Now that we’ve reviewed basic business fundamentals, this chapter will cover practical steps to get to know your business and business partners.

It’s fundamental to your design work to understand the models and strategies specific to your business and the people who use them. With your creative problem-solving processes you can:

• Visualize your business
• Anticipate the needs of your partners
• Analyze the effects of culture on decision-making
• Reflect on how you are or aren’t having an impact

Visualize your business model and strategy

To get a high-level idea of where your company plays and how it wins, there are two diagrams you can use: The Business Model Innovation Framework and the EcoSystem Map.

The Business Model Innovation Framework

Developed by Oliver Gassmann and his team at the University of St. Gallen, the Business Model Innovation Framework is a simple diagram to quickly capture a business model. The diagram makes the business model tangible and helps confirm some of the assumptions you might have about a business.

This diagram helps you answer four basic questions:

1. Who are the target customers of your company?
2. What does your company offer of value to those customers? (delivering value)
3. How does your company produce the offer? (creating value)
4. Why does that offer generate value for the company? (capturing value)

Perhaps you’re asking yourself why the word “value” is used rather than revenue in #4. While revenue is very important, many startups are initially focused on growth. These hyper-growth models are set up to create large customer bases and then find sustainable revenue models later. Value is specified in each of the answers to these four questions.

To create the diagram, draw a triangle and place a circle at each point and in the center. Each circle represents one of the questions above. (See Figure 3-1)

After drawing the diagram, the next step is to provide two to three answers per question. Start with the target customers, then the value provided, how it’s provided, and why it’s valuable to the company.

As an example, here’s a business model I created for the online payments processing company Stripe (Figure 3-2). Stripe targets organizations that want to accept online payments in a seamless and simple way. To reduce the complexity and time it takes to integrate these systems, Stripe provides a “seven lines of code” solution for accepting payments. Using the questions, I formed a quick hypothesis of the business model I’d be willing to put in front of my business partners.

The EcoSystem Map

Now that you have a representation of the business model, the other diagramming tool depicts how the model works. Called an EcoSystem Map, this tool shows all the actors involved in a business and the flow of value between them. Think of it as a flow chart of the transactions between a business and its suppliers or customers. (“We give you X and in return you give us Y.”)

The EcoSystem Map is my favorite way to quickly understand how the business model works. As a visualization, it has several advantages:

1. It maps the big picture.
2. It guides discussions with business partners.
3. It’s quick to develop and cheap to iterate.

I use the EcoSystem Map with business partners so they know that I understand the business model at hand. I’ve also found that these types of visualizations are something business partners always wanted, but never knew to ask for. It helps identify parts of the model that might not be working well.

Here’s an EcoSystem Map for our example, H&R Block. Even with just a simple understanding of the business model, we can gain a new perspective by quickly drawing out the flow of value.

Anticipate your colleagues’ behaviors

As mentioned in Chapter 1, I’m most comfortable in my work when I can anticipate the needs of others. When I couldn’t anticipate what my business partners would do, I began to look for patterns in their behavior.

Sometimes, data was used to make decisions. Other times, the most senior person in the room would just say what they wanted and everyone would scramble. I noticed rules of business would change from room to room, and in order to influence change, I had to take a new approach.

Changing human behavior is hard. B.J. Fogg, a behavior scientist, author, and founder and director of the Stanford Behavior Design Lab, is one of the leading behavior change experts in academia. He’s worked with startups around the world to develop new strategies for behavior change, using his Fogg Behavior Model (FBM).

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Behavior (B) happens when Motivation (M), Ability (A), and a Prompt (P) come together at the same moment.

BJ Fogg

Stanford

Behavior (B) happens when Motivation (M), Ability (A), and a Prompt (P) come together at the same moment.

Simply put, the FBM states that any behavior will only happen when three elements converge at the same moment in time. These are the three elements:

• Motivation: A person is sufficiently inspired to engage in a behavior.
• Ability: A person is capable of performing that behavior.
• Prompt: A person is cued, triggered, called to act, or requested at the right time.

