Molly Norris Walker - Head of Design at InfluxData - Smash Growth Goals with Design Experimentation

[Music] Hey everyone, it's your host Edward Forden. Welcome to the Growth of Podcast brought to you by growth marketing agency Advanced B2B. Advanced B2B helps B2B SaaS businesses generate sustainable revenue growth through marketing. So if you're looking for an agency partner who will help you get measurable results from your marketing, then check out advancedB2B.com for more info. Now joining us today on the show is Molly Norris Walker, Head of Design and User Research at Influx Data. And today we're talking about how to smash your growth targets through design experimentation. Now a big part of Molly's role is scaling design experimentation for a better user experience to support growth, which is something Molly calls Growth Design. Molly not only practices this on a day-to-day basis within the world of B2B SaaS, but she's also author of Design Driven Growth, strategy and case studies for product shapers. So she absolutely knows her stuff on this and that's what we're digging into today, including why growth design is super important in B2B, the relationship between growth design and product led growth, a five step framework for implementing growth design, how you can design growth loops into your SaaS business model, and Molly also puts me through my paces with a growth design A/B test challenge at the end. So there's all this and more on episode 56 of the Growth of Podcast with Molly Norris Walker, Head of Design and User Research at Influx Data. Welcome to another episode of the Growth of Podcast and it's my pleasure to welcome Molly Norris Walker to the show who is Head of Design and User Research at Influx Data. So Molly, thank you so much for joining us today here on the Growth of Podcast. Thank you. As a fan, I'm so happy to be here. Yeah, great that you're here and we always love to have fans as well on the show and today we're talking about how to smash your growth targets through design experimentation and this topic of growth design is something we haven't actually discussed before, but it's hyper relevant to all SaaS marketers. So I think to kick things off, what actually is growth design? Growth design is a specialty where you're trying to connect users to more value in the product instead of building additional value within the product itself. So it's practiced more at like later stage after you have product market fit. And then we have about scaling to new markets, new targets, new segments and the practice itself is really embedded or grounded in a high level of experimentation and iteration and optimization. Yeah, so how is growth design different for businesses in the B2B space compensate other spaces? I think B2B and B2C are sort of collapsing. So at one point in time, we maybe a decade ago, there was this trend around bring your own device, right? Like all of these enterprises, we're like, oh, our workers want to use their iPhones, we need to accommodate that. And fast forward to where we are today, what we see is bring your own software. So people are bringing the software that they want to work with into the workplace. They're not work, we know focused on central procurement efforts where one set of tools is distributed to many people. And what we see with bring your own software is we see that B2B companies that treat their customers like consumers that don't differentiate as much between a B2B and a B2C strategy are very successful. And people call this, I've heard investors call it B2B sort of growth. So like a more of a bottom up B2B growth motion. And this is something that you see like all the really successful B2B companies taking taking on, you know, everything from sort of striped to circle CI, non-dev tools as well. And you see a lot of people just treating their B2B customers like regular consumers. Some people also call this trend consumerization. And so growth design, even though it has its center of gravity, it has its history in the B2C space, you know, very famously practice it places like drop box and Pinterest, you see a lot of these tactics sort of moving into the B2B space and being asked for by investors as well to practice growth design to sort of scale. And how many people you're able to bring into the product and how many people you're able to connect with that value. Yeah, absolutely. And I've also heard the term consumerization of SaaS thrown around when discussing with other people. So it's definitely happening. And I think growth design complements product led growth very well, which is something we've spoken about before on the podcast with like Bartlett. And then actually in our recent episode with West Bush. So can you talk more about the relationship between these two. I think product led growth has been a great enabling change that's been happening across sort of SaaS companies B2B or B2C. And growth design is a, I guess, a sister methodology that's tied more to a discipline. So product led growth, you know, allows people to see the core engine of their product as the means for growing that user base as opposed to marketing or sales sort of top down approach. And then when you get to like how you actually do that, like what are the actual actual disciplines that you need that practices the motions that you need. That's where growth