Beyond Users

There is a saying in business that if a company is trying to prove that it is a monopoly, then it is not one. But if a company is trying to prove that it is not a monopoly, it may very well be. Holding a monopoly gives a company an unfair advantage, which is good for the company but usually bad for consumers and society as less (or no competition) leads to less (or no) innovation. Lately, Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Apple are all facing legal actions to hinder their monopolistic position. So, in this Business Design Jam, we talked about: what exactly is a monopoly, how common business practices may lead to a monopoly, and what impact market-dominating positions have on customers and society.   www.d.mba

Surely, most of us would agree that a 4-day work week is a good idea, right? Early research shows no drop in productivity, and a big increase in employee well-being. So, why hasn’t it been more widely adopted? At the d.MBA, we’ve been running a 4-day work week for the last four years. So, we thought we would comment on some common concerns about the setup and share our perspective. Tune in to learn the most common arguments against the 4-day work week, and learn from our story how you could propose an experiment in your team or company.

The prices of tech companies have fallen dramatically. Facebook, Netflix, Google, Apple, and Amazon are all down between 20 and 80% since their record highs. Yikes. Everyone is freaking out. But why? How does a market crash affect companies and us working for them? How does this affect designers? In this Business Design Jam, we talked about: the recent (mini?) market crash in the tech sector, why Netflix’s stock price is down almost 80%, and what Netflix can (and plans to) do about it.   To read more about the profit tree, which was mentioned in the episode, check out this guide.

Have you ever hired a freelancer and paid them per hour? And did you have the feeling that they are extending their scope of work so they could charge you more? Then, you have already experienced misaligned incentives, which are one of the biggest challenges and opportunities for companies. They can hurt relationships within companies and damage partnerships with outside collaborators. In our latest podcast episode, we explore how incentives affect the work of designers and why we are in a unique position to help companies better align incentives.

Business design is already pretty common among design agencies but not so much in product companies. So, we were excited to talk to Andrew Whelan, a Business Design Director at the D-Ford London Lab, where he leads a diverse and multi-skilled team tackling some of the biggest business model opportunities in the auto and mobility industry. We covered: what the role of business designers at D-Ford entails, Andrew’s favorite business design tools, and how to make the case for the business design discipline.   

Last week, we launched new school certificates. Using a combination of generative art and blockchain, we created several hundred unique certificates so that each student can receive a piece of art that is wall-worthy and trustworthy. To learn more about the project check out the blog post with visual materials. In this podcast episode, I spoke with Emil from design studio Ljudje, which helped us bring these beautiful certificates to life. We covered: How the certificates were designed and generated, how they are minted (you can see the current collection on OpenSea), and how many certificates were created and minted.   https://d.mba/blog/school-certificates-for-the-digital-age

In this Business Design Jam, we talked about NFTs (Non-fungible tokens) and what new business models they will enable. Franz Emprechtinger and Alen Faljic covered: digital art and recurring revenues, fractionalization, distributed ownership, and crowdfunding, community and network effects, and internet native cooperations - DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations).   www.d.mba

Aarron Walter is Director of Product on the COVID Response team at Resolve to Save Lives. Previously, he was VP of Content at InVision, and founded the UX practice at Mailchimp where he helped grow the product from a few thousand users to more than 10 million. He's the author of a number of books, the latest of which is a second edition of Designing for Emotion. In this episode, we talked about: the business case for emotional design, how healthy personal finance lead to better job performance, and Aarron learnings from his recently launched podcast Reconsidering.

The opportunity costs are a super important concept for our decision-making process. They describe potential benefits that we miss out on because we decided to do something else. For example, focusing the company’s resources on rebranding instead of product development. In this episode, we will cover: how opportunity costs affect decisions taken within companies, what are sunk costs and how to avoid sunk cost trap, and how we can present design solutions better to get more buy-in from senior stakeholders.

In the guestimation challenge, two contenders make fast estimations with very little data available. This game imitates a real-world scenario, where we need to estimate certain numbers for our projects. For example, when we want to understand the size of our competitors, how much revenue our product or service idea could make, etc. This time, contenders are two d.MBA mentors Jo Roberts (Senior Business Design Director at Prophet) and Sherif Labib (Business Designer and Senior Advisor at PwC Luxembourg). Listen in, see how business designers guesstimate, and train your guestimation muscle!

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/course

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 lays out how we got to the world where making money became the main and only goal for companies and how we can change that culture through the Bento method. In this podcast, we go deep into how designers can use the Bento method to raise the quality of their arguments in business conversations. www.d.mba

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 what is the difference between a currency and assets?

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 need to estimate numbers for our projects. For example, when we want to understand the size of our competitors, how much revenue our product or service idea could make, etc. The first two contenders are d.MBA mentors, Martina Skender (Innovation consultant) and Brian Wong (Business Designer at FJORD Accenture).

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 the arena’s value chain.   www.d.mba

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-Benz, Volkswagen, Tesla, Ford, etc. It’s also competing with airlines, railway companies, and soon even with Hyperloop providers. In this Mini MBA episode, Franz (program director at d.MBA) and Alen sit down to talk about the concept of Competitive Arenas and how designers can use it in their work.

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 business design community. In this podcast we talked about: how and why we should prototype with numbers, why the era of sustainable competitive advantage is over, and how designers can explain “inflection points” to business leaders.