As I began looking for patterns in behavior, I realized I didn’t know what motivated my colleagues. I didn’t know what skills they were capable of performing, what they paid attention to, or how they were responding to my cues. To better anticipate the behavior of my colleagues, I had to get to know them better.

Start with empathy

Trust is a foundational element of any good relationship. Whether you’re new to a role or have challenges with an existing work partnership, it’s natural to want to jump in and start “fixing” things right away. But don’t rush to act. Instead, spend some time building understanding and trust.

To do this, you need the answers to two basic questions: “Who are you working with?” and “What are they trying to achieve?”

Empathy Maps are a great visualization tool to quickly capture “good enough” answers to these two questions. The exercise helps you to understand partners in a new way so you can empathize with their perspectives.

Empathy Maps

You may already be familiar with the Empathy Map, which was originally developed by XPLANE. Traditionally used as a quick way to develop empathy for customers, the maps are now used by business teams around the world to improve cross-functional partnerships. Since it was released, the tool has undergone many iterations by different users. But my favorite is the 2017 version from the XPLANE team.

As an exercise, the Empathy Map first walks through a step-by-step process to identify a specific person and their goal, and then views the work ahead through their eyes. Doing so gives designers a better understanding of what business partners really think and feel about design work, processes, and approaches.

Best done as a team activity, the diagram is structured around seven basic questions:

1. WHO are we empathizing with?
2. What do they need to DO?
3. What do they SEE?
4. What do they SAY?
5. What do they DO?
6. What do they HEAR?
7. What do they THINK and FEEL?

A team can put as much fidelity into the exercise as they want, but 20 minutes should be enough time to develop a rough profile. Answering these basic questions provides three benefits:

1. You clarify the intended goals a partner is looking to achieve.
2. You identify what your colleagues are on the hook for, how that makes them think and feel, and how those responsibilities influence what they say and do.
3. You realize that our partners are not anti-design, but have different perspectives and ways of working.

Once the exercise has been completed, it’s important for the team to be able to summarize the insights in a clear and concise way. Insight Statements are helpful to highlight new key findings.

Insight Statements

Insight Statements allow you to synthesize and frame the information from the Empathy Map into a simple overview. They provide a quick view into what you’ve learned by empathizing with your partner(s). Here’s an example of how to quickly build an Insight Statement.

Something new or novel I learned about [Partner name] was _______.

This knowledge helps validate/invalidate my assumption about  _______ .

_______ is a pressing question [Partner name] has that I can now provide an answer for.

_______ is a plausible thing the design team could/should do moving forward to help [Partner name].

There is an opportunity here for us to _______ together.

Once Insight Statements are formed, you have the basis to ask yourself how you might become a better collaborator and partner. You’re now ready to take on business culture.

A Great Team Activity

Empathy Maps and Insight Statements are great team-based activities. Set aside a two-hour block with your teammates, grab some Sharpies and Stickies, and develop ideas together.

Map the business culture

There’s another side of business that’s much more complex than the model or strategy but equally important to understand. It’s how business gets done.

Executive stakeholders have the power to say “yes” or “no,” and it’s up to us to figure out ways to win them over. When there’s a lack of clarity around decision-making, designers are likely to feel frustrated. Conversely, when designers better understand how those leaders make decisions, they feel more engaged and have more trust for their teammates.

In either scenario, designers need pragmatic approaches to map these cultures of decision-making. My favorite tools for the job:

• Team Mapping Tool
• Stakeholder Analysis
• Force Field Analysis

These tools give designers the means to quickly visualize culture in a workplace—from stylistic preferences of decision-making to mapping organizational power dynamics and willingness to change. The tools effectively find gaps in communication to identify advocates and detractors of design and form a strategy for whom to partner with and when.

The Team Mapping Tool

Time and time again, culture trumps strategy. What sounds like a simple and straightforward plan quickly evolves into different expectations of what the design should be. What works for one stakeholder is not working for another, and people in the room seem to be speaking past each other rather than listening.

These are not great conditions to make quality business decisions and it’s not the time to try and address the misalignment. While strategy can be captured, culture is much more difficult to pin down. Next time, try a different type of preparation.

