Learnings from teaching business to designers and vice versa

Transcript

1. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 SPEAKER: Hi, last week I read this article titled best designers are business strategists. The author said that great designers not only deliver on design but also push towards business outcomes and I agree with him. He is not the only one saying this. There are countless other articles written about it and we have been talking about this recently quite a lot in fact, quick show of hands, how many of you as designers want to be included in business decisions? Almost all of you. Now, how many of you feel confident about having business conversations? (Inaudible) I asked the same question to about 30 designers last week in a survey that I did. Almost all said that they want to be involved but a shocking 70% of them said that they find it challenging to be a part of business conversations. So my question to all of you and to all these designers is: What's stopping you? My name is Mayuresh and over the next few minutes I'm going to try and answer this question. My journey trying to answer this question started when I moved to Sydney about a year ago and I joined the experienced design team at BCG Digital Ventures what an amazing team of designers but I had a dark secret, I was a management consultant for two years, from the dark side. Having seen both sides, it became very obvious to me that design and business pretty much go hand an in hand but there was clearly something stopping designers to actively take part in business decisions. So I started what we called design MBA. It was simply a set of introductory lectures conducted by me tailored for for designers but I introduced basic concepts of profitability, market entry, some modelling as well. What I learned from this was that there are three main things or three values that were pushing designers away from business and I'mer going to share those with you. The first one was "I don't understand the jargon." This was the most common thing that designers said to me before we started the session. However, as soon as we went through these definitions, it was very nice to see that these designers uncovered the mechanics behind this by themselves. It was more intuitive than one might have thought and became very aeroious that these terms and this terminology and semantics is just a language and you can learn the language as you go. The underlying business is much, much more intuitive and don't get me wrong, the land wj is very important to be a part of these conversations but it shouldn't stop you from being an active part of business decisions. The second thing that I heard was "I don't know the magic framework." So many designers were shying away from these conversations because they thoughtathise some magical complex framework that would solve all their business problems. That's just not the case. Whenever someone asked me, "What framework have you used to solve your business problems?" My answer was, "Honestly, I haven't. I broke the problem down into smaller chunks, solved each of those and then the larger problem got solved." Then it became clear you don't
2. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 2 of 2 always need a framework to solve a problem. What you need, though, is to structure the problem logically. Looking for a framework all the time is exactly like doing all the research, uncovering all the friction but then using a general example to design your solution. Frameworks might help you because they might inclues your speed or make you more exhaustive but it is not something that is very, very critical. What a critical, however s the logical structuring and as designers you're already trained and very capable of structuring problems logically. And the third thing and the last thing I heard was business is all about money, just money, money, money. (Laughter) and that's just not true. Some of us may not be interested in the financial or commercial aspects of things. We might not be good at it and that's completely fine because business is not all about money, it's all about impact and, sure, financial impact is one of the critical parts of a business decision outcome but there are other types of impacts that are more important wholistically so market impact, user impact, organisational impact, effects on society and environment. All of these are quite critical. As designers, you already have the mindset and the tools to think wholistically about these impacts and to contribute quite creatively and that makes you a very, very critical ingredient of business decision-making processes. In summary, there were three things that I heard which were making business obscure for designers. The first one: Business jargon; the second one, these magical frameworks that were never found; and that business is all about money. However, as we saw, the jargon is just the language and the underlying business is much more intuitive so you can learn the language on the go. You don't need these frameworks all the time, you just need to be able to structure logically and it is something you can already do as design ers and it's not about money, it's about impact and you have the right mindset to create this impact. These were my three learnings and I hope they make you better designers and business strategists. So much and I hope this has helped. (Applause)