d.MBA

Economies of Scale is one of the most fundamental concepts in business, which define how competitive are our organizations. In this episode, we dive deep into what this concept really is and explain: why almost every company wants to grow bigger (and why that is good and bad), why investors dislike service companies, and how to use the keyword “marginal cost” in your next big meeting.   www.d.mba/...

Yancey Strickler is the cofounder and ex-CEO of Kickstarter , which revolutionized the field of early-stage investments with the crowdfunding model. The company has helped raise over $5 billion for more than 200,000 projects. After leaving Kickstarter, Yancey became an author and wrote a beautiful book titled This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World . In this book, Yancey la...

Last week, Tesla announced that it will let customers buy their cars with cryptocurrency Bitcoin. We break down the business rationale for this decision and use it as a good excuse to introduce business topics such as: three fundamental business documents that designers need to understand (Profit and loss statement, Balance Sheet, and Cashflow statement), what is inflation and when it happens, and...

This is our first ever Guestimation Challenge! It’s a game in which we try to make fast estimations with very little data. For example, estimate how many miles of highway does the US have? Players can only use a calculator, pen, and paper to come as close to the correct number as possible. Without the use of their computer or additional resources. This game imitates a real-world scenario, where we...

We recently hosted a webinar Prototyping with Numbers. In this episode, we share an audio snippet of the first part of that webinar, where Alen explains how to create numerical prototypes to uncover the viability and feasibility risks of design concepts. You can access a video recording of this webinar here https://d.mba/webinar-prototyping-with-numbers www.d.mba

In this special episode, Alen shares his latest essay on the dilemma between business and design. Many designers are afraid that business literacy will lead them to compromise their values and principles. Alen shares why this is a false dilemma and why in reality the relationship between the two is actually synergistic! www.d.mba/podcast/business-savvy-vs-design-values

In the latest Business Design Jam, Alen is joined by two d. MBA mentors, Jo Roberts (Lead business designer at Designit) and Andreea Strachină (business designer expert at PWC IXDS). They talked about: circular business models and how to apply them to service businesses, how to apply outcome-based pricing to different industries, and how Away founders built a billion-dollar startup by redesigning...

Competitor research is important. It helps us learn about our competitors so we can make better decisions. Decisions that lead to more value created for our customers and our organization. However, when we think about our competitors, we are all making a fundamental logical mistake. We mistake our direct competitors with our only competitors. For example, BMW is not competing just with Mercedes-Be...

In the new Business Design Jam, Alen and Franz , discuss the latest business design stories: how a Michelin 3-star restaurant is not only surviving but even thriving during the coronavirus lockdown, how Universal Studios pioneered a new way to premier movies, and how Airbnb forgot that it is servicing two groups of customers.   www.beyondusers.com/podcast

Rita Gunther McGrath is a world-renowned thought leader and a professor at Columbia Business School. She has received the #1 achievement award for strategy from the prestigious Thinkers50 and has been consistently named one of the world’s top ten management thinkers in its bi-annual ranking. She wrote Discovery-Driven Growth and The End of Competitive Advantage, which are widely used in the busine...

UX Designer and CEO of Clearleft , Andy Budd curates the Leading Design and UX London conferences and helped set-up The Brighton Digital Festival . Andy is a regular speaker at international conferences like SXSW, An Event Apart and The Next Web. In this episode, we spoke about: the biggest learnings from the last Leading Design conference, why and how designers should say no to their managers, an...

Maija Itkonen is an industrial designer, successful entrepreneur, innovator, and brand lover. In 2015 she co-founded Gold&Green Foods , the company behind the phenomenal success story of the “perfect protein food” platform and its first product Pulled Oats. Pulled Oats is a new kind of meat alternative based on the Nordic superfood oats, built around the team’s unique scientific knowledge and...

Eric Quint is Vice President, Chief Brand and Design Officer at 3M , a Fortune 500 company with over $30B in revenue and over 90.000 employees. An industrial designer by training, Eric joined 3M in 2013 to “design the design function” in the company. He grew the design team substantially, built revolutionary 3M Design Center (an incubator for Collaborative Creativity), and helped build the brand p...

In the fifth Business Design Jam, Alen and Franz (also a mentor in the d. MBA), discuss business design stories such as: why IKEA offers 0.99$ hot dogs after you bought furniture for hundreds of dollars, how Soul-Cycle created a competitive advantage by designing for their employees instead of customers; and why designers should co-create with lead users, not just test after designs are made.   Th...

In many companies, designers do not prepare the product roadmap. We are handed a feature list and expected to just do it. But we’ve all been in situations where we felt that what we are working on just isn’t right. But how do you push back? How do you correctly recognize what to create? Does a hobby runner want a better running shoe? Or do they just want to be faster? Or to lose some weight? If we...

Design Sprints have become an extremely popular format in businesses. However, many sprint projects never get executed because they are not aligned with the business context. Tim Höfer is a product design director and head of the design sprint team at the AJ&Smart , which has run sprints for companies like Google, Slack, Lyft, and Lufthansa. In this episode, we spoke about integrating business...

In this episode, we share a lesson from the d. MBA course . In this lesson, which is a part of the Business Models module, we introduce ten famous business model patterns. We go through their advantages, disadvantages, and explain when to use them. We compare e-commerce with brick and mortar models, talk about white label solutions, open-source models, freemium, subscription, razor and blade mode...

David J Bland is the founder of Precoil to help companies find product market fit using lean startup, design thinking, and business model innovation. David has helped validate new products and businesses at companies such as GE, Toyota, Adobe, HP, Behr and more. David is the co-author of Testing Business Ideas , a Wiley business book with Alexander Osterwalder. In this podcast, we talked about Dav...

Designers are used to using prototypes to test usability and desirability. You put a wireframe in front of a user and you can quickly learn if they like (or know how to use) something. What if we could do the same for viability? Well, we can. With math. In this episode, you’ll learn how to use simple math to: estimate the business impact of your product changes calculate in money what value can yo...

Have you ever been told to be more strategic? What does it mean though? Strategy, unfortunately, has different meanings for different people. It is one of the most widely misunderstood concepts despite being crucial to the success of business and design. In this episode, we talk about a difference between strategy and business strategy, what you should do if you find yourself on a strategic projec...

Trent and Alen discuss the importance of design research and desktop research from the perspective of business designers. In this episode, we are covering: conducting looking-ins (internal interviews) and looking-outs (customers and outside stakeholders), doing desktop research (analyzing industry and competitors), using data, and much more!

“My name is Jason Barron , and I’m a designer. I’ve always been doodling, sometimes when I shouldn’t - like in class as a kid. Fast-forward 20 years and not much has changed. Except that I decided to put my lifelong doodling habit to work when I received an MBA from a top 40 business school, Brigham Young University.” Jason is an author of The Visual MBA , a great book explaining all key business...

Imagine working on the iPhone before its release in 2007. Imagine the number of design decisions to be made. No one knew if this is going to be successful. Now, imagine working on the iPhone in 2019. Now, the level of design work is completely different, for sure.  Each product has its lifecycle and its strategic position in the company. If we learn what type of product we work on, we will know wh...

Customer is king. Especially to designers. We would do everything for them. We fight for what they want and need. But is that always a good idea? I would argue that it is sometimes self-destructive. That it is against what customers actually want. Find out more in this mini MBA episode in which we discuss the fundamentals of a business strategy   www.d.mba

This week, I published the Business Design Guide , which introduces business design as a design discipline. In this episode, I present the outline of the guide and share a few stories from my career that led me to write this guide. I took one topic from the guide and presented it in more detail. What most budding business designers overlook is the importance of a design mindset. So, I share six mi...