Alen Faljic
Creating Business Confident Designers
In this episode of Brave UX, Alen Faljic shares the gap he observed between design and business while at IDEO 🧐, what he’s doing to address it 🙋♂️, and how quantitative data can lead to greater empathy 💯
Highlights include:
- What does a business confident designer look like?
- Where does the disconnect between design and business come from?
- What do designers who have the most business impact do differently?
- What is the difference between being strategic and understanding strategy?
- How do designers and business people view the value of design differently?
Who is Alen Faljic?
Alen is the Founder and CEO of d.MBA, a company he started in 2017 to help designers become business confident 💪, which is part of d.MBA’s mission - to show that companies can be run more thoughtfully and also be financially successful.
d.MBA seems to be making progress in that mission, with a 97% completion rate and a 9+ out of 10 student rating 🏆. That’s been achieved from over 600 designers, hailing from more than 60 countries, and who work at companies like Apple, Frog, Google, Logitech and Amazon.
Before founding d.MBA, Alen was a Business Designer at IDEO in Munich, Germany, where he practiced human-centred design, while working on digital experiences, services, physical products, and new ventures for Fortune 500 companies 📈.
Alen is a generous contributor to the field, sharing his insights freely through d.MBA’s podcast and other online resources 🎙️. He has also been a guest on the Disco, Design MBA, and Bonanza podcasts, as well contributing his thoughts to UX Collective on Medium.
Transcript
- Alen Faljic:
- The funny thing is that designers actually have a feeling that there is enough of business people out there. So the way we will try to bAlence this out, these two perspectives is like there's enough of people who only think about how to make money. I'm just going to care about how I can create value. Then the bAlence is created by me just focusing on value creation and I'm going to ship over my work. I'm just going to throw my stuff on the business people's desk and they will take care of the business stuff. But that's not how it works because the viability perspective to the perspective of how this works from the business. So how design works from the business side can't be solved after you have designed your solution, it needs to be baked into the very solution.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, managing founder of The Space InBetween, the behavior-based UX research partner for enterprise leaders who need an independent perspective to align hearts and minds and also the home of New Zealand's first and only world-class human-centered research and innovation lab. If that sounds interesting, you can find out more about what we do at thespaceinbetween.co.nz.
- Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to keep on top of the latest thinking and important issues affecting the fields of UX research, product management, and design. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of a diverse range of world-class leaders in those fields.
- My guest today is Alen Faljic. Alen is the founder and CEO of d.MBA, a company he started in 2017 to help designers become business confident, which is part of d.MBA's mission, to show that companies can be run more thoughtfully and also be financially successful.
- d.MBA seems to be making progress in that mission with a 97% completion rate and a nine plus out of 10 student rating that's been achieved from over 600 designers, hailing from more than 60 countries and who work at companies like Apple Frog, Google, Logitech, and Amazon.
- Before founding d.MBA, Alen was a business designer at IDEO in Munich, Germany, where he practiced human-centered design while working on digital experiences, services, physical products, and new ventures for Fortune 500 companies.
- Alen is a generous contributor to the field, sharing his insights freely through d.MBA's podcast and other online resources. He has also been a guest on the Disco, Design MBA, and Bonanza podcasts, as well as contributing his thoughts to UX Collective on Medium.
- And now he's here with me for this conversation on Brave Ux. Alen, hello and a very warm welcome to the show.
- Alen Faljic:
- Thanks, Brendan. I think you've done a very thorough research of where I've been on which podcasts. I've been so looking forward to this conversation. It seems like you've done your research.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I've given away all my tricks now all my tricks. Hey, Alen, one of the things that I discovered about you was that your home country is that of Slovenia, as it would turn out is a even slightly smaller country than my home country of New Zealand, which I thought was one of the smaller ones is around 2 million people in Slovenia. What is Slovenia best known for?
- Alen Faljic:
- Ooh, that's a good question. I mean, at this stage, I think it may be our superstar basketball player, Luka Dončić. He plays for Dallas Mavericks. He's been like a top NBA player for the last three, four years. I guess more people would know about him than about the country itself. Perhaps that's one thing. Apart from that, I don't know. It's a beautiful country in the middle of Europe that it's kind of overlooked, but it has a little bit of everything. It has a little bit of alps, a little bit of the seacoast, a little bit of Peronian fields. So it is a beautiful place.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It certainly looked like one, I did have a little cheeky Google and saw some of the images. It does look like one of those places that you could easily get lost in.
- Alen Faljic:
- Yeah. Oh, I mean, it's not that big to get lost in, but it it's nice to get lost in. It's one of those countries that I recently pops up in a lot of these lists of like, oh, here are top 10 countries you haven't visited yet. It's like this second tier popular destinations in Europe. Now everyone, a lot of people have been to Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, and they're looking for new destinations. I can just attest it. It's a really cool destination for tourists, but even more so for living.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Just to give people some geographical context, it borders on its southern borders, Croatia, and then south of Croatia is Bosnian, who's a Gina. And I noticed on your LinkedIn profile that you also speak Bosnian, and so I wanted to ask you about that. I assume you've got Bosnian heritage.
- Alen Faljic:
- Yeah, correct. So my parents are Bosnian. They were born there. And then my father, when he was 18, he moved to Slovenia. So at the time it was still Yugoslavia, Slovenia was together with Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia and so on. It was one country and they moved. That was, I don't even know when exactly they moved, but I was born here. But yeah, we visit every year, so it's like a six hour drive back to Bosnia, and we have basically all of our family there.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I was going to ask, do you make return and clearly you do, you go regularly. What is it like going to a country that you've obviously got quite close ties to, but that you weren't born in and a country that has been through some whatever tumultuous period over the last 20 years. Is there a certain feeling that you get when you cross back into your, I suppose it is your father and your mother's homeland?
