Good Morning! ☀️

This week we have all things business literacy and the importance for designers to embrace business to enhance their careers.

Read time: 6 minutes ☕️

In this mail:

1. Business + Design: Q&A with Alen Faljic

2. The state of IA in 2023: Sparked from a LinkedIn post

3. My #1 design team in Europe: Wise

Unlocking Career Potential: The Importance of Business Knowledge For Designers

In my discussions with non-design leaders, the main topic is often how they want to work with designers, but feel designers struggle to quantify their value as they don’t understand how their work links in with business, and ultimately bottom line.

I couldn’t think of anyone better than Alen Faljic to discuss this important topic. He’s the founder and CEO of d.MBA, an online business program for design leaders. He is an ex-IDEO business designer, one of the most prominent business designers internationally, and a guest lecturer at RCA Royal College of Art in London.

1 - Hello Alen! 👋 Please could you share more about your journey in design so far?

I had a rather non-traditional path into the design world. I studied business in a business school because I wanted to create cool products and ventures. My thought process was that a business school is the best place for that.

While I was there, I realized a business school teaches you how to create a good business model but not how to create great products and services. So, I had the feeling I needed to learn design too.

I got an internship at IDEO as a business designer. And that’s where I started to learn design. And while I was at IDEO, my colleagues, who were mostly designers, started to approach me with business questions. “Hey, Alen, who are the biggest competitors of this company? What is their business model?

I slowly started to realize how big of a problem the lack of business literacy is within the design community. I saw how it held us back on client projects. We would create these awesome user scenarios and opportunity areas but we wouldn’t explain the size of the opportunity or the business model behind it.

So, I just felt like something needed to be done about this. And that’s how the d.MBA was born.

2 - Designers want a seat at the table, but why should non-designers listen?

Design-driven companies like Apple, Tesla, Airbnb, and Google have shown that design can help drive business results. Research even shows that design-driven companies outperform S&P by more than 200%. From what I can see, most good companies have already realized that design matters and that it leads to concrete business results.

I think the real question is why would a designer need a seat at the table. Isn’t it enough if they do their design behind their desk?

Well, design is not just making things look shiny. It’s an approach to solving problems. As someone who has finished business school, I can tell you that this approach is completely different from the approach of non-designers.

For example, designers are much more comfortable with ideas that seem unrealistic at first. Those ideas that non-designers would immediately label as “would never work”. Designers see that these ideas aren’t perfect either but they are comfortable with ambiguity because they understand that to create something new, novel, and differentiated, we need to start at the edges. And thinking through the “crazy” ideas is one way to do it.

And then there is also the designer’s superpower: prototyping. This is a really special skill that can take boardroom discussion to the next level. Imagine having someone in the room that can quickly sketch the idea so you can chat more concretely. “What if we entered X market next” can go from a hypothetical exercise to a concrete exercise with a quick mockup of our storefront in another country.

I’ve seen examples where that one mock-up was enough for business managers to talk completely differently about the idea. Why? Because it brings out minor but important details. For example, should we open a mono-brand store? Be present in stores of others? Does our branding need to change for it to work in X country?

3 - If business and designers are such a match made in heaven, why do we keep hearing how designers struggle in companies?

Great question! Yes, I do believe business and design are indeed a match made in heaven. I actually like to say that “Business - Design = Utility”, “Design - Business = Art”, and “Design + Business = Magic”.

Unfortunately, there is a whole generation of designers who was let down by its education. The problem is that most design schools have very little or no business education. So, designers join companies with great knowledge of how to design services and products, but they don’t have the framework and language to see or explain how their work fits into a bigger picture.

When you work as a designer in a company, you are expected to drive business results. But the interpretation of designers is that if I do good design, this will naturally lead to good business. That’s the unspoken expectation that designers acquire in design schools. But we know this is not true. Beautiful design is not necessarily good design for users. Nor business.

I think it mostly boils down to the lack of business literacy.

4 - So, what’s the solution?

I think both sides have some work to do. Let’s start with designers first.

As I already pointed out, the design community needs to realize it has a problem that it needs to fix. The lack of business literacy is really hurting us. We are in the “design revolution” era, where companies invest heavily in design and naturally, designers will get more and more responsibility. But if we don’t do a good job of explaining what we do and tying it into a broader business context of our organization, we’ll end up as pixel-pushers instead of boundary-pushers.

And the path there is much easier than most think. We don’t need to become great in maths or spreadsheets. We just need to practice the very thing that makes us designers – empathy. We need to practice it towards the business side as well.

Just get curious about things like: how my company makes money, what is the best-selling product and why, what is our business strategy, who are we competing against, and how we measure success. These simple questions can be answered easily if you start picking the brains of your business colleagues.

On the other hand, the business community needs to give us time and space to develop. Design is a relatively new discipline. We need to learn how to be CDOs. How to lead teams. How design needs to operate in different company sizes. How it needs to operate in different industries. The Business community had hundreds of years to come up with best practices, language, and culture. It’s going to take some time for designers to get there. It requires some experimentation (luckily, we are good at that) and grit (we got that too) to get there.

To follow Alen’s work I’d advise checking out his epic newsletter, where they take business news and explain their relevancy for the design community. And the second is the d.MBA program. If you are interested, you can sign up for the waiting list here.

What Makes A Good Design Team?

I was thinking this week, about what makes a great design team and who are my favourites outside of the obvious ones such as Airbnb, Apple etc.

One team I love is Wise, based in London.

Why?

• They have a strong design leader.

• They have sponsorship at the right level and retain that sponsorship.

• So, they have an influence on the business and product strategy.

• They hire slowly, with intention, meaning high retention.

• Established design disciplines, with strong leadership in each.

• They focus on candidate attraction by showing the work.

• They get prospective candidates excited.

• Unlike most, they have great visual talent.

• They just shipped an epic re-brand.

The biggest reason they stand out for me is they have sponsorship at the top level of the company, and retain that, which is evident by having budgets to hire world-class talent, partner with best-in-class agencies and produce epic work.

Who’s your favourite design team?

Special mentions for:

• Typeform

• Volvo

• Klarna

They are producing high-quality design craft.

Also, special mention for those leaders who are leading design in companies who are going through modernisation and fighting the good fight.

The State of IA in 2023

When I joined the design recruiting world in 2015, the most common brief was “Information Architect”. Moving forward to 2023, I rarely see IA even mentioned on JDs now.

What has happened to IA? It seems like Content Design, SEO and some UX people are picking this up, but focused IA practitioners are sparse.

This topic caused a great conversation on LinkedIn yesterday, with the majority also seeing a lack of IA roles and buy-in to do proper IA in organisations.

It’s definitely a topic I want to explore in more depth.

What do you think? Is IA in the wilderness?

That’s all for now.

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Until next week! 👋 

Tom