d.MBA

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...

John Oswald is a business design pioneer. He was the first business designer at fjord where he defined its role and built the team. He is currently a managing director at a strategic design consultancy Method London . With John, we discussed: the early days and evolution of the business design, five patterns of business design talent, how hiring business designers work, and how typical business de...

Imagine you are running a hotel. Who would you rather have as a customer? High value but one-time visitor or an average customer who will keep coming back for many years? It depends, right? Lifetime Value (LTV) is a concept that can help us determine the business value of our customers and with that understand: who is an ideal customer, how much they are worth to a business, and how much we can sp...

When you open a yoga studio, will you hire yoga instructor full-time or will you find a contractor? Will you sign a one year lease for your studio that you can equip the way you want or will you try to rent a pop-up store that gives you more flexibility? These are all design decisions that entrepreneurs and designers should think about. In this mini MBA episode, we spoke about: the difference betw...

In the second mini d. MBA episode, we look at two related business concepts: Opportunity Costs and Return on Investment (ROI) If you take a year off from work and do an MBA, this doesn’t just cost you $100k. During that same year, you could be earning your salary. So, your opportunity costs (for that year) are way above $100k. A freelancer that takes on a project with a 50% discounted rate won’t b...

This is an experimental episode where I present one business concept and explain its relevancy for designers work. In the first mini d. MBA episode, I talked about cash flow and its importance. It is one of the most common reasons companies go out of businesses. When you run out of money, the game is over. If you like chocolate, expensive apartment buildings, Walmart, and loans, you will love this...

The Business Design Jam is back. In the third session, David Schmidt , a business design partner at United Peers , and I discuss four business design topics: how misaligned incentives fundamentally hurt user experience across different industries and what we can learn from Lemonade (the insurance startup from USA), why creating sustainable brands could be the next big wave in business innovation (...

Matic Pelcl is a director of product at Celtra , a creative management platform for digital advertising. Matic has gone through the experience of starting as a junior designer to having the proverbial seat at the table today. In this episode, we spoke about: why scalable design is important and when companies should start implementing it, what does having a seat at the table mean, and how does a d...

Watch the video version of the talk.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxck_k6TIOI Recently, I gave a talk titled "Good design is good business" at the UX/UI Meetup Berlin. I presented the synthesis of my research on the heritage and purpose of design. The basic question I was trying to answer is "what is the purpose of design" and "how designers can achieve it". In this talk, I share my answer. 

Jules Ehrhardt is the founder of FKTRY, a creative capital studio aimed at revolutionising how creatives get paid. Jules was previously an owner of USTWO , the pioneer studio that kicked off the digital product studio trend. Jules left USTWO couple of years ago to focus on building one of the first creative capital studios and to create an example of a new business model for creatives, which he la...

Tulio Jarocki is a product designer at Blinkist , a subscription service that summarizes non-fiction books so they can be consumed in just 15 minutes. The company has over 2500 books in its database, more than 6 million customers, and it has raised over $35 million. In the episode, we spoke about: the checklist design process that product designers use at Blinkist, how designers at Blinkist use da...

Mackey Saturday is a world-renown graphic designer who created visual identities for some of the most famous brands of our time: Instagram, Oculus, Luxe and recently also Unsplash. He is currently running a brand agency based in New York City. In this podcast we talked about: his early beginnings and how he learned to sell his services, how we can avoid taste based discussions with clients, when a...

Dave is a co-founder and Partner at Play Bigger Advisors , a consulting firm that coined the term category design and is advising companies on how to create and own new categories of products. They recently also published a book also called Play Bigger where they explain the category design process in detail. In this episode we spoke about: what is a category and category design, why do category k...

A few weeks back, I published the guide for designers who want to learn more about business. As the title already suggests, it covers seven most important business skills for designers. I decided to turn this guide into a podcast for those of you who prefer audio books. In it, we cover: Industry Analysis Competitor Analysis Business Strategies Business Models: Prototyping with Numbers Design Metri...

The second episode of Business Design Jam was all over the place. But in a good way ;). With Jonathan, founder of AJ&Smart and co-host of an awesome podcast Product Breakfast Club, we spoke about business models and concepts relevant for designers. We talked about Tesla, PewDiePie, Microsoft' Xbox and a lot about AJ&Smart’s products and journey. Among other things, Jonathan told us how he...

Business Design Jam (BDJ) is a new format of Beyond Users podcast. It’s a discussion with a fellow business designer about inspiring business design examples and the learnings we can take from them. In the first BDJ, I am joined by David Schmidt , a fellow business designer in Berlin, working as a business design partner at United Peers. Each of us prepared three examples. After a short introducti...

Christian Hertlein is a head of design at N26 , the mobile bank startup with over 1 million customers across 17 European markets. A year ago, Christian took over a team of designers in super fast growing startup and started integrating design across different departments and promoting design as an important part of the culture. We discussed: how is the design team structured and organized within t...

Raffaela Rein is a cofounder of the Berlin-based educational startup CareerFoundry , which offers online courses on UX, UI, and web development. Career Foundry is one of the biggest players in this field with more than 10.000 students each year. Raffaela is also recognized as top 50 women in tech by Forbes (congrats!!) and a great guest for this podcast as she is a business leader with a big focus...

Amy Bonsall is a head of venture design at IDEO. She currently works in the Palo Alto studio, leading a team of seven business designers. She is also an instructor in the recent IDEO’s course Designing a Business , which teaches venture design. In the episode we covered: what is venture design and how it is different to lean startup, what is Amy looking in business design candidates, and how you c...

Taig Mac Carthy is a graphic designer who decided to become an entrepreneur to realize his creative vision. As many designers, he wasn't fond of business but changed his mind once he started to get more into entrepreneurship. After reading the Blue Ocean Strategy, he came up with the idea for blue wine GIK  and Hola Plate , which are today very successful products.   In the episode we covered: why...