- Alen Faljic:
- No, definitely. The funny thing is when I was, I don't know, between 10 and 15, and we would frequently go back two times, three times a year. When I went to Bosnia, they would refer to me as Slovenian when I was in Slovenia, my schoolmates here would refer to me to as Bosnian. So it's like that identity, who am I, what am I? But yeah, I mean Bosnia was unfortunately really struck by the war and there's still a big difference. I mean, politically it's not in the best shape. Economy is not in the best shape. So when you go there, you do see a completely different basically society and economy and how this works. So it just gives you a perspective on how people live differently and it's basically just three, 400 kilometer path, but it's just a huge difference. So I think it definitely enabled me to just have empathy for different situations and to be able to get myself into different shoes, which I think coming to design also definitely helps me a lot. You
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Mentioned there it was almost like you were describing being caught between two worlds, your Bosnian heritage, but born in Slovenia and Slovenia, but they don't, or some of those people at school didn't consider you to be Slovenian. And then the same again, when you go back to your parents' homeland, where have you arrived with that in yourself? How have you decided to approach that situation? Where have you reached so far?
- Alen Faljic:
- It's another thing I've really consciously we're thinking about or trying to make a decision about. I think it's just one of those things that happens. I think I'm a combination of both. So I consider myself a Slovenian. I think being born here, having most of my friends being Slovenian, I do consider myself Slovenian with Bosnian heritage. I have certain mindset and characteristics of a Bosnian. But yeah, so
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What would those mindset characteristics? Yeah, what would they be?
- Alen Faljic:
- So we sometimes say like, oh, you're such a baan person. So this means that you just find your way through life being shrewd and sometimes not always following all the rules, trying to not go against the law, but just sometimes certain things, certain rules let's say don't make sense and you just find a different path. And I think that's important also for entrepreneurship to just think for yourself. So that's an example of one such thing, maybe self-deprecating humor as well. So what you notice, one of the things you notice in Bosnia is just like, so the mindset of people is just not as positive out. They don't have such a positive outlook. The life has taught them that things are not going to turn for the better. That's at least the feeling you get, especially from coming from the outside in the way people deal with this is a lot of humor. And I think I definitely inherited some of that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh good. Well, I hope to tease some of that out on this podcast with you, Alen. It's interesting you talk about the willingness to bend the rules and to work around in conveniences when they don't make sense, and that being something that's useful in entrepreneurship. I can definitely see that. It's also interesting that you ended up in Germany or you are so far right, and what I assume is, wouldn't say rigid, but seems to be very stereotypically famous for its ability to stick to processes and to be very methodical. And I just wanted to I suppose, understand how your balkan this, if you has fared you well or otherwise in that very German, very industrial, very process-driven economy, that way of working.
- Alen Faljic:
- It's a great fit. It's a great fit because I myself also love some kind of structure and stuff so that you understand the constraints, but within those constraints there is still some freedom of how you behave, freedom of interpreting. And as I said, I mean one of the main questions I always have is why is certain rule a rule? You have people who just follow the rules blindly and you have people who ask the why. And if you really answer the why and ask this question, you sometimes see that this same rule can also be interpreted differently. The same rule can also be fulfilled differently or I don't think this will make sense and you just decide to go against it, which is also a decision. So yeah, I mean also Germany as a country, I think it's definitely not for, I wouldn't call it rigid, but it's just like it has a good structure, but once you live in it, you also see that you have baan people everywhere. And I don't mean literally, but there people who just think more freely. Also in Germany, let's put it this way, and there's a funny story. Where does Balkan start? If you ask Germans, it starts in Austria. If you ask Austrians, which is north of Slovenia, it starts in Slovenia. If you ask Slovenia, it start in Croatia. If you ask Croatians, it start in Bosnia. And this is basically going from north down to south. And Bosnians don't say anymore going, they accept it, they accepted their Balkan.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Let's talk about, I suppose some interesting tension that I saw at least in your educational background, sort of maybe a bit of your Balkan, this brushing up against some of the structure that exists. In this case it was in Austria because you left Liana where you'd studied your undergrad, which is Slovenia's capital, and you went to study a master's degree in Vienna, which was in strategy, innovation and wait for IT people management control. And the first half of that degree to me was like, oh yeah, that's definitely, that sounds really exciting. That sounds very design minded. And that second part management control sounds a little bit scary, frankly. Yeah. Maybe a little bit Austrian, a little bit German. What is management control and how did those two parts of the masters interrelate?
- Alen Faljic:
- I mean if I'm completely honest, I was so disinterested in the second part that I don't even remember. It's just one of those things that you go through. I was super interested in strategy and innovation and I couldn't care less about managing corporations and controlling processes and so on. So I mean, that's my answer. I don't really even have a good answer to it because that's one thing that people don't realize is if you go and study business, there are two different paths. You can study business and you can study economics. Some schools, most schools at least abroad are called business schools and some are even called economics, like London, the school of Economics, but most are called business schools. But usually as far as I know, you can study both of these paths. So one is business, it's like how do I do business?
- And economics is more like how do I understand economy of a country, how do I understand an economy, how it works? I was definitely more interested in the business side. And then even within the business side, you have these different paths. So you can go into strategy, you can go into entrepreneurship, you can go into finance, you can go into, well, finance is part of economics, there's so many different paths. So strategy was definitely something that I was interested since always into, so I'm more remember from that part of the program than the management control part.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And this program, I understand it took you to some pretty interesting places or to one interesting place in particular, and that was to a role at ideo. So after you finished, you went to work in Berlin there as a business designer?
