d.MBA

Fabricio Teixeira  is a design director at the digital product agency  Work & Co  and the founder of the  UX Collective , one of the best resources for blog posts, links, and resources for UX designers. In  The State of UX in 2018  report, UX Collective editors wrote that "The UX designers of 2018 will need to understand more about business". So, I reached out to Fabricio to learn more about t...

Taco Carlier  is a co-founder and CEO of  VanMoof , an Amsterdam-based company that design and manufactures awesome commuter bikes. Taco is an industrial designer who turned his love for bikes, design, and business into a successful company, which is disrupting the bike industry. The company has recently launched  VanMoof+ , a subscription service for bikes, disrupting its own business model.  In...

François is senior product designer at Headspace. In 2017 he was asked to design a new cancellation process for Headspace users who decided they no longer want to use the service. At first, François thought this will be a boring task but it quickly turned into his pet project. In the end, he published an article on Medium, describing his process and providing guidance to other designers who want t...

Jonathan Courtney  is a co-founder of  AJ&Smart , a design sprint agency based in Berlin, which has worked with companies like Lufthansa, Slack, Google, Lyft, Bose etc.  He is a host of  The Product Breakfast Club  podcast with Jake Knapp, author of Design Sprint. In one of the podcasts, Jonathan explained why he thinks the  golden age of UX is over  and what designers should do to stay releva...

Ben Burns  is an award-winning designer, a digital director at  Blind , brand strategy design consultancy, and COO at  The Futur  (business education for designers). Ben has a fascinating story that took him from charging 50$ a logo to 100$ an hour and that ultimately changed his career.  In the episode, we talked about topics related to running a creative business such as : why you should not loo...

Kate Rutter is an adjunct professor at California College of the Arts. She is a phenomenal UX designer with a strong background in arts and painting, so she sometimes refers to herself as a sketchnoter and graphic recorder. But she also combines her visual skills with data and metrics, particularly in her design process.  In the episode we spoke about: why it makes sense to measure design, how to...

Steve Vassallo is a general partner at Foundation Capital (VC firm that invested in Pocket, Netflix, Uber etc.). Prior to that, he worked as a lead designer at IDEO where he worked on a famous Cisco's 7900 series VoIP phone. He recently published a book "The Way to Design", which helps designers become entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs adopt best design practices. You can read the book for free onli...

Sudy Majd is a customer experience research lead at Candid Co. In the fifth episode, I spoke with Bobby, a colleague of Sudy, and we talked a lot about the way they do user research at Candid Co so it only made sense to dive deeper into these topics with Sudy. She has a PhD specialized in consumer behavior and behavioral economics.  In the episode we spoke about: doing proactive user research that...

Bobby Ghoshal is a co-host of a famous podcast High Resolution and a co-founder of a startup Candid Co. He has more than 15 years of experience in the design world and is a big proponent of bringing design closer to business.  In this episode we spoke about: how to do user research that is rooted in business problems how to measure and present results of your design work,  and how to hire and trai...

Marc Hemeon has a truly impressive CV. He has lead design at YouTube, Google Ventures, Oakley, Digg, Design Inc, Fflick and lately Ease Central. He has been designing since 1996 and is a true veteran in the design community.  In this episode we spoke about: the distinction between art and design, how ugly design can beat beautiful design, how to explain the value of your work to non-designers by f...

Joel Califa is a senior product designer at GitHub. He recently wrote a very interesting and popular blog post Subverted Design, which describes what happens if designers forget that their first responsibility is still the user. You can read the full article  on Joel's blog.  In this episode we spoke about: examples of subverted design and how you can fight against it why putting users first is de...

Joe Gerber is a business designer and a managing director of  IDEO CoLAB . After studying biology, taking an MBA, and working as a product manager, he joined IDEO as the first business designer in the New York office.  In the episode we spoke about: how to systematically test your design so that it achieves users and business goals, the role of vocabulary in bridging different design disciplines, ...

Trent Huon is a business design director at IDEO Munich. After finishing his MBA, he first worked as a management consultant. As he never went through official design training, he had to learn design on the job when he joined IDEO. We talk about his transformation into designer and about the relevance of business in design. Some of the topics we covered in this episode are: how to show non-designe...