The 10 Principles of Good Business Design

In this piece, you’ll learn:

What Business Design is
The various responsibilities of a Business Designer
How it differs from “traditional” product management
My 10 guiding principles for being a great Business Designer

What is Business Design?

Working as a Business Designer (aka Venture Builder), I see my mission being to demonstrate how combining the tools of business with the ethos and principles of design (and design thinking) can create better businesses, better products, and better outcomes.

What does that mean in practice? It means using learnable, repeatable, disciplined processes for enhancing the way we look at solving problems. It means learning collaborative, visualized ways of communicating and making decisions. And it means going on a journey of exploration.

Now let’s take a look at how others describe the art of “Business Design”. I think this makes for a useful kick-off, to set the context before we start getting into exploring various tools, methods, and mindsets in later posts.

IDEO

Business designers take juicy, creative, human-centred innovation and make it succeed out there in the real world. We use strategy, analysis, and financial modelling as generative design tools, and help organisations turn their biggest, wildest ideas into businesses with long-term viability.

frog describes a Corporate Venture Builder as:

leveraging the power of agile methodology, design thinking and deeply informed market strategy to create ventures that complement — not compete — with their core business. By decoupling innovation from legacy products and processes, we help large organizations more rapidly identify, validate and scale category-defining new products and businesses.

And I love this from Parabolic:

The Idea: a venture is, in essence, an experiment. Venture design is all about prototyping and iterating on business and product ideas at a rapid pace to reduce risk, increase chances of success and make a greater impact.

What Does a Business Designer Actually Do?

Lorenz Korder Fort, Executive Design Director at IDEO, has shared that the key activities of a business designer are:

Understanding the business and the competition
Providing industry perspectives
Designing experiments for prototyping
Measuring the results of those experiments
Identifying risks and mitigating strategies
Identifying differentiation strategies
Developing business models/cases with financial models to support investment

There’s also a great summary of the typical work of a Business Designer, from Alvaro Rojo, Product & Venture Leader at HSBC:

Disruptive trends & competitive forces
Discovery-driven planning
Customer experience strategy
Value proposition design
Market size & growth
Ecosystem mapping
Roadmapping
Go-to-market strategy
KPIs modelling & tracking
MVP & in-market prototyping
Product/market fit optimisation
Business model design & monetisation opportunities

👉 It’s worth calling out the “disruptive trends” aspect here, as this is often forgotten, but can actually be a fantastic way to kick-start a business design project. I’ll go into this in more detail in an upcoming post.

I think combining these two lists together actually makes for a well-defined overview of the main responsibilities, and is certainly in line with my own experience.

How Is Business Design Different From Product Management or User Research?

It’s fair to say that a lot of these tasks may typically fall to a senior PM or Product Lead, often in conjunction with design/UX/research resources. But for me, the key to (great) Business Design is how these tasks are approached, applying some key guiding principles (mindsets, even) as you go through each of these tasks.

Some of these are based on Michael Lewrick’s fantastic guide, “Design Thinking For Business Growth”; others are based on my own experience.

🧭 The 10 Guiding Principles of Business Design:

Apply a design mindset — that expedites working in iterations and with experiments, and puts the customer experience on the front stage; your point of view is always influenced and informed through an iterative and cyclical process of understanding, ideation, prototyping, and validation.
Use variable mental states — that allow you to combine design thinking, systems thinking, and critical thinking to arrive at scalable offerings, from a problem statement through an MVP.
Address hitherto unknown market opportunities — that are explored based on customer needs and developed with other actors through co-creation.
Ambition to realize a “black ocean” strategy — that gives actors in an ecosystem the best framework for realizing the value proposition, and makes it difficult for rival offerings to stay in competition.
Think and work visually — this helps you to see the bigger picture, gain clarity on complex topics, create a visual anchor for your strategic conversations, and engage with stakeholders.
Research — Understand the problem and the situation holistically. Take advantage of market research and trend research. Try to understand all the drivers of change, both current and future. Validate and supplement your findings.
Tell good stories — share the vision; cool stories will spread.
Don’t fly solo — gather different insights by working together, and collaborating with the brains in the room and in your market will uncover hidden opportunities.
Sense-check consensus — challenge ideas and decisions at the first time of consensus; put yourself in competitors’ shoes and imagine Black Swan events that could derail your assumptions.
Simple, not complex. Don’t add stuff that doesn’t solve real, important problems.

What’s coming up?

This post sets the scene for the fundamentals of Business Design. From here on out, I’ll be introducing a series of practical approaches and tools for designing new business models, strategies, propositions, and ecosystems, in ways that follow these 10 Principles.

Thanks, everyone, see you next time 👋

Also published here.