- Alen Faljic:
- Yeah, I was in Munich actually. Oh, right. It's a funny story. So while I actually did my undergrad in ANA and there was a program entrepreneurship and one of my professors was for half a year, she taught, so her name is Anya and for half a year she taught in ana. And for half a year she taught in Stanford. And obviously one of the things she brought to us in ANA was design thinking. So in a business school we were taught design thinking class. It was interwoven into all classes, but obviously there was also one called design thinking. And I dunno, I just really hit it off with a professor. And when she heard that there is an opportunity for business design internship at id, she told me about it because if you go and study business, IDEO is not a company you hear about.
- It's not like a career path you would usually think about. So she told me about it, then I checked their website, I checked the shopping cart video, which everyone has seen. And then from there I was like, oh, that sounds like an interesting place. I then decided to get in touch and they asked me for a business design portfolio. As a business school graduate or business school student, you don't know what business design is and you don't have a portfolio because no one has ever asked you to have a portfolio because you are a business school student, so you have a cv. And I quickly googled what this thing is. I quickly put something together, I sent it over, seemed to be good enough. So I got an internship and I fell in love. Yeah,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You didn't fall in love for too long though, right? You were there for a couple of years and then it seems like you fell in love with another idea. And about this, you've said while you are working at I D O, you described this in your own words and I'll quote you now, you observed what was a, and here's the quote, a big disconnect between the design community and the business community. What was it that you saw or experienced while you were at IDEO that was symptomatic of that disconnect?
- Alen Faljic:
- Before I went to ideo, I was just one of the 60 people in the room who was thinking about things from the business perspective. And then I transferred from a business school to a design agency, world-class design agency. And I would tend to be one or there would be two people who would think about the business things. Everyone else was just thinking about design. And initially I loved it, I was just learning everything about design. It was the first time I heard things like synthesis, persona, I dunno what else, there's been plenty of these terminologies. But then I started to see the problems on projects where we would deal with clients who obviously expected some kind of return on their investment in these projects. And a big part of the team would not be able to communicate with a client, explain the value of design, explain our concepts, or even frankly even sometimes think about the business side of the things on the project because U B B would typically approach things from the user perspective, obviously. But the problem was then sometimes it stopped there. It didn't translate into also how does this translate into a business model? Does it fit with a client's strategy and so on. So that was the disconnect that I kind of discovered or identified.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And this is a disconnect that you've framed before and I'll quote you again now as a systemic issue in the design community that we have to work on. So what is the system, I suppose, or the aspect of the system that you attribute the issue to? Where are we going wrong, what aren't we joining correctly here? I
- Alen Faljic:
- Think it's two big factors. One factor is self-selection of designers. So most people who go into design go into it because they don't want to, I dunno, deal with math, they dislike make companies, they have their own thoughts about capitalism and so on. So even self-selection is like, oh, I don't like these things, I want to go into something more artistic. And this in itself, seeing designer as artistic is usually a that you have as a student. But then once you get into working as a designer within companies, you see design is less about art and more about solving problems. It's a way of thinking actually. So self-selection is one part. And the second part or more systemic part of the issue is also design schools where to start. So I mean the way design schools, I mean they are taught by more traditional designers and they themselves also don't have business education.
- And even when they do, it's very limited. So when you go to the designer through design school, you are not exposed to the business realities or realities that you can expect once you get into your role. And the way design schools try to solve that is by let's have a business course. So you have a three year program and one of those 20 courses, so one of those 20 classes that you take is going to be a business course. And then they think, oh, I checked the box here. Which is by the way, exactly the same way that business course try to solve the design problem. So there is 19 courses about business and then there is one course called Design Thinking. And I know design is really dislike when business people say, oh, I have a design thinking certificate, I know how to do design thinking. Well it's exactly the same thing with designers in design schools learning about business. So the problem is it's the curriculum is just not tackling these issues at all, frankly. It's not really intertwining these topics in the way it should. I think still in the beginning of the career you should more focus on the craft of the design craft, but there's still some basics that you could and should be aware of going into these roles.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Sounds like you're saying that education is part of the problem, but clearly given what it is that you do, you seem to believe that education is also potentially the solution to this issue. What is it that you have specifically chosen to do different at d.MBA to address the gap that you see in effectiveness that the traditional design education model has been delivering?
- Alen Faljic:
- The thing that, I mean we're basically solving the problem that design schools kind of create. The very fact that we exist means that there is a problem that we are solving. So it's not even about the way we try to be different from the schools, we're just solving the problem that is there, but we are trying to be different in a way that we try to create a good educational experience. So that's our kind of spin through the whole thing, which is it's an online education and we are concerned and we try to design the thing in a way that it just works a lot of online. Most of the online education space is just, it's not a good experience. It's basically just education content hidden behind a paywall. It's not real education, there is no interaction, there is no one giving you feedback talking to you, which is what all of these things are required for education, which is you growing basically. So that's how we try to build our thing. It's not even counter positioning to design schools. This is more like us counter positioning to all other online educations, but also our content is basically solving the problem of design schools and our format is solving the problem of online education.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I imagine that that that framing doesn't make you particularly popular at design schools.
- Alen Faljic:
- I dunno, I've worked a little bit with the London School of Economics who is aware of this issue and most of the schools are actually aware of like, hey, we do need more business education, we do want more business courses also because now students have started to demand it like, hey, we do want to know about business models and so on. So it's changing. So I don't think, I don't have any feedback of my unpopularity
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Best not to listen to the critics anyway, isn't it? What do they really know? Anyway, I was curious about the decision you made with d.MBA that you couldn't just pay and participate, you have to apply. How does that application, which is of course it's very common in terms of other higher education institutes, you can't just put your credit card in and then start program, but how does this change the way that your students feel about their participation? And is there a sense of elitism or something else that intended behind this decision?