design kind of comes in. So if your product team is already practicing product led growth, growth design would be like what your designer would do on that team. And then a designer would do in partnership with a product manager. So it's kind of a discipline specific take on a product led growth collaboration or affinity that you're hopefully your team or your company is adopting. But at the end of the day, you still sort of need a set of activities and methodologies that sort of like, hey, how do I actually practice growth design as a designer like how do I do design experimentation, which my cycles and rhythms B. And I think that is of the product should I focus on how do I know when I've done enough for when I need to do more so it's sort of like an additional area of depth really on that hands on practice itself and less on the kind of high level philosophy, which I think product led growth really articulates super well. And in your book, you wrote that design driven growth offers a practical process of how to do growth design within a product led growth environment and there are five basic steps to this process that you've identified. So I was thinking, could you talk us through these five stages of design driven growth. So the first thing that you have to do is define what growth you're trying to move what the targets are. So product led growth would, you know, be concerned with a certain sort of metrics usually like high level around recurring revenue monthly recurring revenue building towards annual recurring revenue, especially in the B2B space. So if you're going down the level in growth design, you would need to have your key user journeys and know identify what those are a line around what the definitions are for you and your collaborators and be able to measure what those baselines are to improve upon it. I mean, you can use basic startup metrics like acquisition activation retention conversion retention, you can use sort of basic sort of startup metrics, maybe your sector has specific metrics that they use. So being able to say, hey, here are my key user journeys, here's how they're contributing towards these growth metrics and let's define I always say a base and a stretched target for your key user journeys, whether those are sign up or checkout or something inside of the inside of the app itself. So being able to sort of define growth define what your what the baseline is and what you're trying to move from a base and I always keep a kind of really sketchy so you can iterate over time towards that, but step one define growth step two simplify value proposition. You know, a lot of times as tech workers, we tend to overthink what our value propositions are. So if you formulate your value proposition as a statement you're able to a be text that like any other copy in your app so I always say, you know, define growth define your value propositions and start a journey on iterating and simplifying those value propositions like step one and two and then. So certainly I talk about crafting your growth funnels and loops so if you feel like you have a solid testing program around your value proposition, then you can do sort of I think what people more expect with design experimentation, which is optimal optimization and loop definition and loop optimization. And that is sort of you know trying to get that incremental progress trying to make everything you're doing just a little bit better try to squeeze as much value out of the code you can. And then the next step step four is building personalization at scale so if optimization work for funnels and loops is about small incremental gains there are. are a few big investments that you can make to have a larger sort of jump. I call this, this is like another track of work. And that's around personalization and personalization technology, which tends to kind of marry data and user experience to create more salient user journeys. And then the last sort of step I talk about is more about differentiated strategies for B2B companies. If you're a two-sided app, having a differentiated sort of program around B2B for a speed of sea. So yeah, define growth, simplify your value proposition, craft your growth funnels and loops, build your personalization as you scale, and then seek expansion with existing users. Yeah, that's really good. It's a whole book, so it's hard to surprise. I was going to say there is the book on this that goes into more detail. So definitely check that out. And you know, there's a lot we could dig into here. I don't know if we have enough time to go through all of those today, but I think the third stage in particular, so crafting growth funnels and loops. Let's look into that a bit more. And there's some debate on whether the best framework for growth is a funnel or a loop or even a flywheel now. That's what HubSpot are preaching and how it been for the last few years. But why do you see growth loops as the way to go? There's a big existential, what is the right framework discussion? And I think that you can actually layer a couple of them on. And yeah, HubSpot's trying to make flywheel thing. None of us are Renaissance farmers, so it's kind of hard to even visualize what a flywheel is, but they're trying to make that happen, more power to them. How I like to do it is actually like to layer funnels and loops together. So a