Growth Design: A holistic approach to Product Design - Fonz Morris- S1 - Episode 8

Season 1 - Ep. 8 - Growth Design: A holistic approach to Product Design - Fonz Morris.

Fonz Morris, the Lead Product Designer at Netflix, is enthusiastic about designing engaging, inspiring, and attractive experiences for people. He has worked with some of the most well-known companies in the world, including Coursera, Comcast, ESPN, and High 5 Games. He is a mentor, a DEI Advocate, a speaker, an advisor, an entrepreneur, and a self-taught designer.

Discussion Points:

• Being a self-taught designer, what inspires you about designing? And, any tips for the people who are learning to design on their own? 1:09
• Netflix is one of the most popular entertainment platforms in the world, how to create such products with immersive and inclusive user experiences? 1:52
• As a Lead product designer at Netflix, and even having worked with the world’s leading brands. What have been your key learnings as a designer there? 3:36
• How was your journey? How did you get into this industry in the first place? 7:37
• What is Growth Design? Why is it important and what are the skills needed to be successful in Growth Design. 27:00
• What is some advice that you’d like to give someone who’s just starting out in the industry? 33:13

Show notes:

• It all comes down to solving user problems and developing effective-efficient solutions at the end of the day. 1:45
• When you have so many consumers like at Netflix, it's not a good idea to just flip the switch and roll everything out at once. What if there are some problems? What if you want to tweak something or do something else, and you'd rather do it in phases, which I believe keeps everything safe. 3:19
• Every company moves a little differently. However, they follow the same product design principles and aim at conversions. You have to think about how mature are those design agencies, their design team, how big that design team and all these little things matter to help you really well to craft each individual team. 5:54
• Every time someone works for a different brand or organization, they have to absorb not only the new user base but also the culture of the company or organization that you're working for and what kind of steps they're bringing in. - Dushyant 6:17
• Before you take the job, make sure that you have done some research on their culture and that there is some synergy between your values and principles and the company’s. Make sure you want to work in that industry and you've done as much research as you can to discover what it's like to work there. 7:00
• Entrepreneurial advice: You really have to have a better understanding of what your investing looks like. Because it may take time for your idea to actually take off. So if you don't have enough runway, then you won't be able to stay afloat long enough to maybe have the industry understand your idea and support your idea. 10:37
• For anybody who is looking to work with bigger companies and organizations, it's a stepwise process, if you can't just crack it with your placement directly, I think the best way would be to just get the relevant experience and make sure that you keep making connections, you keep meeting people, and go to these events.12:30
• Learn from people's successes. But don't judge yourself based on their successes. Maybe that’s not the path for you, so find an alternative path. Keep getting experience, keep pushing and one day you’ll be where you want to be.12:58
• Growth design is essentially the intersection of business and design. A lot of the work I do at Netflix is focused on the design, but also heavily focused on the business impact. Only being focused on one aspect of the design, be it UX or UI is not enough, we should think about the success of this feature overall, business metrics, and what's the business impact of that. That happens when you are data-driven and as a growth designer, I am using the data, I know where the business wants to go plus design, along with user research and user experience which is a more holistic approach. 27:09
• Career advice from Fonz: Be patient with yourself and have fun. Invest in yourself. Invest in yourself, like you're the product. All the time that you put into bringing all the pieces together in your portfolio and what you think you're going to do when you get this amazing job at Meta. Make sure you put that same time into yourself so that you are on the right path. Make sure you take time to do self-assessments, make sure you take time to really think about what you're passionate about, and what success looks like for you. And try to build a little plan for yourself. It may change that's fine. It's not about following the plan. Exactly. It's about just having some form of structure and being able to build on things and over time you'll get to wherever you want to go. 33:24
• Remember that you are a designer and you will get better as time goes by. But you have to take that first step. 34:30
• Take your time if you fall. Get back up, get up, and keep pushing. If you fall again, just get back up and keep getting back up, no matter what happens, because it's so worth it. 35:16

Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fonzmorris/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fonzmoney/?hl=en Twitter: https://twitter.com/youngfonz?lang=en