- Alen Faljic:
- The whole idea is now that we are trying to be exclusive, it's more that we are trying to find the people who this is for. So what we mean by this is that the m b is designed for designers full stop and only for designers. So if you're not a designer, we will not let you in. That's one thing. If you don't have enough time to commit to the program, even if you're designer, we won't let you in. And if you apply and through your questions we see that you don't know what you're applying for, we won't let you in. So these are all the things that we basically use as a filter to make sure that people who get in actually co-create a nice experience for everyone else who gets in. Because education, everyone who has gone to any school knows that a big part of your experience is everyone else who is in the program. That's why we have this whole application process to make sure that everyone else who is in there is also motivated because you also learn from each other. We don't just learn from the teacher, let's say.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And one of the things that you do differently once people are in the program is you have quite an extreme level of accountability that seems to sit over their participation. And you've said, and I'll quote you again now, everyone's work is visible each week you need to do an assignment. And if that's private, it's a completely different culture than if it's public. What does that look like in reality? Is this something that spins people out? They have to actually do everything in a public forum.
- Alen Faljic:
- So basically the way the n b works is we believe that you learn the most by doing. Also when you're a little kid, the way you learn something is like this pan is hot. If the parent tells you that it's hot, you won't believe it until you try. So I think it's baked into us. The way we learn best is by actually not consuming content, but by producing content. So the way each week works is you receive certain content, you learn something about the business, and then you need to apply this to an assignment, to a challenge. So we work with real world companies and they give us challenges and then you as a student, you have a safe sandbox and you apply this knowledge. So basically not everything is public in a way that you can presume this knowledge whenever you want the way you want it, and you can try and apply to this assignment and work on it individually, privately, but then once you're ready, then you share it with the cohort.
- This means that we have a channel in Slack where everyone shares their work. And this is the magic because once you start seeing those things come in, you see as a student like, oh, I haven't thought about this. You checked Peter's work, you check Ashley's work and you see like, oh, that's a really cool way to do it. So it works as a nice way to learn, but it also works as accountability because you see all of those assignments trickle in and you're like, oh, I don't want to be the one that's not doing it this way. And it's a really powerful psychological lever that just makes you finish and do the work. And that's the whole point of education is that you actually test yourself even when it's hard that you actually go through this, let's call it struggle, and you come out of that with some new knowledge and being in a group, it's just a different dynamic and it just makes you go through this experience with just different energy, more accountability and just more learnings.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I'm thinking about my own education and I seem to recall that we were graded on a curve and that means that there's a scarcity of a's if you like to go around, which disincentivizes your will to share your work with others, which again is like what you are talking about here is almost counter the point of education. It's counter that kind of, if I go to bit sort of Greek or Roman on it here, it's counter that kind of academy type focus where you're there learning together. Do people need to be warmed up to this? Is this something that it takes the first assignment for people to really connect with until they're comfortable working in this way?
- Alen Faljic:
- So we do try to explain the culture upfront. We do try to show how it works upfront. Most of the people also before they join the program, they talk to an alumni. Sometimes it's their friends, sometimes it's their colleagues, sometimes it's just reaching out to LinkedIn to an alumni and talking to them. So most people get into it with the expectation that it's going to be this type of work, but it does take a week to just understand how the wheels spin. Like okay, how does a weekly rhythm feel like consuming the content, applying the knowledge, having a weekly call where we discuss things. It does take some time. We have people from, as you said in the beginning, people from all over the world, from all continents. And it just seems to be more natural to us human beings to be cooperative than to be in competition. So we don't have any issues with that actually. So it's a very open culture, everyone's sharing and it just plays on human nature I think.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So thinking about culture and now thinking about strategy, I've heard you describe your strategy at d.MBA, and I'll quote you again now as our caring is our strategy. And that sounds very nice, that sounds particularly appealing to people that are interested in furthering their education and loosely generalizing here to designers as well, but what does it actually mean and how does it show up? What does it look like?
- Alen Faljic:
- So what this means is that, you know how if you go to university or school, you can just feel like you're a number. Nobody really caress if you're going to finish the course, nobody caress if you show up, we try to be opposite on the opposite spectrum of this, let's call it feature. So what we try to do is obviously going in to the program, you have an application call with a person who explains how things work. So that's the first step where you get a feeling like, okay, there is some interaction here, but what it means within the program is that if you, for example, would miss out on giving an assignment, we wouldn't ignore it. We would reach out and ask you, Hey, do you need any help? Or for example, we even do this at the end of each week, an hour before there is a deadline for submitting an assignment, we have a reminder reminder for like, okay, these five people, you haven't finished your assignment yet.
- Do you need any help? And this is small little moments that do not happen in online education because a lot of people have a feeling of like, oh, if I don't do this thing, nobody will notice. No in the d.MBA we will notice, and it's not just about noticing and making you finish this, but it's also about like, hey, did you get stuck? And if you do get stuck, then we try to help you get unstuck. Maybe it's with some help, some guidance, sometimes it takes a call to help. So these little moments are the thing that make you feel seen and be seen and have the feeling of care like those things. And that's what is essential for education and for growth. You do need to be seen and have the feeling of I can trust these people and I can grow with them.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And people aren't just doing this for fun. This is a significant investment of time and also energy and money into this. We're not just doing it for a good time, people are seeking to achieve some sort of outcome. And the way that you've framed the outcome that the program delivers is that it's an outcome of helping them to become business confident. So what does it mean or what does it look like? What does a business confident designer look like?
- Alen Faljic:
- Yeah, it's a great question. So we didn't want to say that the d.MBA will, we were trying to find the right word because by taking a regular M B A, the goal of a regular M B A is to turn you into a business manager. So you come from different perspectives of life and you learn enough business that you can become a manager essentially. And our promise is there's enough of business people out there by joining the M B A, you won't be turned into a business person, you will stay designer, but you'll know more about business and you won't have all the business answers, but you'll have much better questions. And the way we try to package this into one word is business confidence basically. So the way this translates into real work, it means, as I said, you having better questions because the problem with the business topic for designers is a lot of times it's like blind spots.