funnel is just a really easy thing to collaborate across disciplines on. And we all know that user experience is nonlinear. So people of the park and come back, they reduce steps, etc. But I like to have a high level funnel that we can kind of all convene around and track. And then I like to do loops at sort of different parts of that funnel. So if I'm talking about activation, for example, I might have a couple of loops there that I'm working on that sort of fit within that step as I see it. So I think they can coexist. I don't think you need to be like dogmatic about using one or the other. But I think what loops does well that a funnel doesn't do is it thinks about how to define what a loop in is. It's where one action taken by a user generates an output and that output creates another effect that creates an input back into your system for business value. So I like to use an example, since you're in the UK Edward, have you, you may not have heard this kind of small UK Canadian company? Have you heard of fellow, do you know who they are, what they do? I never heard of say, but I'm based in Finland now. So I kind of, I'm out of touch with the UK these days. Yeah, you have a whole different start up community. So I like to think of loops as with an example. So there's this SaaS product for managers called fellow, they're based in Ottawa and they have, you know, they have managers from I think over 60 countries at this point, but what it's for is it's for people managers to create collaborative agendas for one-on-ones, on also group meetings and facilitate feedback. And so their core product is this collaborative agenda and they've created many loops within their product. But I'd say one of their main loops is I'm a manager and in order to build a collaborative agenda for my one-to-one with my director reports, I have to invite them into the platform. They come into the platform. Now one user has become five users, but then they also are enriching these agendas with content and context and therefore making my sort of historical feed or one-to-one meetings even more valuable. So the user's output, which is I'm going to invite my director reports, those director reports join, create an input into my system, which is new user acquisition, as well as content, which creates a more valuable platform for me. And so that sort of a virtuous circle, that loop is kind of its own little growth engine inside of your product. It's evergreen that's baked into the very way you use that product. And so to me, that's still within a final step of acquisition or activation. So I think there's still that valuable high level, how many people are requiring, how many of them are activating. But inside of those, I'm able to see these little loops, these little engines that are driving those higher level final metrics. So that example of fellow, I think, illustrates how loops and finales can coexist productively together. Yeah, for sure. So one of the ways that product and marketing teams can actually design growth loops into their SaaS business model. I think the best way to do it, and for B2B, I always say, if you're a newly born growth team, the most basic places to start that you'll get quick wins is going to be sign up flows, onboarding flows, and checkout. So allowing people to easily join, easily learn about your product, and then make it easy to buy your product. And if you're like a new little baby growth team, there's going to be so many quick wins and so many easy improvements that you can make that are going to have a big effect. So even though kind of growth loops and product led growth practice, they really want to look at the core user experiences around creating content or whatever your workflows are depending on your sector. I think if you're a new team trying to practice growth design for the first time or product led growth, I always say start with sign up or onboarding or checkout because you'll get quick wins and the improvements are going to be super obvious. Yeah, for sure. It seems growth design is very cross-functional, so it's about marketing, sales, product, growth, and design working together. So one thing I would love to ask is how can these teams actually work together most effectively and actually operate on a good way, so to speak? One of the questions I get when I talk about design driven growth is like, whose job is it to care about growth? And I think especially with creative or design audiences, they tend to be like, well, it's not really our job. We want to build good user experiences and by good we might mean delightful and by good we might mean people can complete their workflows quickly and efficiently. But I would step back and say, okay, well actually what is good UX? Good UX is one that contributes to business values so that you can continue to exist and scale and offer that value proposition to more people. And I think we have to look at user experience is closely tied to growth. And as everyone on a good, high-performing product team, big care about user experience and a natural intersection for evaluating whether or not user experience is good or not, is how it's contributing to growth. So I think going back to the first step around being clear about what kind of growth metrics are you setting, setting those collaboratively, those based in targets collaboratively. And there's