Beyond Users

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 the 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.

UX Designer and CEO of Clearleft, Andy Budd curates the Leading Design and UX London conferences and helped set-up The Brighton Digital Festival. Andy is a regular speaker at international conferences like SXSW, An Event Apart and The Next Web. In this episode, we spoke about: - the biggest learnings from the last Leading Design conference, - why and how designers should say no to their managers, - and the current state of design education.

Maija Itkonen is an industrial designer, successful entrepreneur, innovator, and brand lover. In 2015 she co-founded Gold&Green Foods, the company behind the phenomenal success story of the “perfect protein food” platform and its first product Pulled Oats. Pulled Oats is a new kind of meat alternative based on the Nordic superfood oats, built around the team’s unique scientific knowledge and design thinking under Maija’s leadership.

Eric Quint is Vice President, Chief Brand and Design Officer at 3M, a Fortune 500 company with over $30B in revenue and over 90.000 employees. An industrial designer by training, Eric joined 3M in 2013 to “design the design function” in the company. He grew the design team substantially, built revolutionary 3M Design Center (an incubator for Collaborative Creativity), and helped build the brand platform that catapulted 3M’s brand value among the world’s top 100 brands.

In the fifth Business Design Jam, Alen and Franz (also a mentor in the d.MBA), discuss business design stories such as: - why IKEA offers 0.99$ hot dogs after you bought furniture for hundreds of dollars, - how Soul-Cycle created a competitive advantage by designing for their employees instead of customers; - and why designers should co-create with lead users, not just test after designs are made.

In many companies, designers do not prepare the product roadmap. We are handed a feature list and expected to just do it. But we’ve all been in situations where we felt that what we are working on just isn’t right. But how do you push back? A great framework that helps us with that is Jobs to be Done. To help us better understand this framework, we spoke with Jim Kalbach, who recently wrote a book The Jobs To Be Done Playbook, which is coming out in early April. https://bit.ly/2tK9zMc

Design Sprints have become an extremely popular format in businesses. However, many sprint projects never get executed because they are not aligned with the business context. Our guest is Tim Höfer, a product design director and head of the design sprint team at the AJ&Smart, which has run sprints for companies like Google, Slack, Lyft, and Lufthansa.

In this episode, we share a lesson from the d.MBA course. In this lesson, which is a part of the Business Models module, we introduce ten famous business model patterns. We go through their advantages, disadvantages, and explain when to use them. If you want to see this lesson's slides click here --> http://beyondusers.com/podcast/business-models

David J Bland is the founder of Precoil to help companies find product-market fit using lean startup, design thinking, and business model innovation. David has helped validate new products and businesses at companies such as GE, Toyota, Adobe, HP, Behr and more. David is the co-author of Testing Business Ideas, a Wiley business book with Alexander Osterwalder.

Designers are used to using prototypes to test usability and desirability. You put a wireframe in front of a user and you can quickly learn if they like (or know how to use) something. What if we could do the same for viability? Well, we can. With math. In this episode, you’ll learn how to use simple math to: - estimate the business impact of your product changes - calculate in money what value can your project have - and how you can use that to talk to managers in your company.

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 project, - and how to create strategic prototypes. www.d.mba

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!

Jason is an author of The Visual MBA, a great book explaining all key business school concepts and frameworks through illustrations. It’s a perfect book for all designers who want to grasp basic business concepts in a language that we are well versed in - images. In this podcast we talked about: - Jason’s favorite business school concepts, - if he would recommend other designers to take an MBA, - and how he decided to publish the book.

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 where design has the most value.