- You don't even know what you don't know. And then you have this meeting with a decision maker and then they show up with, I mean they ask you about, I dunno, return on investment or they use a weird word you've never heard about, then you just block, you dunno how to respond to it. So it's about having an answer, having a discussion in that perspective. And the way this then translates into concrete results for example, is for those of our alumni who joined who are freelancers. So for the freelancers who joined the program, they frequently said, Hey, because I use business tools on projects, I can also reframe my projects in a way that I can charge more. For those who are in-house designers, they frequently report that they have more say in strategic topics, they can better present design topics in their work and they can better also explain why they need more budget for the team, for example, because they can use simple spreadsheets to explain like, hey, if we invest in this, and by the way, I need two people for this, but if we invest in this, then it's going to lead to, I don't know, increasing revenue or something like this.
- For consultants for example, they basically just reported they have similar to in-house people, so they use a better language to explain the projects, but it's not just about that. But also they can use different frameworks to do research like business research and they can also design business models for innovation projects. And for some of our alumni, they're also looking for to start their own companies. And for those they basically need to come up with a strategy, come with a business model. So they do need to know these topics also pretty well so that they can basically create a successful venture.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You spoke about blind spots just a little earlier on there, and I want to zoom out now and rewind time a little here and it's back to a time in Berlin at a conference or a meetup called Berlin ux UI where you gave a talk called Good design is good business. And that talk was quite insightful in the way that it exposed a couple of blind spots for two different groups of people here who are put together and have to work together. One being business people and the other being designers. You put forward two perspectives in that talk on that saying the saying good designers, good business. The first was the point of view of designers and the second was the point of view of business people. What are those two perspectives and how do they relate?
- Alen Faljic:
- So broadly speaking, I think you're referring to business perspective focusing on the viability perspective. So it's like how much does something cost? How much should we charge for it? How do we extract values, how do we make money? And for the designers it's like how do we create value? What do people want? How can we give them what they want? And the funny thing is that designers actually have a feeling that there is enough of business people out there. So the way we will try to bAlence this out, these two perspectives is like there's enough of people who only think about how to make money. I'm just going to care about how I can create value and then the bAlence is created by me just focusing on value creation and I'm going to ship over my work. I'm just going to throw my stuff on the business people's desk and they will take care of the business stuff.
- But that's not how it works because the viability perspective to the perspective of how this works from the business. So how design works from the business side can be solved after you have designed your solution, it needs to be baked into the various solution. And the story I use in the talk is from the Bauhaus masters. So if we look at their beautiful furniture, it's not just desirable from the perspective that it looks good and that it's ergonomical and so on, but it's also very viable. If you look at the way it's designed, it uses very simple shapes, it's squares, it's triangles, it's surplus. And why? Because those are the easiest shapes to reproduce in a factory on scale. And that means you can produce this furniture at the low enough cost to be able to sell it at the appropriate price for the middle class, which was the goal of the Bauhaus in that era, like the modernized design, basically the same for the colors. What are the three basic colors of Bauhaus? It's blue, yellow, and red. Again, very easy to produce for factories. And you can see that if those Bauhaus macers would only think about let's create something beautiful, they wouldn't keep these things in mind, which were basically the reason these pieces of design became icons because they were produced on scale and they could be produced in factories and that meant that they were just viable and desirable at the same time.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And something that I wasn't that familiar with the story until I listened to your talk, something that I thought was also really interesting was that there is a broader international competitive lens that sparks this whole story. There was a competitive imperative for Germany to do this. What was that imperative? How did it all come to be?
- Alen Faljic:
- This is how, I mean this is a type of story I love, which is like you see that nothing happens just because it happened. There's always a reason. And in this case, Bauhaus was born because German factories were trying to find a way to compete with at that moment basically the industrial champion, which was England. So they created the best products at the best prices and all the whole world wanted to have basically British arts and crafts products and Bauhaus, sorry, and German factories were basically looking for what can we do? It doesn't make sense to compete with the English factories on the same parameter. We need to be different. And that's what the strateg is about. It's about being different. And it was basically born as a reaction to this. It was almost going opposite to what England was good in, which was this beautifully decorated ornamental type of products. And they went into super simple geometric shapes, very utilitarian but beautiful at the same time. And it worked. So German factories then basically won this game because it was more desirable and more viable to produce these products because you didn't need to have as much handwork involved with the Bauhaus products as you did with the arts and craft one.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And maybe I'm simplifying this a little bit, but it also seemed to have somewhat started with a bit of ethnographic or a bit of design research that there was a particular individual in whose name escapes me, perhaps you'll recall, that was sent from Germany to England to understand the context to inform this. What was the story there?
- Alen Faljic:
- This guy's name is Herman. I don't the surname anymore. I think even in the talk I just went with Herman because his surname is super complicated German surname. But yeah, they basically sent a cultural spy to England to try and understand what makes the English factory successful. So they were like, Hey Herman, here's a ticket. Just go there. Just go to factories, try to become friend with these designers and try to understand what makes them good. And Herman stayed there for some time, came back and said, guys, it doesn't make sense to compete with them. They're super great in creating this product that they're creating. But there is something interesting I found. So there's this new movement, I'm forgetting all the whole story right now, but he found a new movement and basically this new movement became basically the idea for the Bauhaus and forgot the name, but basically what happened in England, because of this super success of these big factories who created this beautifully decorated product, new wave of design aesthetics was born and this was designers working within workshops.
