1/ Start with first principles. Always get to the core of why you're doing something—whether it's a new feature, experiment, or nudge. A clear hypothesis sharpens focus, drives alignment across stakeholders, and ensures your work ties back to measurable outcomes.
2/ Think in journeys, not just screens. Map the full user journey—including surfaces outside the core product like emails and notifications. Identify key inflection points: When is the right time for a user to adopt a feature? What signals tell us they're ready?
3/ Understand your personas deeply. Clear personas help you pinpoint where the key inflection points lie in their journey. Design interventions that are timely, relevant, and context-aware.
4/ Timing is everything. The right nudge at the right time can feel magical. The same message at the wrong time erodes trust and becomes noise.
5/ Design with actionability in mind. Error states should help users recover or take the next best step—quickly and clearly. Nudges and calls to action should highlight the benefit and "why" behind the behavior you're promoting.
6/ Context is king. Contextual upsells are more effective than generic prompts. The best upsells help users reach their goals with your product, rather than getting in their way.
7/ AB testing discipline. Don't test too many variables at once—clarity beats complexity. Not everything needs to be tested. If it's a clear quality improvement, ship it.
8/ Simplify, then simplify again. Growth work often boils down to stripping things to their core. Collapse multi-step flows into one click. Cut copy that doesn't clarify value. Focus on what really matters. Simplification requires addressing hidden challenges in complex products, like edge cases and variants, to streamline the experience without losing logic.
9/ Build for scale. Treat empty and success states as prime surfaces for activation. Create reusable patterns that can scale across the product—empowering other designers and avoiding inconsistency.
10/ Drive alignment. Activation work often touches many surfaces. Without coordination, it gets noisy fast. Create a shared framework that defines tiers of promotional patterns so teams know what level of visibility is appropriate. This helps cross-functional teams prioritize, avoid overusing key surfaces, and build alignment without constant back-and-forth.
11/ Cross-functional intuition matters. Don't just rely on your own assumptions—pull in your data scientist's take, invite engineering feedback, and ask others what edge cases you're missing. Collaboration helps spot blind spots early and sharpens execution.
12/ Velocity and quality aren't opposites. One of the biggest criticisms of growth teams is that they move fast at the expense of quality. Avoid this tension by defining what "quality" actually means with your team and leadership. When quality is well-understood and agreed upon, you create space to move fast with confidence.
13/ The role of the activation team evolves. The most impactful activation teams shift from a service model to an empowerment model. Activation team should be leading the efforts on experimenting specific patterns and sharing the learnings. As your product grows, more teams will need activation support. Instead of one-off tasks, activation should become a strategic partner by defining best practices, shaping frameworks, and providing insights.