them to change their behavior,” says Steger.

Most growth teams already have that business strategy competency — designers can translate and push back against a pendulum that’s swinging too far away from what’s in the best interests of users.

“Certain types of tactics seem good in the short term, but can burn people. If you send spammy notifications or emails, you devalue the entire ecosystem. If users turn off notifications or unsubscribe, you don't get that chance back,” says Steger. “For virtually every business model in the world, you’ll want to build a long lasting relationship with your customers. Build a 

, not something that seems promising on its face, but is really churn and burn behind the scenes.”

You can trick users into doing things, but the truth is they're only going to fall for it so many times. Instead, push an experience that really addresses the nuances of their emotions — that's when growth will drive repeat behavior and start building user habits.

For more sustainable growth, make sure that users are able to see their intentions through and exit the product experience with a good feeling. “When we were working on the share flow at Pinterest, we had a realization: Sending is content that you're sending to a particular person. Sharing is one to many. And, typically, what we saw on Pinterest was that, because it’s about your personal taste, you're actually sending, not sharing. It’s a subtle yet meaningful difference,” says Steger.

With a better understanding of the primary intention, the team set out to improve the user experience. “After a closer look, we saw that there were probably about 11 different sending actions that you could take on mobile, which is insane. The more decisions that you have to make, the less likely you are to make any decision at all,” she says.

To simplify this experience, Steger and her team iterated to winnow it down to just three categories of sending — and increased the original sending rate almost seven-fold, demonstrating the incredible potential for impact with growth design experiments.

4. Rooting out what to look for in an experiment — and what makes for truly successful results.

Even with a focus on user success and a dedication to uncovering deeper motivations, growth experiments won’t truly be successful without a fundamental grasp on which results matter and how to observe them.

“A critical part of growth is understanding how to observe, and that's not something that I traditionally see as a design competency beyond traditional research methods,” says Steger. “You need to think through how you actually observe certain things in the wild. For example, when someone visits a page, what are they doing on the page? Are they scrolling through? Are they clicking? Are they hovering on certain things? Are they reading up and down? Growth designers tend to develop a stronger understanding of how to observe behavior.”

Digging a layer deeper, it’s clear that these powerful observation skills equip growth designers with the invaluable understanding that 

growth experiments can have positive outcomes that are bad for users.

“When I was working on sharing back at Pinterest, our hypothesis was that we needed as smooth and quick of a flow as possible. And the outcome of that experiment was super positive. But, when we did the user research and watched people in the lab, the growth designers saw something different, beyond the numbers. I’d describe it as a bad hookup face, that the experience was over too soon. They didn’t say anything, but there was a full body ‘What happened?’ kind of reaction,” says Steger.

“After some digging, we uncovered that it felt too fast. And that really came back to understanding their intent. You like to share with the people you’re close to — it could be anything from a future plan to buy a house to a silly inside joke. Whatever it is, it’s meaningful, and people really needed and wanted to set context,” she says.

Steger’s team then added an additional step to the share flow to allow for personal messages. “It’s counterintuitive from a pure growth perspective. It decreased the overall volume of sends slightly and slowed everything down, but it increased the 

 And at the end of the day, that’s what success was there,” she says. “The response rate was the value. No one wants to share to a void — you’re more likely to keep sending content when the recipients respond. Think about the whole ecosystem of what motivates behavior, not just the discrete action. 

If you don’t have a designer on your growth team, you might miss the 

Growth design pushes you to look beyond the results. I’ve seen experiments where the data showed a positive outcome, but back in the research lab, users had what I call a bad hookup face. It wasn’t an experience that made them feel good — and it’s not something they’d do over and over again.

Opting for velocity — not haste — with chainsaws and chisels.

Another key distinction between traditional product design and growth design is rooted in a simple truth from the art world: it’s hard to define what makes for “good design.”

“In the context of growth, it depends on your objective. A high quality design might not mean that it's perfectly polished, but rather that it has enough polish to get you to the next phase,” says Steger. “If the objective is just to learn but not to ship, then that’s the bar you have to clear. After you’ve shipped something, the standard is different. Then it’s about ‘How can we make it better? What might best look like? How do we squeeze all of the juice out of the lemon?’ Many traditional design teams over-engineer and over-design, while a growth designer knows that they may be looking for something more simple.”

And it’s not only a matter of grasping the level of design an experiment requires. “Maybe I don't need to design at all. Maybe all I need to do is pull up data, have a conversation, show a customer a paper sketch or have them draw,’” says Steger. “

Because growth designers straddle both worlds, we can sense what we need to pull out of our design toolbox — and when to close it altogether

Essentially, Steger has an updated twist on the classic wisdom that with a hammer in hand, every problem appears to be a nail. “Imagine you're trying to shape a block of ice into a dolphin. If you start with your finest chisel, it’ll take you forever and the ice will melt before you ever get there. Instead, start with a chainsaw. Block out the shape and get a rough sense of where the problem really lies. Then you can go finer and finer, pulling out chisels and even smaller chisels to carve with finesse and add the detail you need,” she says.

growth’s goal is to learn and execute as quickly as possible. But it's not about haste — it's about velocity.

 “That’s a very important distinction. And it’s an encapsulation of what a growth designer can bring to the broader growth cross-functional conversation,” she says. “Oftentimes, the temptation for engineers or project managers is to rush through, to trim on the execution in order to ship two weeks faster. Sometimes that’s true. But with experiments, it’s not always about launch speed, but rather about a crisp execution. Take a step back and think about what’s going to contribute to statistical significance.”

With experiments, sometimes you need a chainsaw, and sometimes you need a chisel. A growth designer knows which tool to reach for.

Aside from outlining the assets growth designers can bring to an early-stage startup, Steger can also make the financial case for hiring them: “If you’re looking to make your first designer hire, consider shaping it into a growth design role. It’s straight up cheaper to have one person who can do both,” she says. “You basically get an all-star player. Find the right person, and you’ll have someone who is keeping an eye on user experience and business impact — for the cost of a single hire.”

But in Steger’s experience that task, as with 

, is easier said than done. And while many leaders 

face a particularly acute struggle to find designers

, growth designers seem to be an even rarer bird.

“It’s incredibly competitive to hire for. The field of people who are currently in growth design is so narrow. 

I’d estimate that five out of 100 candidates have actual previous growth design experience and expertise

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