- So they went and work within workshops with these masters of crafts. And that's basically, it was a reaction to this inhumane, also conditions in the British factories and at their just economies of scale and industrialism and so on. And the whole idea was, hey, let's do something more crafty and let's create products with soul and let's create products that are more utilitarian. So that kind of started to form in England on the edges. And then Herman, our spy was like, oh, that's interesting. Let's actually industrialize this idea. So even though this was born as just a way to actually fight industrialism and capitalism and then ended up being even more industrial and capitalistic idea that actually won and helped Germany win over UK
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And to this day still do still hold the dominant manufacturing position. This is a very strategic, this is a beautiful marriage of business and design. And one of the things that you've spoken about before is that if designers are going to have greater impact in their organizations and do what we are framing here as good design and that being design that is good, but design that is also good for business, they need to be a bit more strategic about that. You've pointed out in a recent, fairly recent medium article, which is called How to become a more strategically minded Designer, that being strategic and having an understanding of strategy aren't necessarily one and the same thing. So what is the difference? What's the difference there that you are articulating in that article?
- Alen Faljic:
- Yeah, so what I'm trying to say is first of all, you need to understand the word strategy and it's one of the most misused words in business. And when somebody says strategy, they mean different things. So first of all, if you want to be more strategically minor designer, you need to understand what you want, what you think this word means versus what others in your organization think. When they say strategy, is it the same thing or not? So for example, when somebody says strategy, sometimes they mostly say like, oh, I need a plan. Because strategy is like, oh, let's do big thinking, big picture thinking. But actually that's not what strategy actually is within business. So within business strategy is a path to differentiation. So we're trying to take different set of actions to get to a defendable and valuable position in a market. That's what strategy is in a business.
- So when you say, Hey, I want to be more strategic, you need to first be clear with yourself, am I just saying, Hey, I want to be more mindful of the big picture, which means I basically just need toand how my work fits into the work of this company. If that's the case, that's easy to solve. There are two tools to use there. One is like ecosystem map. So this basically means I just try to visualize my company's business model by using three different things. I want to draw on a piece of paper, all the actors, and then I want draw all the flows. And basically we have three different flows on there. So flow of money, flow of data and flow of goods. If I draw this, I can understand my company's business model and then I can also understand better how are my decisions helping this business model, or are my decisions even hindering this business model?
- I'll come back to this point, just first talk about the second tool. So the second tool you can use to do the big picture thinking is like profit tree. And profit tree is like just imagine a tree on top. We have fewer leaves than at the bottom, so it's like a Christmas tree, so on top there's a profit, and then below that we have revenue and we have costs. And then even below that we can break it out even further. So your job in on any project is to basically understand am I now trying to increase revenue or decrease costs? Ultimately what every project within the company does, and once you understand this, you can go even further if you increase revenue, okay, am I improving retention? Am I increasing the lifetime value of the customers or whatever it is? Or if you're decreasing costs, am I decreasing fixed costs, variable costs?
- You can just go deeper and deeper to really try to understand how your work fits into the big picture. Because once you know that you can use different language to explain your work, you're not longer just going to talk about, I dunno, wireframes or aesthetics or the branding, but you can also talk about the business metrics and you can also use words like strategy and so on. Yes, these are the two tools basically about how you can be more big picture thinker, which is what usually people think being strategically minded designer is. But there's also another definition of strategy, which is as I said before, strategy is a way for a company to find a valuable and different position in the market. So being differentiated, being different, and if that's what you mean, then actually your actions as a designer need to help your company differentiate.
- An example of that would be trying to find the branding, the brand image and the brand position that puts your company into a different position from others. That's one example. Another example is aligning your decision with actually your company's business strategy. An example I have there is if you are strategically minor designer, and let's say you work for an airline for a low cost airline in Europe, we have a few of those. So if you're a designer working for a Ryanair and you go out and you do research and you talk to your passengers, what is the most likely thing that they'll tell you, the planes are cramped, I need more leg room. And you're going to hear this over and over again and you're going to go back to your desk and you're going to be like, Hey, everybody's telling us to give them more leg room.
- And you go and you propose this to your non-designer friends and they're just laugh you out of the room. And the reason why this is the case is because Ryanair is low cost airline and the fact that it has small leg room means that they can fit more rows onto a plane many more rows than a traditional airline can. And this means they can have more passengers and this means they can have lower prices. And why do people fly with low cost airlines? Because they're willing to make sacrifice for leg room for lower price. So essentially by us just focusing on a design perspective in this example, by actually just focusing on what users are telling us, what customers are telling us, we are actually working against the strategy and even against the customers themselves.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Is it unfair to say that in that example that the business strategy is more important than the customer?
- Alen Faljic:
- I think it's a bAlence strategy ideally fits with what the users and customers want, but there needs to be a nice beautiful bAlence.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's like a depth of understanding what their hierarchy of wants are, right? Because talking about trade-off decisions here, people are going to say, I want to be more comfortable. And you go, okay, well we can make it more comfortable, but the fear is going to be twice as much. How comfortable do you want to be now?
- Alen Faljic:
- Yeah. So one of the things you should start doing in the user research, it's exactly this. It's not just asking people what they want but actually presenting them with what strategy is. Strategy is actually you understanding what trade-offs you as a company to make because there are trade-offs that customers willing to make. So what I would frequently do in the user research is exactly those things is I would present users with two scenarios. Both of them would need to be attractive and see actually what do they want more. So for example, if you work for a car company and you're trying to think of a new strategy, you might be playing with two strategies. One is performance strategy, let's call it, and one is space strategy. So one performance strategy is like we want to create the best engine, the best driving experience for driver.
