As our industry matures and continues to evolve and grow, its not surprising to read about emerging disciplines within design. Adobe recently published an interesting article on the closely linked discipline area with product design called, Growth Design.
Verna Bhargava, a Senior Design Manager at Adobe says that Growth Design “expands on the human-centered problem solving process by using scientific methods to improve business methods”.
Although we have seen related specializations in the past few years, such as “Employee Experience” and “Business Design”, Growth Design focuses on purely scaling improvements. The article is an interesting one, as it focuses on the the close relationships with core Product Design, where user customer insights are used to conceptually solve design problems.
Whilst Growth Design also focuses on the observation and experimentation with customer behaviors, Adobe says it specifically focuses on Scaling and Improvements, and together (with Product Design), helps create even more meaningful experiences.
Adobe’s current Global Growth team focuses on these 4 main areas:
- Optimization: Understanding drop-offs, bottlenecks, and closing gaps to reach performance goals. We lean heavily on data to identify and prioritize the bite-sized ways we can make the current experience more seamless.
- Experimentation: Approaching known problems and opportunities in a current experience in new ways, powered by new customer insights, emerging patterns and behaviors, and market research.
- Innovation: Identifying and building high level concepts for product or business transformation to push boundaries, disrupt current markets, and get ahead in new ones.
- Impact: Socializing insights and knowledge back to our cross functional and core product partners to influence strategies and product building.
An interesting follow-up will again be similar to past discussions to how these newish emerging areas fall within Design, the vast complex dimensions of teams in the industry, and how these specializations fit within well established fields such as Service Design, Strategy, and User Research.
Definitely worth a read.