38: Experience-Led Growth: How Design Unlocks New Revenue, Boosts LTV, and Reduces Churn
Why the future of sustainable growth depends on design as a strategic advantage—not just surface-level polish.
A golden padlock with circuit engravings sits against a vibrant blue background, bursting with glowing pink and orange particles, digital icons, and currency symbols—symbolizing secure, dynamic digital innovation.
If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably noticed that growth roles are everywhere. That’s no accident. As product-led organizations mature, they’ve nailed down metrics and optimized performance using data. However, optimization alone has a ceiling.
The next frontier of innovation—and retention—occurs at the experience level, where design shines.
Growth is no longer just about funnel tweaks and A/B tests; we’re entering the era of experience-led growth (ELG), where design and user experience become strategic levers to drive revenue, deepen engagement, and reduce churn.
For senior leaders and ICs, this shift means moving beyond the old growth playbook. It’s about embedding design thinking into your growth strategy—not just to acquire users but to earn their long-term loyalty.
Here’s how experience-led growth can unlock your next wave of sustainable, scalable impact.
Why Experience-Led Growth?
Most growth teams are wired to optimize for acquisition and conversion. While those are critical metrics, they only tell part of the story. Experience-Led Growth (ELG) takes a more holistic approach that treats the entire user journey as an opportunity to create value, not just capture it. Here’s how this has shown up in my work—and how leaders can begin to operationalize ELG across their teams:
Opens New Revenue Channels: At a fintech company, I led the redesign of the platform and the launch of its first credit card. Through ethnographic research and behavior mapping, we uncovered how financial empowerment could be embedded into the social payments experience. What started as a design improvement became a revenue-generating product, unlocking new value without sacrificing user delight.
What leaders can do:
Encourage your teams to look beyond the conversion funnel. Run cross-functional discovery sprints to surface user frustrations or adjacent behaviors that could point to new product extensions or monetization paths.
Enhances Lifetime Value (LTV): I led the UX for a major loyalty program, reimagining it to reward more than just transactions or promotions. By aligning user needs with business goals, we designed journeys that personalized rewards, recognized and celebrated repeat behaviors, and reinforced a sense of belonging. This transformed the program from a discount engine into a relationship-building platform, ultimately boosting engagement and lifetime value.
What leaders can do:
Invest in building shared journey maps that integrate behavioral, emotional, and transactional touchpoints. Use these to identify where emotional resonance and value moments can be amplified to drive loyalty.
Reduce Churn Through Frictionless Journeys: When I led teams at a global automobile company, I scaled a service booking platform across 56 countries. We mapped regional frictions, adapted flows to local contexts, and introduced consistency where it mattered most. By reducing cognitive load and creating a sense of trust, we cut drop-off rates and increased completed bookings across markets.
What leaders can do:
Set churn reduction goals beyond metrics—look at friction audits, onboarding experiences, and first-week retention flows—pair product metrics with qualitative insights to prioritize changes that improve perceived ease and confidence.
Revenue Begins with Relevance: How Design Reveals Monetizable Value
Uncover Hidden Revenue Streams Through Research. Most growth teams focus on optimizing what’s already visible—conversion funnels, clickthrough rates, and feature adoption. But real growth often lies in users’ unmet, unspoken needs—the jobs they’re trying to do but can’t.
Conduct Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) interviews to understand the deeper context of user behavior. What are users hiring your product to do, and where does it fall short?
Audit drop-off points in onboarding or underused features. Are there unmet needs that could be repackaged as paid tiers or premium services?
Explore pricing through value delivery, not just features—like Slack’s intuitive upgrade path, which lets usage organically drive conversion.
Example – Industry: Calendly evolved from a solo scheduling tool into an enterprise-ready platform by deeply analyzing team workflows and pain points. They transformed utility into monetizable value by offering shared team pages, routing logic, and CRM integrations.
Example – Personal: At a large fintech company, we uncovered that users wanted more than peer-to-peer payments—they wanted financial tools that felt equally intuitive and social. This insight led to the launch of the first credit card, where the experience, not just the product, was the differentiator. What began as a design-led exploration became a new revenue channel.
Increase LTV Through Delight & Habit Formation. Users don’t stick around for a one-time offer; they stay when your product integrates into their routine, providing emotional and functional value over time.
Design for faster “aha moments.” What magic moment makes your product indispensable? How can you surface it earlier?
Apply behavioral UX principles: streaks (Duolingo), milestones (LinkedIn), and progress indicators help reinforce habits.
Personalize content or feedback loops: Spotify’s annual Wrapped turns usage data into a celebration, building pride and community.
Example – Industry: Notion’s templating system empowers users to start building immediately, lowering friction and creating moments of success quickly. Power users emerge not because of advanced features, but because the core experience helps users feel capable.