a little bit of gamification I think that people can really get into meeting targets, reporting against targets in a regular way. And you have to, I think another way to have a healthy collaboration is also to something I'm talking about more and more as growth sort of mature is also doing it at a sustainable pace and doing it in a way that is like, embrace the self-care. Because once you meet your growth targets, guess what? Like more are set. It's relentless. It's a hamster wheel. And so working with your key collaborators in a way that's gentle and recognizes that really practicing growth design or part of that growth takes a lot of time, even getting the infrastructure that you need in place to do a design experimentation can take months and months and months if not a year. And so I think the key to collaborating with multidisciplinary people is having shared definition and then growth targets and reporting against progress to them by the work that you're doing together, but also doing it gently and in a way that is emotionally intelligent and in a sustainable pace and understanding that change takes time. I think those two sides of the coin, like reaching for really ambitious goals, but also doing it in a sustainable, paced way is a very powerful way to build a collaboration that can take you really far. Yeah, for sure. I love that thinking. And could you give us some examples of what is good growth design look like in the world of SaaS? Yeah. So let me think of some good examples that translate to audio. So I really like this example called "Drigal." Again, I like to focus more on early stage companies because I think one of the problems that we have in growth is that we are judging ourselves by companies who have literally unlimited resources. It's amazing that Dropbox and Pinterest and Google Ventures can all do this work, but at the end of the day, they have literally unlimited amounts of money. Like they're capitalized so aggressively, they can afford to fail. And with growth design, you fail, you fail, you fail, you fail, you fail, and you win. I mean, most experiments fail. And what you hear from the big names is really their successes when they could afford to fail for a very, very long time. And so when I think about what is good growth design, I don't like to focus on how big names practice it, because I don't think that's really attainable for the vast majority of people who want to practice growth design, especially if you're practicing it in an environment that really matters, like the social sector, like the public sector. You cannot fail if you're doing growth design on a citizenship application. You can't fail if you're trying to practice growth design on a health test. So it's really, if you think about it, we need to focus on what is good growth design in a way that's early stage that's scrappy, but also is very aware of the resources that it takes and the implications for their user base. That's a big disclaimer because you asked me to talk about good growth design, but I wanted to say why it's important to elevate examples outside of Silicon Valley, especially early stage examples. So, you know, we could talk about illustration, which was done really amazingly at Dropbox, but I think what I like to talk about is a small company called Riggle, which is in, it's in five cities in the UK. It's in, it started in Bristol, it's in Brighton, it's in, I think at this point, you know, every time I check it's in, it's in a different number of cities, but it's really, what they do is they do flash sales about flash sales for food. So what they do is they created an app that allows restaurants to sell excess food in a flash sale format and users buy vouchers to get that food at a discount. So it might be like, okay, two burgers should be 15 pounds, but we're going to sell them for eight pounds inside of the platform itself. And it's the whole flash sale market is like super duper crowded. And I think what they've done that I would consider a really good design is they've been relentlessly relentless about identifying what isn't working and completely like removing it and pulling it out of the platform when it doesn't work. So one of the things they did when they started scaling to other cities, and they scaled early in their company, they scaled to London. And London is, you know, 17 times the size of Bristol, it's geographically much more spread out and their app wasn't working because the app was designed for you to have a flash sale about your near you. And in a small compact city, it was likely that you would have about your near you, but in a big London, they would look around and see that, oh, like there's not likely to be a flash sale near me. And so what they did is they decided to stop using the app, which I think is an amazing growth design to be like, hey, this flagship channel, this flagship product is not working in this new market. We need to rethink it. And what they did is they started an email campaign using a square space landing page called the Better Lunch Project. And people would sign up and say, hey, yeah, I want to have a better lunch. And then they would email you about your when there was a flash sale near your work. So you would sign up with your work post code and then they would just email you a flash sale when it was when there was one near you. And