Beyond Users

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 (we talked about Patagonia as an example here), we discussed a question that very few designers and entrepreneurs ask themselves: “how big should my company be” (hint: growing is not always the best answer), and we discussed what separates a successful corporate innovation from the ones that are likely to fail. If you want to add to our discussion, reach out to us on Linkedin (Alen, David) or Twitter (Alen, David).

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 design process look like at Celtra?    

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 laid out in his seminal pieces called State of the Digital Nation 2020 (and 2018). In the episode, we discussed: if the design agency model is doomed, how creatives will get paid in the future, and how the lack of economic literacy blocks creatives from achieving their full potential.

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 data in their design process (and where they get it from), and differences between USA and Europe in design maturity.

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 brand redesign is a good idea and when it is not, and why do business even invest in logos?

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 kings capture more than 70% of economic benefits in an industry, and how did companies such as Salesforce, Tesla, and Qualtrics become category kings?

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 Metrics Business Metrics

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 nearly bankrupted the agency and how he solved it.

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 introduction, we went into details of these case studies and looked for key learnings that we can take away for our projects.   00:50 Company Builders (e.g. FinLeap) - Companies that create startups. We focused on company builders that help big corporates create startups. 6:30 VanMoof+ - The Dutch bike manufacturer that changed its business model and started selling subscriptions for their bikes (instead of selling them). VanMoof was discussed in the 12th episode of Beyond Users podcast. 14:15 - WeChat - A successful example of a platform business model. Even though WeChat is a messaging app, users can use it to pay its u

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 the N26, how to get a seat at the table by proactively shaping what the design team works on rather than passively waits for project briefs, and what are design consultants naive about when they work with clients.   Show notes: 1:40 How did Christian get into design? 6:05 What are consultants naive about when working with clients? 14:15 What are the responsibilities of a head of design? 16:45 Why is investing in design research important? 24:55 The importance of proactiveness 27:40 How is design team structured at N26? 30:50 The importance and advantage of tangibility 34:25 What KPIs does the de

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 on design. We spoke about: her organizational design experiments, changing the culture of CareerFoundry, why and how every employee (even non-designers) have UX as KPI in their performance review, and what you can say to your boss to convince her to invest more in design.   Show notes: 2:20 How CareerFoundry started. 6:30 What is special about CareerFoundry’s curriculum? 10:25 How to convince your boss to invest in design? 15:40 How a UX designer helped CareerFoundry to go from 10 to 100 customers per month 21:50 New skills and disciplines that will be relevant for designers who want to advance th

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 can create prototypes that will give answers decrease uncertainty in your business or product team.   Show notes: 2:20 How did Amy get into design? 5:30 How do you get a job as a business designer (at IDEO)? 13:20 What skills do business designers need? 21:40 What is venture design? 28:00 How is venture design different from Lean Startup approach? 31:15 Behavioral vs attitudinal prototypes 35:10 How do you know you are making progress? 43:40 A good example of venture design 45:45 One thing about design Amy has changed her mind about

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 is Taig focusing on providing meaning instead of solutions, how to test your product idea with a press release, and why did Taig decide to attend a business school. Show notes: 2:35 How did Taig start his first business  5:10 How Taig developed a distaste for business and how he turned that around 6:35 Why is Taig focusing on providing meaning instead of solutions 13:35 Entrepreneur as a cultural provocateur 15:15 Where does the idea for blue wine come from? 16:35 The pricing exercise from the book Blue Ocean Strategy 20:40 The pricing strategy of GIK  23:20 How did Taig validate the idea before spending two years

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 the backstory of this statement and how did his path to becoming more business-savvy look like. In this episode we spoke about: the simple exercise UX designers can use to start building their business muscle, how sharing knowledge is the best way to learn and advance the career,  and how can we recognize future trends in the UX community?  Show notes: 2:20 How did Fabricio get into design?  6:20 How Fabricio teaches UX design through simplification 10:30 How and why Fabricio started UX Collective 12:50 How sharing knowledge is the best way to learn  17:05 How to recognize big trends and important patterns in the UX comm

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 the episode we talked: how VanMoof prepared its business for a launch of a subscription service, how the company introduced an innovative Bike Hunter service that helps their customers when their bikes are stolen, and what are the advantages and disadvantages of a closed design system (VanMoof design all bike parts in-house)

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 to design cancellation process too.  In this a great example of a project that needs a careful balance of user focus and business knowledge because one needs to balance users' wish to unsubscribe and business' goal to retain users. How do you reconcile the two? Well, that's what we covered with frank.    Show notes: 1:50 How did François get into design? 6:50 How did François survive the financial crisis as a designer freelancer?  8:30 Why did François leave agency work and join Headspace?  12:40 Headspace reached 1 million subscribers 14:10 The premise of François' article on cancelation process 20:10 How did Fran

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 relevant. Answer: learn business, of course.  In this episode we spoke about: three business skills that designers have to learn to design better (and get ahead in career) why Jonathan loves panic learning,  how AJ&Smart launched online course on design sprint and generated €60k in pre-orders.    Show notes: 2:15 How did Jonathan get into design?  7:20 Jonathan's panic learning 9:55 How AJ&Smart started?  14:00 The golden age of UX is over 18:50 Three business skills important for designers to master (product strategy, growth, marketing) 27:00 How can fluency in "growth" help designers on projects? 32:50 How do designe

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 look for more clients but better clients, what to say to your clients when you try to raise your rates,  and how to sell brand work at the premium rates (5 or 6 figures). 

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 find a design metric for your project, and how you connect a design metric to business value.