- And another one is like we want to create the best driving experience for everyone else. So I'm not a driver, so this is a space strategy, let's call them. So basically you go to your users, your customers, and you give them these two options. You tell them, Hey, would you rather have a car that actually is pretty slow? The engine is not going to accelerate fast, but you're going to have all these awesome features inside. So people can sit in, I dunno, couches like imagine Ikea creating a car. It's basically you become a furniture company, not a car company anymore. So that's a strategy versus you having a car, which is how cars are built today, which is like the car is built around the engine. So one car is built around the engine, another car is built around the space for passengers. So yeah, you can present these two both. So both of these scenarios we should present in a tone and in a way that it's desirable. So presenting advantages and disadvantages to both, and then people can make a trade-off. Where would you rather be here or there? Which of these two cars would you have? And that's an example of forcing users to make this trade off decisions so you can make a strategic trade of decision.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And through that I imagine that you're actually understanding how they're critically thinking about the trade-off. Why do they say they prefer one over the other? You're actually forcing them into a much more intellectually interesting and potentially more business useful way of articulating what it is that they're after.
- Alen Faljic:
- And you get a hierarchy of needs in a way as well.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- These kind of decisions, these trade-off decisions around at the business strategy level doesn't strike me that there are too many designers that are regularly participating in those decisions. What's it going to take to get more designers at that particular type of decision-making activity? How do we get there? And business confidence seems to be one step, but if you think about the broader arc potentially zooming out, thinking globally here, what things do you believe need to happen for in say, 15 years for us to have more designers at those types of tables?
- Alen Faljic:
- First of all, we have to realize that even among all of those people with MBAs, not all of them make strategic decisions. So they are made by strategy, a thing you don't want to change too often, even as a company. Now I'm talking about business strategy. So this strategy which involves making trade-off decisions, those are usually taken at the top of the company. And ideally companies in the future, every company in the future has chief designer officer. It becomes as ubiquitous as having a chief technology officer. You just have it because it's normal to have one. And those chief designer officers would ideally be fluent in those things because they are the only ones in the room who can do quick visual prototypes for everyone else in the boardroom to quickly talk about an idea, quickly talk about strategy, and to agree on something concrete.
- The thing that many designers, we overlook this as a community, is like this is our superpower and the skill that not many other people in business have. If you go into a boardroom, there's a lot of people who know how to read spreadsheets and how to read numbers, but they have almost zero visual skills and they talk and talk and talk, and they have this illusion of agreement because they agree about the words. And then next time somebody comes with a prototype and it's like, oh no, no, that's not what I said. But the other person is like, no, that's exactly what you said. And so once they get a prototype, they start to disagree. So that's our superpower in those situations is to be by facilitating those conversations, by being visual, we can help make those decisions and inject our ideas, which is like, oh, we're thinking about this and this strategy, and then use a design.
- I can say, Hey, actually I can test this because no one else in the room will have an idea to test strategy because it's like, what are you talking about? You can't just test strategy. We need to invest hundreds and millions to test this, to actually see if people want this. It's like, no, I think I can actually do it for 20 K and just give me, I dunno, a month and I'll at least have some preliminary results that we can use. So that's on the top level. But most of the designers won't be taking these decisions, but they might be taking product strategy decisions and a product strategy decision, for example, is this open or closed system. And there again, you can do this research so you can go and talk to users and you can see which makes more sense. You can also have two different versions of the flow and test those in a strategic manner as a trade off. So I think fundamentally we as a community should be aware of the difference what strategy means to different setups. It's a business strategy versus strategy as thinking big and just knowing which tools to use. When
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Do you get the feeling that it's easier for business people to become designers or for designers to become business people?
- Alen Faljic:
- I dunno, because I started business, I had zero experience with design before I went into design agency. And honestly, I was lost for the first year. I had zero idea what's happening. These people were thinking so fast, so differently from me that I was literally lost. So my experience was not a smooth one of transitioning from being a, what you call deductive thinker to being more like abductive thinker. Because what you're being thought in a business call is like, we have a problem. Let's eliminate all the ideas that obviously won't work and let's focus on the one to two most promising ones and let's test those. And as a designer you're like, no, I want to stay in this in between zone and I want to explore things that I know don't work just so that I get inspired so that I maybe find something that works in the end and that's super uncomfortable for business people. So I think it's just such a different way of thinking that neither of these two is easy, but I don't think either side needs to actually make the switch. It's more about just being aware of the powers of each of these sites. So I think it's more about building our own bridges than about combining these two things.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Perhaps talking about combining some things or building some bridges between two different things. You've spoken before about how designers sometimes have this worry that by becoming more quantitative or more analytical using more financial data in their decision-making, that in some way it might dehumanize the people that our work is for. And you've suggested though that by combining our qualitative data that we can draw on from our organizations from different areas of them with the more subjective qualitative data, that we are more accustomed perhaps to getting by spending time with users, with the people that we're creating things for, that this can actually lead to more empathy rather than less empathy. How is that? So
- Alen Faljic:
- If you have more data, you can look at the problem from different perspectives. And I think the way, what quality of the research is good at is answering why something is happening, but doesn't tell us how much of this is happening and maybe where it's happening and so on. And if you use quant, quant is very good at telling you how much of what is happening. Is it relevant enough to care about this thing? So I think this is then the really powerful combination of why and how much of what is happening. Then you have the both, because sometimes if you look just a lot of people who use and love dashboards and numbers, they know what's happening, but they don't understand why and vice versa. People know why something is happening, but don't know how much of that is happening, if it's relevant. And that's the eternal trouble with design research. You go and you do 12 user interviews and then you come and present this to business people and they're like, yeah, but that's just 12 people, right?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah.
- Alen Faljic:
- So you need to, I mean, ideally then you can kind of show the connection and that's the holy grail of research.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. I mean, you are touching on here something that we're laughing about, but this is because it is true. There's something deeply true about this. There's people that generalizing, of course designers on one hand where there's a bit of fear of numbers, and then you've got business people on the other one, which there's safety in numbers regardless of whether the numbers themselves are actually valid or right. There's a sort of implicit trust in having a large data set to quantify something. Is there some magic way of bringing these two worlds together? What have you seen that actually works? How can you pry open the door just wide enough to these various camps to show them that there might be a more interesting room on the other side if they could just have a little look through and step into it?