so they shrunk the problem from the entire dining out scene to just better work clenches, which are concentrated in an urban core. And they switched from an expensive app that was really hard to acquire users to a dirt cheap square space landing page that allowed them to build a list that they could activate off the back of. And so I think that's such an element elegant example of growth design because it's around radical simplification, getting rid of what doesn't work as much as building on what does. And so I like that as an example. It's a bit of a story. So thanks for sticking with me while I explained it. But that case study about Riggle, I think shows that like how powerful email can be as a channel. And how a lot about a lot of growth design isn't about making an amazing UI element, but it's really about stripping back to what is what is basic and what is converting and what is relevant and salient. Yeah, I think that's really cool to hear in a great example of growth design. And I was thinking before we jump into the fast five challenge. Let's go through some more examples of growth design experimentation using a couple of a B test. So here's how this will work. We're a bit of fun. You'll describe the test and both variants. I'll guess which I think worked better. And then you could discuss the results. So how about we jump into the first one. Okay, so the first one I have for you is about our donation page for a charity called Partners in Health. So Partners in Health, they build hospitals in countries that have sort of broken health care systems. They're most famous for their work in Haiti, for example. So on this donation page, we'll featuring the founder or the beneficiary drive more donations. So the a version that's the exact same donation page. The a version has a picture of Dr. Paul farmer who's the founder, sort of giving a checkup. And then the second is a really close up picture of a child receiving an oral vaccine. So it's kind of really in your face and personal and it shows what actually happens with partners in health giving giving these vaccines. So again, which one do you think drove the most donations featuring the founder or featuring a child getting the oral vaccine. Okay, I'm going to say the with the child getting the vaccine. But I have a feeling I might be wrong. So yeah, so a the picture of the founder, Dr. Paul farmer, one by about 10%. So pretty large margin. And I think that's kind of counterintuitive. This can be applied to sort of B2B companies as well. If you have an inspirational founder, customers as well as donors, connect and relate to a founder who inspires them, maybe more than a beneficiary who is kind of less relatable to them or more distance. Even though they really care about the outcomes of the work, it's easier or it can be in this case easier to connect with a kind of inspirational founder. So even though I think the charity industry wants to always show impact, always show those kind of emotional pictures. In this instance, a less emotional picture about somebody who is genuinely inspirational rather than sort of a faceless beneficiary drove significantly larger number of donations. Well, that's super interesting to hear. And I wonder if now everyone's going to swap pictures of their customers to the picture of their CEO or founder tomorrow after listening to the podcast. But yeah, it's a super interesting experiment because immediately you always thinking be. But then to hear that, that does make sense as well. So yeah, interesting. And then you had a second one as well for me, Molly. Yes. So this one is two landing pages for a company called Yapi Chef in based in South Africa. And Yapi Chef is an online e-commerce store for kind of high end kitchen gear. And they have a wedding registry page. So on one version of their wedding registry landing page, they have the full site navigation. So it's just a landing page that says, sign up for a seamless online registry. It's within their full site, there's full navigation. And then the B version is exactly the same, but it has the main e-commerce menu navigation removed. So will a landing page with or without navigation convert better? Okay, so I think all best practices in marketing and B2B SaaS will say, when it comes to designing landing pages, you have to remove your navigation, keep people on page, no external links, etc. So in the name of best practices, I am going to go with version B, no navigation converted better. Yeah, dinging. Oh, I got it right. Okay. So B doubled conversion for wedding registries sign up from 3 to 6%. So removing navigation definitely improves the conversion rate of that landing page. And it is a golden rule. What I like to do is to kind of create what I call a funnel page, which is usually landing pages are an easy example, but a checkout experience might be something like that or a key moment in a growth loop. And have those have a completely different template. Usually I kind of switch contacts. So I usually if my app is light, then those pages are dark. If my app is dark, then those pages are light. And I kind of think of it as a focus state. So I also remove all optionality or remove all navigation, all links to FAQs, everything. And so for my funnel pages, I tend to really bear down on one primary call to action, except being able to outline the steps as