An Insiders Guide To Business Design At IDEO IDEO Stories Medium 19/05/17, 19:11

An Insiders Guide To Business Design

At IDEO
What Good Looks Like
Feb 16, 2016

I like to play with words. Business Designer @IDEO and Columnist @Inc. Read
more on unabridgedro.com.

These erasable tiles enable teams to visualize the flow of goods and services in a business

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Illustrated by Ina Xi

When I first joined IDEO as a business designer, I had no idea what the role would
look like day-to-day. To start figuring it out, I turned to some of our veteran
business designers. As I went from one conversation to the next, I was surprised to
find that each person had a unique perspective around how business design can be
applied to a given challenge. However, they all agreed on one thing:

Good business design is invisible.

If youre considering becoming a business designer or working with one, youre

probably in search of what this invisibility looks like.

I recently sat down with three business designers at IDEOs SF location to learn
how they collaborated with other designers on their teams and applied business
design to their most recent projects.

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Heres how they see good business design.

Our first interview is with Miki Heller who focuses on innovation in

education.

Miki (center) getting immersed in the classroom with teachers

After studying aerospace engineering in college, Miki taught and consulted for
Teach for America and founded a non-profit to mentor students in the college
application process.

How would you describe business design to a third grader?

You know when you want a new toy? Theres a group of people who have
designed itits color, how big it is, how fast it goes. Thats the toy you get to
play with.

But there are a lot of other questions that people answered when building the toy:
How much do your parents have to pay for it? Where in the store can you find it?
What should it say in the commercial? What should it be called?

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Those questions help make the toy into a good business for the toy company.
Business designers answer those questions. At IDEO weve found that if a toy
company doesnt have the answers to those questions, even the best toy wont
make it to the stores.

Whats your favorite design tool?

Okay, hear me out. I love Excel. It has a lot of hidden abilities which make it a
reservoir that goes infinitely deep. The more you use it, the more you learn.
Though the default setup doesnt make for a good way to share things with a client
or team, you can get creative (it gives you a lot of flexibility) and turn it into a
really beautiful storytelling tool.

What skill do you think is most valuable to you in this role?

When we look for creative solutions to user problems, those solutions typically

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come in the form of a product or service. But what we deliver to a clientand

what a customer eventually experiencesis not a product or service in a vacuum.
Its all the stuff around it too. I am able to think creatively around the design of the
business by deconstructing all the assumptions around its business model and
reassembling them to derive value in new ways. I believe that for a lot of products
and services out there, the brilliance is in the business. Having hands-on
experience in the education sector, I also bring deep industry expertise to my
studio.

Now on to your most recent project. What was the design challenge? Our team
was tasked with creating a global platform to help teachers in the classroom.

What did business design look like on the project? For many projects, the
beginning involves some sort of competitive landscaping to understand who else
is playing in the space. The education space is massive. I enlisted my team to help
me dig in. We went through a round of research and compiled a list of
organizations who could compete with or substitute the thing we were designing.
We dug up more information about each company and bucketed them into
categories to understand the different levers we were dealing with.

Then we did a timed activity: Each person chose a companys name, spent fifteen
minutes researching and writing a blurb about it, then shared it with the group.
This was a great way for everyone to become aware of the landscape.

What were your biggest surprises? We traveled all over the world doing
research for this project. We had hypotheses around how the classrooms would
differ depending on location. But what we observed is that the education world is
becoming flat. Teachers are increasingly turning to the internet for inspiration, so
classrooms feel very similar. A teacher in India watches a YouTube video of a
teacher in Italy for ideas.

What is a new product or business you admire?

The line of companies in the sharing economy. Its admirable for a business to

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help people take something they dont use much (for example cars and
apartments) and turn it into an extra source of income. Good business design is
one where you can see there is an obvious opportunity to stop wasting something
valuable.

Now lets move over to Carl Fudge who is part of our studio for
organizational change.

Carl debriefing with Design Researcher Priti Rao after feedback sessions

Formerly a strategy consultant, Carl leads projects and is especially passionate

about tech and finance.

How would you describe business design to another designer?

Business design focuses on making the business as beautiful as the design. Our
clients are always making some sort of business decision. For example: Who
would use it? How would we sell it? Would it make the client money? What
makes this idea different from other solutions in this space?

Lets talk about your most recent project. What was the design challenge? We
were working with a client in financial services looking to attract millennials who
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dont currently use their product.

Can you give me an example of a specific business design activity on the

project? Our team came up with three different concepts for our client to test with
millennials. Each of these concepts was based on first-hand research, which
included talking to the target customer and experts. I also tried out competitive
products and purely inspirational ones, identifying what worked and what didnt
based on what we had learned in the field. I then led the development of pitch
decks for each concept, which included market sizing, customer segmentation,
and projected revenue.

Thinking creatively about payments

What were your biggest surprises on the project? For a deeply personal topic
like finances, its important to build a product people can trustA product that
feels like a trustworthy friend.

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Looking outside IDEO, what is a product or business you admire?

I think Betterment is brilliant. Its approachable and affordable and wrapped up in

a nice online user experience. I recommend it to everyone. Do you use it? You
should use it.

Our final chat is with Vaughn Baker who is particularly interested in new
venture design.

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Vaughn preparing for in-context user research sessions

Vaughn has previously worked at Bank of America and launched an equity

crowdfunding startup.

How would you describe business design to your grandma?

My job is a lot like being a translator. But instead of translating language, Im

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translating business concepts. Say Im familiar with a concept, for example a

pricing model, that seems to fit well with the idea our team is discussing. Id teach
my team the concept with enough detail so that they could apply it to our design
concepts.

Whats your favorite design tool?

SPSS, a predictive analytics software. It is an effective tool for identifying

differences between what people say and do.

What skill do you think is most valuable to you in this role?

Telling coherent stories. I often find myself trying to convey the relevance of an
abstract concept to my team, and the best way Ive found to do so is by telling a
specific story of the concept playing out in the world.

Using fake money to visualize heat around possible product features

Lets talk about your most recent project. What was the design challenge? We
were helping a startup come up with an offeringthe service and business model

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that would cater to their target market.

What were one of your business design activities? When it was time to turn our
research insights into concepts we could test, our teams graphic designer sketched
concepts while I designed a pricing model for each of them. That way, when we
showed our ideas to target customers for feedback, they could react to the
experience we were selling and what they would be willing to pay for it.

What was your biggest surprise? On my first project, I was pleasantly surprised
that I wasnt expected to just go into a hole and build a financial model. My role
was more about introducing various business tools and frameworks to my team
and deciding as a team whether it made sense for our context or not.

What is a new product or business you admire?

Codecademy. Theyve taken a subject matter that is conventionally known to be

unapproachable and theyve gameified it.

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Behind-the-scenes complexities

There is no one definition of business design or one way to approach it. But there
are certainly common threads that weave into this invisible tapestry.

Good business design is collaborating with other designers to deliver a fantastic

end-to-end user experience.

It is about solving problems for the consumer and the client.

It is applied in different ways throughout a project, from conducting competitive

user experience analyses early on to running pricing experiments mid-project to
building a robust financial case into the final concept.

It is invisible because it takes complex systemsthe way a business is run, the

way customers engage with a business, and the way a team understands the
businessand makes them so simple that things just work. For the business and

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its customers.

Have a business+design topic or challenge youd like us address? Send us a note

at askBxD@ideo.com.

IDEO Stories
It doesnt occur to most people that everything is
designed!!Bill Moggridge

Write a response

Paolo Bartoli

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