- Alen Faljic:
- Yeah, that's a culture thing within the company. There's usually a way of taking decisions and that way of taking decisions usually comes from the way founder has done them or the top management is doing them. And that's the hardest thing to change. Culture eats strategy for breakfast is a famous saying in business. So it's more about a culture than about a process. Yeah, the recipe is pretty simple. You just need people who think differently working alongside each other and complimenting insights and way of thinking. So it's nothing. Yeah, it's not rocket and science, but it's just hard to do because as you said, business people feel safe in numbers. And if you can show, hey, we're attacking this market because it's so big, and even if you fail because you use numbers, you feel safe and you probably won't lose your job. I mean you might, but that's another story.
- And with designers we're like, no, but I did 12 interviews, this makes sense. I'm super happy with taking this decision. And we feel safe in that qualitative research. It's about combining these two cultures and basically it's just about changing the way we take decisions. And that's the hardest thing to do. So if anyone's listening and has this chance, it's more about opening up to different data sources. So for example, after every d.MBA intake, we do extensive research. So we do interviews, we do survey, we talk to people, we gather and we also gather behavioral data. So how do people behave during the intake? And then we combine qualitative and quantitative research to see what's going on. So we try to have different perspectives to then synthesize and make a decision what to change and what not to change.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- We won't have time to get into this in full, but something that you quite a proponent of is prototyping with numbers.
- Alen Faljic:
- I love prototyping with numbers.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Maybe we need to do another episode at some stage. It's a really interesting area for people to look at. And I will put a link to in the show notes to a resource that Alen has put out there through d.MBA's website that talks to this specifically. Now, as part of this though, you've talked about the idea of, or the importance of prototyping with what you've called wrong numbers. So if we are talking about getting at truth here or getting a more objective view of what truth may be by using different types of data to achieve that, what are wrong numbers and what essentially is their purpose?
- Alen Faljic:
- Are you referring to the fastest way to get to right numbers is using the wrong numbers? Is that the thing or I
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Believe so.
- Alen Faljic:
- Yeah. So first of all, what is prototyping with numbers? So the same way that we as design community use wireframes, I dunno, black and white logos, service journey maps and so on, these are prototypes. The same way you can use numbers to prototype things. When I worked as a business designer, my language of design was numbers. So I would be like, okay, we want to sell for this thing to make sense to our client, which is a 10 billion revenue, 10 billion euros per year company. This product needs to make at least billion. Okay, so for this to make at least billion in revenue, we need to sell this and this many products per year for us to sell this and this many products per year. What kind of business model do we need? Do we need to go through third party vendors? Do we need to sell ourselves, blah, blah, blah.
- So you can see how by using numbers, I am not just using numbers, but I'm taking decisions. I'm prototyping the business model, I'm prototyping the service, I'm prototyping the pricing. So that's what price line with numbers is. And yeah, the fastest way to get to the correct numbers is to use the wrong ones. Because once you have these wrong numbers, those are basically, you're not saying, Hey, this is a prototype and this is the truth. No, it's a prototype and their assumptions baked into it. And now you go out and you test those numbers. And that's why the fastest way to get to the right numbers is to use wrong numbers. And if you work with clients, if you use the wrong number, they also give you the correct number. So that's another added benefit of using numbers is if you have a spreadsheet and you use certain assumptions of your own, if they see an assumption that they have an exact data for, they'll be like, no, no, no, no, no. You got this wrong. So this cell, you see C 12 cell, no, that's wrong. I have the correct data for you. And then you can plug it into your model and you have a better prototype.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I wish we had more time to go into that, but we do not. So I must bring things down to a close. Alen, I have one final question for you today, and it's tied back into this objective, this outcome that you're seeking for designers, which is to become business confident as a result of going through d.MBA. Now you obviously give them the content and environment from which they can do that, and I know that you keep a close eye or there's a close community that forms after people have gone through the program for them to stay in contact and for you to understand where they're getting to in their careers. For the ones that go through the program and that go on to have the most impact in their careers, the most business level impact in their careers, what is it that they have seen or that they are doing different than perhaps the ones that have less impact? What are those ones doing?
- Alen Faljic:
- They apply things immediately. That's the difference. I mean, it's easy, but it's just like you learn something and you try it right away and you get on this treadmill of like, I'm not just learning this. I'm not just taking a course just to consume some data, but I actually going to try to use it. And those that start using it, they see the value very quickly. So it's just about taking that leap and finding the right project to use it in your work.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Wonderful. Alen, I've really enjoyed getting a bit deeper into your perspectives on design. Obviously hearing a bit about d.MBA as well today. Thank you for so generously sharing your stories and insights with me.
- Alen Faljic:
- Thank you, Brendan. Thank you. Lovely being here.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's been my pleasure. Alen, if people want to connect with you, they want to keep up to date with what you are doing, what d.MBA is up to, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Alen Faljic:
- Yeah, you can head over to d.MBA, and maybe if you are interested in learning more about business as a designer, I think the easiest first step is to go over to d.mba/mini-mba. So that's where they can sign up for a short seven day email course, but if they want to just get in touch with me or stay in touch with me, they can. Also, I think the social media I'm most active on is LinkedIn, so you can just look up my name, find me there, but it's linkedin.com/in/alenfa. I think it's my URI, something like that. If not, just type in my name and you'll find me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Wonderful. Thanks Alen into everyone that's been with us. It's been great having you here as well. Everything we've covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find Alen, including his LinkedIn profile. I'll be sure to put that there. And all the things that we've spoken about will be fully chaptered.
- If you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world-class leaders in UX research, product management and design, don't forget to leave a review on the podcast, subscribe so it turns up every two weeks, and tell someone else about the show if you feel they would get value from these conversations at depth.
- If you want to reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Brendan Jarvis. There's also a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes or head on over to my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.