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The Business Design Jam is back. In the third session, David Schmidt, a business design partner at United Peers, and I discuss four business design topics: how misaligned incentives fundamentally hurt user experience across different industries and what we can learn from Lemonade (the insurance startup from USA), why creating sustainable brands could be the next big wave in business innovation (we talked about Patagonia as an example here), we discussed a question that very few designers and entrepreneurs ask themselves: “how big should my company be” (hint: growing is not always the best answer), and we discussed what separates a successful corporate innovation from the ones that are likely to fail. If you want to add to our discussion, reach out to us on Linkedin (Alen, David) or Twitter (Alen, David).

Matic Pelcl is a director of product at Celtra, a creative management platform for digital advertising. Matic has gone through the experience of starting as a junior designer to having the proverbial seat at the table today. In this episode, we spoke about: why scalable design is important and when companies should start implementing it, what does having a seat at the table mean, and how does a design process look like at Celtra?    

Watch the video version of the talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxck_k6TIOI Recently, I gave a talk titled "Good design is good business" at the UX/UI Meetup Berlin. I presented the synthesis of my research on the heritage and purpose of design. The basic question I was trying to answer is "what is the purpose of design" and "how designers can achieve it". In this talk, I share my answer. 

Jules Ehrhardt is the founder of FKTRY, a creative capital studio aimed at revolutionising how creatives get paid. Jules was previously an owner of USTWO, the pioneer studio that kicked off the digital product studio trend. Jules left USTWO couple of years ago to focus on building one of the first creative capital studios and to create an example of a new business model for creatives, which he laid out in his seminal pieces called State of the Digital Nation 2020 (and 2018). In the episode, we discussed: if the design agency model is doomed, how creatives will get paid in the future, and how the lack of economic literacy blocks creatives from achieving their full potential.

Tulio Jarocki, a product designer at Blinkist, talks about the checklist design process at Blinkist, the use of data in their design process, and the differences in design maturity between the USA and Europe.

Mackey Saturday is a world-renown graphic designer who created visual identities for some of the most famous brands of our time: Instagram, Oculus, Luxe and recently also Unsplash. He is currently running a brand agency based in New York City. In this podcast we talked about: his early beginnings and how he learned to sell his services, how we can avoid taste based discussions with clients, when a brand redesign is a good idea and when it is not, and why do business even invest in logos?

Dave is a co-founder and Partner at Play Bigger Advisors, a consulting firm that coined the term category design and is advising companies on how to create and own new categories of products. They recently also published a book also called Play Bigger where they explain the category design process in detail. In this episode we spoke about: what is a category and category design, why do category kings capture more than 70% of economic benefits in an industry, and how did companies such as Salesforce, Tesla, and Qualtrics become category kings?

A few weeks back, I published the guide for designers who want to learn more about business. As the title already suggests, it covers seven most important business skills for designers. I decided to turn this guide into a podcast for those of you who prefer audio books. In it, we cover: Industry Analysis Competitor Analysis Business Strategies Business Models: Prototyping with Numbers Design Metrics Business Metrics

The second episode of Business Design Jam was all over the place. But in a good way ;). With Jonathan, founder of AJ&Smart and co-host of an awesome podcast Product Breakfast Club, we spoke about business models and concepts relevant for designers. We talked about Tesla, PewDiePie, Microsoft' Xbox and a lot about AJ&Smart’s products and journey. Among other things, Jonathan told us how he nearly bankrupted the agency and how he solved it.

Business Design Jam (BDJ) is a new format of Beyond Users podcast. It’s a discussion with a fellow business designer about inspiring business design examples and the learnings we can take from them. In the first BDJ, I am joined by David Schmidt, a fellow business designer in Berlin, working as a business design partner at United Peers. Each of us prepared three examples. After a short introduction, we went into details of these case studies and looked for key learnings that we can take away for our projects.   00:50 Company Builders (e.g. FinLeap) - Companies that create startups. We focused on company builders that help big corporates create startups. 6:30 VanMoof+ - The Dutch bike manufacturer that changed its business model and started selling subscriptions for their bikes (instead of selling them). VanMoof was discussed in the 12th episode of Beyond Users podcast. 14:15 - WeChat - A successful example of a platform business model. Even though WeChat is a messaging app, users can use it to pay its utility bills, order a pizza, send gifts to friends etc. The platform is open for 3rd party developers who create apps for WeChat and enable new functions. 22:20 Light Phone - A phone that is designed to do as little as possible. A good example of a blue ocean strategy, which combines low-cost and differentiation. 29:35 - Sandeman Tour Company - Company offering free walking tours in major European cities. Sandeman works with self-employed tours who are paid with tips. It is an interesting example of a franchise model. 36:50 - Warby Parker & Ace and Tate - Understanding industry forces (eyewear industry is dominated by Luxottica) can help us reimagine the product and traditional business model. Warby Parker revolutionized the industry by vertically integrating and offering glasses for $100 (usually $300+).