business design: my d.MBA experience
In November 2023) I graduated from a very intensive course on Business Design, the dMBA.
Am I a business designer? No.
Do I see myself as a business designer in the future? Probably not specifically.
So why did I decide to invest 6 weeks, a very decent number of hours and a lot of commitment into learning more about business design?
There are a number of reasons, and one of them is very simply that I love design and learning more about every aspect of design, it is not a coincidence that I am a multidisciplinary designer, and love being one.
However, the most important reason was that the business side to design was a skill I was lacking and which I had been wanting to learn more about for a while.
I am the stereotype of a designer who loves design, and who has a hard time understanding how anyone can not love design as much as I do. However, I have also been doing this for a while, so I am aware that most stakeholders have other priorities.
I believe that us getting out of our design-thinking silos, understanding other languages and being able to at least partially speaking them, is key to building positive collaborations, rather than our colleagues just finding us annoying. We are all pulling in the same direction, each with our skills, to build something awesome. There is no such thing as one type of thinking, the magic happens as a result of diverse minds communicating efficiently and respectfully.
I work in a uniquely collaborative environment: I am part of the UX Centre of Excellence in HCLSoftware, a large organisation which builds a number of highly successful enterprise software products. I work on a variety of things, and am lucky to collaborate with a number of totally brilliant colleagues, within and out of my team.
I work very closely with one colleague in particular and his (impressive) skills are quite different from mine. One of the many is that he masters internal politics and conversations with stakeholders in a way I can only hope to get close to, so while admiring this and learning from him, working with him highlighted my own lack of knowledge. The magic of team work!
I love how Daniel Burka, in an interview in one of our lessons, speaks about how the value of a designer is connected to business results and that organisations are driven by business objectives. No wonder that if we walk into meetings and lecture product managers on design thinking methods, it will be hard to get taken seriously (and they will find us annoying). I am not saying we should lose those, but we absolutely have to be able to communicate our ideas in a way that will make them see the value of them. And it goes both ways, they may be more “forgiving” of our design-rants if they see that we are actively working on truly understanding what is important to them.
"
This is ethical, but it is also good for business.
Daniel Burka
This is such a simple, yet powerful message and it effectively changed the way I am working on something these days.
One of the things I work a lot on is digital accessibility. I have built a complete training course, and co-host the training sessions we do with designers, developers and testers of various product teams within my organisation. We strongly believe this is a team effort, so during the kickoff sessions we invite the whole product team to participate, including product managers, release managers and other members of the team.
As a result, this specific session has become more effective since I added more information about the business value of accessibility, and what we say is more relatable also to those people who will not be working directly on designing and developing the product, but who will be working with the result, in sales, marketing or legal.
I used to concentrate mostly on the ethics of accessibility, but now I am also including information about the higher number of people we can reach, their spending power, how a product being accessible can be deal breaker or a deal maker in a sales pitch and, in general, the ROI of accessibility.
"
Designers have rose-coloured glasses, we are in this to do good. But fundamentally businesses are about making money.
Daniel Burka
This was another quote that really appealed to me: I am certainly a rose-coloured glass wearer, my friends would say that I am in many aspects of my life. But I am also not naive and inexperienced: businesses must make money, that is what they are here for.
I believe that if we, as designers, have knowledge of business principles, we can help build this bridge and make sure we do both.
Finally, I am not a natural public speaker, so when I do speak in public, whether during an internal event, while conducting trainings or speaking at public events, the only way I can do it is to know my stuff extremely well. I believe that the broader knowledge I have, the easier (or less difficult) it is for me to overcome this fear and be able to communicate in a way that will be more engaging to a broader group of people.
It has been a journey! But I do love to travel.
