DESIGN IS JUST PRETTY PICTURES = TOTAL BULLSH*T

"I have this new business idea and we've already coded this service pretty much to completion. It looks pretty ugly though, could you make it look prettier?" "Sure, but let's take a couple steps back and think about your business case first..." This is a true story that happened with a startup entrepreneur. They asked me to put lipstick on a pig in the last stage before launching the service. I asked one simple question about their business model and ended up demolishing their entire business case. OOPS! They went about the whole thing ass-backwards and crashed and burned.

"Our strategy is to achieve the best sales results of all time while also achieving the greatest cost savings." "Okay, so that's your strategy...Strategy involves making choices, and your business strategy should always aim for a competitive advantage. How do these two strategic focus areas contribute to achieving a competitive advantage? And have you considered what all the actions that fall under these objectives are on a company-wide level, and how they contribute to realizing these earnest desires?" *Deep silence*

Design - just pretty surface or something more?

A common misconception is that design is just surface-level aesthetics. It is that, of course, and having a visually appealing surface has its place. After all, who wants to buy or use an ugly-looking product or service? However, what most people forget and what is completely new to the majority is that the entire business can be conceptualized and designed.

In the digital age, business is completely abstract and often very complex, requiring collaboration between many different experts. One must understand business models, value creation, business cases, customer behavior and needs, technology, data, and more. Business is still seen solely as administration and risk management, while the creative side of business is often completely forgotten.

As someone who is not an administrator but a creative problem solver, I approach business by conceptualizing and validating various problems and opportunities. All actions aim to create value for both the customer and the business. Both are important; without creating value for the customer, they will not be willing to pay for the solutions the company provides, and thus the business will not benefit and make money. If business is not able to be profitable in the long run, it won’t see its future.

Design is not just about creating pretty surfaces; it is about designing the entire business, from the ground up, to provide value for both the customer and the business.

What can and should be conceptualized in business?

I have not yet come up with something that could not be conceptualized in business. Below is a picture that sheds light on all the different levels and areas that can and should be conceptualized in business. Creativity can also be utilized in business and it is a prerequisite nowadays in order not to get stuck in one's own ways and become insignificant from the customers' point of view.

What can and should be conceptualized in business?

Vision and Strategy

Strategy is purely problem-solving. First, you need to understand where you are currently and where you want to go, which is the direction of the future. Everything in between is problem-solving. What is preventing us from reaching that desired future state? What completely new opportunities arise for us along the way?

In my previous blog post, I wrote about the reasons why, according to research, the majority of strategies fail. I argue that these infamous tragedies could be turned into winning strategies simply by conceptualizing and modeling different future choices and perspectives before embarking on the infamous implementation work, where teams often march in different directions.

Each strategic focus area should be conceptualized in the big picture, what it actually means in practice. Now, most strategic focus areas are just fervent wishes that each team can compose to suit their own purposes. Nobody considers the big picture. How do you know when you have succeeded in your strategy? You don't know, because goals and metrics have not been created. How do you know which actions belong under each focus area? You don't know, as the actions are not transparent, and in many companies that hellish tool called PowerPoint is still used to track actions, instead of using dynamic, modern, and real-time tools to monitor strategy implementation.

Business Architecture

Since strategy already fails while creating it, this leads to value creation happening in a piecemeal way instead of holistically across the entire company level. By business architecture, I mean value creation at the business level, i.e., who our customers are, what their needs/problems are, how we address them with our offerings, how and where? What strategic choices do we make to create value in the best possible way as a company? I don't know if there is a better or established term for business architecture. I named it business architecture because it defines things in a systemic way and at the level of structures from both a business and a customer perspective.

In my experience, most large companies lack business architecture, even though there is a need for it. Corporations do have enterprise architects on the software side who are responsible for the overall technical architecture at the business level. However, there is no counterpart for them on the business side, and the business side is often completely fragmented. The end result is piecemeal value creation and internal power struggles and conflicts between different business units.

Business models/concepts and processes

When business architecture is value creation at the level of the entire company, business concepts are the conceptualization of individual business solutions. Examples include exploring, conceptualizing, and validating new business models and opportunities. At this stage, we are still considering whether it makes sense to make investments and whether the problem to be solved is even the right one.

In addition to creating new concepts, I also include the conceptualization of internal processes and operating models in business concepts. Internal processes and operating models can be completely rethought, with the main goal of streamlining internal operations, improving employee and customer experiences, and also achieving cost savings. Often, cultural changes such as making the business customer-centric and data-driven require people to be engaged, conceptualization of operating models, and validation of concepts.

Services

Service concepts, as the name suggests, involve conceptualizing individual services. The assumption is that there has already been some validation of the business case and a decision has been made that the service makes sense. Unfortunately, based on my own experience, the decision to create a service is often based more on intuition than validated research. Sometimes it can be a struggle to prove that the problem being solved is completely wrong and that the service should not be created in the first place.

Assuming, however, that the justification for the service is valid, service concepts involve studying customers' needs, conceptualizing different alternatives based on those needs, validating those needs, and then designing and implementing the service in detail (UX design and technical implementation). This is also where the famous discipline of service design comes in. Service design is fundamentally about empathy towards the customer and identifying their needs and problems. Based on this, different concepts are created to validate those needs before detailed design, i.e. UX design, begins (assuming we are talking about creation of digital services). Service designers have a diverse toolbox of research and engagement methods, canvases, and frameworks to help create the final product.

What are the different ways in which you can utilize the skills of a designer?

In short, designers can be used in a variety of ways, including creating something completely new, improving existing, solving problems, identifying opportunities, and using customer-centric approaches and creativity. This can involve strategy, value creation, offerings, business models, or entirely new business opportunities, processes, operating models, or services. Additionally, designers can be used for detailed level user interface design and visual design. The purpose of this blog post is not to evaluate different tasks, as all tasks are important and have their own place. Rather, it aims to highlight the underlying things and ideas that can be conceptualized and designed.

If you are a business leader reading this blog post, take a moment to consider whether your organization has designers whom you could utilize for decision-making and problem-solving. Designers are creative problem-solvers, often good facilitators and bridge builders across organizational boundaries between different stakeholders. At the heart of their work is customer-centricity and challenging the status quo constructively.

I know that many senior-level designers are extremely frustrated right now because they feel that they are only allowed to create services. They have a lot to offer and can bring new thinking to the table, and specifically contribute to the creation of creative solutions at the strategic level of the business. Not everyone can do everything, that's for sure, and it applies to all other professions as well. But there is also a lot of untapped potential that is now going unused. So give designers growth opportunities and you'll likely be surprised by the results. Personally, in my career, I have been fortunate to have supervisors and leaders who have enabled my growth and current level of expertise, and I thank them for that.