In growth we have a very famed mentality of “Done is better than perfect”. This framing wires every growth marketer for speed, driving fast iterations and quick learnings.
As a growth marketer I love the action-biasness of that thinking and just gettting things done in general. However, the design thinker side of me would sometimes come out.
You see, design thinking has 5 stages – Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test. Growth? We tend to just rush through 2 of these steps. Ideation and Testing.
Not bad for speed but the sharpness of what we are solutioning for often falls short and is reflected in the impact on our growth metrics.
“Improve the checkout page” is not a problem statement, it’s just a mangerial request at best. However, “New trial users don’t understand why their card gets charged mid-trial” is a problem statement and it points you toward one or two specific tests instead of eleven vague ones.
Growth marketing didn’t drop this step because it’s a bad idea. We dropped it because “define” doesn’t produce a dashboard. Ideation feels productive while empathising and defining the issue feels like a delay on action.
Habits to speed things up
Product teams ran into this same problem years ago, and the fix that stuck is Teresa Torres’ “continuous discovery habits”: at least one real customer touchpoint every week, feeding what she calls an opportunity solution tree. With outcome at the top, real customer opportunities (pains, needs, points of friction, each backed by actual evidence) branching off it, and only then, solutions and experiments hanging off a specific opportunity.
You don’t need a research team to borrow this. Here’s the version I’d actually run:
- Block 30 minutes a week for a “define” session, before you groom the test backlog — not after.
- Pull one real customer signal. A handful of support tickets, a churn-survey verbatim, a session recording, an NPS comment. Not a competitor screenshot.
- Write the opportunity as a sentence about the customer, not the metric. “Users think the renewal fee is a surprise charge” beats “improve renewal page conversion.”
- Generate two or three test ideas that address that specific opportunity — not a brainstorm of everything the team’s been meaning to try.
- Tag every test in your backlog with the opportunity it maps to. If an idea has no opportunity attached, it’s a guess wearing a hypothesis’s clothes. Rank it behind the ones that aren’t.
- Revisit the tree monthly. Opportunities change as you fix or rule them out — a tree from last quarter is decoration, not a working document.
What this looks like in practice
Picture a subscription fitness app with the usual day-30 churn problem. In a 30-minute weekly define session, someone actually reads three recent support tickets and notices the same complaint twice: users didn’t realize their card would be charged again after the trial, and felt blindsided. That’s the opportunity. The test that comes out of it isn’t for varying button colours or more discountss it’s a pre-renewal reminder email worded in various way to drive conversion. Simple and solutioning for a funnel problem that is clear.
The fix isn’t more tests
It’s fewer, better-aimed ones. If your team’s response to a flat win rate has been “let’s increase test velocity,” you’re about to run more of the same guesses, faster.
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