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. With Maija, we talked about: her rocky path from a design school to starting companies, how and why Gold&Green became a nation-wide sensation in Finland, and what it means to start and run a purpose-driven startup.   www.d.mba

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 this episode, we talked about: why designers should stop measuring the value of design (and how we can show our worth), what it takes to become a Chief Designer Officer (and what does one do as a CDO), and why designers need studios as much as scientists need laboratories.

Business design expert Alen and Franz discuss interesting topics such as why IKEA offers $0.99 hot dogs after buying furniture, how SoulCycle focuses on designing for employees, and the importance of co-design with lead users. They also explore improving the customer journey at IKEA, creating engaging loyalty programs, the impact of subscriptions on product quality and service, and designing scalable online courses. Applications for the next D MBA program are now open.

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? How do you correctly recognize what to create? Does a hobby runner want a better running shoe? Or do they just want to be faster? Or to lose some weight? If we understand what people really want, we can work on the right solution. A great framework that helps us with that is Jobs to be Done. It promises to identify the customer jobs (i.e. customer goals), prioritize our product roadmap, and help us better communicate with business colleagues. To help us better understand this framework, we spoke with Jim Kalbach, a noted author, speaker, and instructor in design, customer experience, and strategy. He is currently Head of Customer Experience at MURAL, the leading online whiteboard. He recently wrote a book The Jobs To Be Done Playbook, which is coming out in early April. We spoke about: Jim’s first encounter with the framework, how he uses it in his design work, and how it can help us drive product prioritization and business strategy talks.

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. Tim Höfer is 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 spoke about integrating business thinking with design sprints. We explored: how competitive research can completely reshape sprint’s goal, why many design sprint projects never get executed, and a new sprint format: Strategy Sprint.

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. We compare e-commerce with brick and mortar models, talk about white label solutions, open-source models, freemium, subscription, razor and blade mode and many more. 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. In this podcast, we talked about David’s new book Testing Business Ideas. We covered: three types of risks facing your business and product ideas how to design experiments for these risks, and how you can use experiment sequences to design better products. www.beyondusers.com/podcast/

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