Example – Personal: At a grocery delivery service team, I focused on the shopper experience—the platform’s backbone. We introduced achievements, milestone rewards, and peak-time pay incentives to foster a sense of progress, purpose, and recognition. These features were designed to help shoppers feel valued and empowered in their earning potential. By reinforcing positive behaviors and creating emotional resonance through small wins, we increased engagement, decreased attrition, and ultimately extended the lifetime value of our most active shoppers.
Reduce Churn by Fixing the “Death by 1,000 Paper Cuts” Problem Churn is rarely the result of a single, significant failure. More often, it results from a gradual erosion of trust due to small, repeated frictions—confusing interfaces, delayed confirmations, or lost progress.
Run churn autopsies: interview canceled users to trace their journey and identify overlooked UX issues.
Identify and prioritize micro-frictions in core flows—account recovery, checkout, and onboarding. Even a two-click simplification can reframe user sentiment.
Use proactive UX, such as in-app nudges, contextual help, or AI assistants, to guide users in moments of uncertainty.
Example – Industry: Dropbox once saw a spike in churn due to file recovery frustrations. Redesigning this feature—making it easier and more transparent, and even adding it as a benefit in premium tiers—reduced churn and became a value differentiator.
Example – Personal: At BMW, our team noticed a significant drop-off in service bookings, particularly in mobile experiences across global markets. Localizing flows, simplifying inputs, and creating a consistent visual rhythm across countries drastically reduced abandonment and boosted completion rates, proving that operational simplicity fuels retention.
Getting Started with Experience-Led Growth: A Leadership Playbook
If you’re leading a growth, product, or design organization, experience-led growth doesn’t necessitate a complete reorganization—it begins with how you prioritize, structure teams, and define success. Here’s how to start integrating ELG into your leadership approach:
Make Growth Leaks a Team-Wide Diagnostic, Not a Design-Only Task. Too often, UX issues are treated as downstream polish. Flip the script.
What to do: Build a recurring rhythm for experience audits across cross-functional teams. Create a shared backlog of high-friction moments across the journey (e.g., onboarding, repeat engagement, cancellations).
What to prioritize: Focus on moments that disproportionately impact LTV and retention, even if they aren’t top-of-funnel. Bring designers and analysts into early-stage data reviews—not just retrofits.
Team management tip: Pair PMs and designers to co-lead opportunity mapping sessions. It builds shared ownership and breaks siloed accountability.
Embed Design Thinking in Growth Sprints. Growth shouldn’t be a siloed function but a multidisciplinary lab of curiosity and iteration.
What to do: Invite UX researchers and designers to participate in growth sprint planning. Use journey mapping, rapid prototyping, and assumption testing—not just A/B testing.
What to prioritize: Encourage sprints targeting desirability and viability—is the experience meaningful and monetizable?
Team management tip: Shift the mindset from “shipping fast” to “learning fast.” Celebrate cross-functional teams for insights gained, not just experiments launched.
Redefine Success with Experience Metrics. Conversion rate is one signal, not the story.
What to do: Evolve your KPI stack to include behavioral and emotional indicators, such as engagement depth, feature retention, NPS by segment, and qualitative user sentiment.
What to prioritize: Track how user perception changes over time. This will tell you whether you’re building lasting relationships or short-term spikes.
Team management tip: Create OKRs that pair business goals with experience outcomes. For example: “Increase LTV by 15% and reduce onboarding confusion by 30%.”
Final Thought: Design Is Your Silent Growth Hacker
Experience-led growth isn’t a tactic—it’s a mindset. As a leader, your role is to model that mindset by prioritizing, structuring collaboration, and defining what “good” looks like across teams.
Today, many growth teams aren’t solving shiny new problems—they’re wrestling with the hard, foundational ones: fragmented systems, messy data, and siloed teams. You’ve already picked the low-hanging fruit. Getting to the next level means embracing deeper collaboration, aligning across squads, and designing experiences that connect across the entire journey.
The most effective growth strategies don’t just acquire users—they engage, retain, and monetize them through thoughtful, frictionless experiences. When you lead with design, you’re not just chasing short-term gains—you’re building a defensible moat that competitors can’t easily replicate.
Your turn: How has experience design shaped your growth strategy? What UX change unexpectedly moved the needle for you? Let’s learn from each other—drop your story in the comments.
Want to read more on how to have an impact as a design leader?
Consider reading these:
36: Beyond the Dashboard: A Design Leader’s Framework for Meaningful Metrics
32 - The Product vs. Design Battle Isn’t a Bug—It’s a Feature
21: How Great Design Leaders Win Stakeholders with Powerful Storytelling
17 - Balancing Speed and Safety: Building Trust in Expansion Mode