well as also helpful. And this is a golden rule. I've never seen this removing navigation not improve conversion, but I could be wrong. With D2B, like your, users are really niche and they have their own preferences. So you have to test it. But yeah, this is one of the things I do that when I join a new company, I try to create a funnel page and look at what pages really need navigation and an optionality removed in string lines. Yeah, that's super interesting. And yeah, I guess an opportunity for people to test this out, to see if it really is the truth. But I know best practices take a lot of crap these days. So some of them do that's good. Good to hear. Yeah. Cool. But hey, this is this is super cool. And we could actually move on to our closing questions and the fast five challenge. So I will ask five questions and all you need to do is answer as quickly as possible. So are you ready, Molly? I am ready. All right, let's do it. So first question, what's the one book you would recommend others to read? I would actually recommend a series of articles on Medium by Let's Romand. She is the kind of leading light of growth design and really spells it out really well. So she has not written a book because she should. But Lex Romand is her medium articles are pure gold. Cool. And we'll add a link in the show notes if you want to go check them out afterwards. Second question, Sass Company, you love and why? I really love fellow. I talked about them in this case study as a manager. You have a lot of meetings and fellow helps you have better meetings. And they also are just amazing practitioners of growth design. They do it in a really natural way. The ads value to me as a user. So I really recommend fellow. If you have a lot of meetings and you want to build better agendas and track action items, they're they're amazing. I think as both practitioners and then as a product itself, I really recommend them. Cool. Favorite place to read about marketing online? My favorite place to read about marketing online is I kind of think there are so many amazing kind of like addictive little things to check out. But one of the things that I really like to follow is this little blog called growthdesigners.co. They have amazing resources from practitioners. And I think more and more just slack groups are actually where I'm finding the most positive ways to learn about growth design and be to be marketing in general. So I like the product led growth slack group. I like ladies that UX is an amazing slack group. I like growth designers slack group. And I like mine the product as well. So they're not they're all related to marketing. But I would say that a lot of interesting content is moving more into slack communities and interactions there. Yeah definitely. I've also noticed that fourth question most important growth metric. I like to daily active users because I think it's a really pure like people are getting value out of it. They're using it. So it's very basic, but I think it's easy to understand. It's a classic for a reason. So I think daily active users is still a really important growth metric, but not as a volume as a ratio. Because if it's a volume which will always be growing an insensitive abandoning metric, but if it's what percent of your user base is daily active, I think that's a much better metric that lets you see kind of how valuable how adoption is going. So that's my general north star. Cool. And then fifth and final question best piece of advice for fellow marketers. I would say that if you stick to your processes and you practice your methodologies rigorously, it you know it always works out. It's a very scary place to work, marketing especially SaaS marketing. People are always disrupting things, but you know if you stick to your processes, if you build on what works, get rid of what doesn't and repeat like you will see dividends to your efforts. Absolutely awesome. Well, Molly, this was super good and I just want to thank you so much for coming on the growth of podcast. Thank you so much for your time. That was Molly Norris Walker on how to smash your growth targets through design experimentation. Now before I go, I just want to say a big thank you for listening to the show. I don't want to give a shout out this week to Jay Rugo who left a review and rating on Apple podcasts. They said Ed would interview some top notch guests who really know how to build and grow B2B companies. Highly recommend checking this out if you have a marketing related role, especially in SaaS company. So thank you so much. And if you want to shout out, leave a review and rating on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. And maybe I'll be reading your message out next time. And as ever, you're always welcome to reach out to me on Twitter, at Nordic Edward or connect on LinkedIn. So thank you so much for listening to growth of podcast, brought you by growth marketing agency advanced B2B. This is your host Edward Ford signing off and make sure you check out advanced B2B.com for more content and resources on everything B2B SaaS growth. It's our job to tell that story. And always remember it's the risk takers that are reported. People are sick and tired of being marketed too and they're sick and tired of being sold. The single biggest story today in sales marketing is how our customers are buying and going.