In her book The Culture Map, Erin Meyer introduces a visual diagramming tool called the Team Mapping Tool to help teammates better understand the cognitive, behavioral, and relational differences between one another. As a professor at INSEAD, a top international business school in Paris, Meyer developed this tool for organizations as a way to decode cultural differences so teams could better work together.

The tool includes a total of eight cultural dimensions with ranges of differences for each. As a quick workshop activity, this tool helps design teams understand how their preferred methods and styles of communication, decision-making, persuasion, etc. may be different than their cross-functional partners. The basic process of mapping out these cultural differences is as follows:

1. Identify stakeholders.
2. Use Post-its to plot the observed styles of each across the eight dimensions.
3. Draw a simplified culture line to connect dimensional differences.

By taking a little time up front to understand differing cultural styles of stakeholders, you can speak directly to their comfort zones. Your colleagues will appreciate your understanding.

Reverse Engineer What Works

If your colleagues are successful at getting stakeholders to make tough decisions, ask them for their presentation documents. Rather than reinvent the wheel, reverse engineer what has worked previously.

Stakeholder Analysis

Designers need to create, deliver, and capture value for colleagues. But introducing new cultures of design and modern development practices can be hard, especially when your company has done things a certain way for a long time. While your ultimate goal may be to help transform a company into one that’s customer-led, it’s important to pick and choose your partners strategically along the way. You need to find your allies.

Stakeholder Analysis is a great way to select strategic partners. Utilizing a two-by-two grid, you can quickly map who has power/influence in your workplace and who is willing to experiment with new ways of working. As you may have guessed, this is called a Stakeholder Map.

In my adapted version of the Stakeholder Map (Figure 3-7) the purpose of this plot is two-fold: 1) To understand stakeholders who will advocate for design when designers aren’t in the room, and 2) To find “less visible” projects to work on to build case studies of success. The grid is divided into four sections:

• Champions: influential partners who can help drive scalable adoption of design
• Challengers: influential partners who may be skeptical of design
• Sidekicks: partners willing to experiment with something new and willing to forgive if the experiment doesn’t go as planned
• Say-nos: partners to politely de-prioritize

While it’s logical to try and work closely with Champions first, it’s better to try new things with Sidekicks. Champions drive organizational change, but they tend to be more risk-averse to making organizational changes without seeing evidence that those changes will be successful. Sidekicks will help you build those case studies of change, and if things don’t go as well as expected, they won’t be so influential as to prevent change in the future.

Force-field Analysis

Designers, you are a force of change and not all partners are ready for that change. In some cases, they are quite resistant. For change to happen, the status quo will be disrupted either when conditions favorable to the change are present, or when forces resisting the change are reduced.

Being able to visualize problems gives you a leg up in understanding the whole problem. Force-field Analysis is a great visualization tool used to evaluate when the conditions are ripe for change. It’s a rapid way of examining the forces both for and against a change. This helps determine whether or not teams should move ahead (with confidence) with the proposed change.

The following questions may help you identify forces that will influence the change:

• What benefit will the change deliver to your partners?
• Who supports the change? Who is against it? Why?
• Do you have the resources to make the change work?
• What costs and risks are involved?
• What business processes will be affected?

You can combine the three tools from this chapter on a semi-regular basis to help you better understand your workplace culture and when the right conditions are in place for changing how things get done. They’ve served me and my teams well over the years.

Reflect

By visualizing cultural differences, stakeholder interest, and the forces both for and against change, designers can quickly identify gaps in the value they provide to partners and how they provide it. With gaps identified, you can then conduct a retrospection of how designers provide value to their colleagues.

Atlassian’s Team Health Monitors are fantastic, step-by-step guides to help teams assess themselves across eight different attributes. They identify when there’s a problem with how design teams create, deliver, and capture value for the business and its business partners.

When to Reflect

Conduct reflections on a quarterly basis. This will allow enough time to discover new patterns, while ensuring too much time hasn’t passed to build on past discoveries.

Conclusion

As you begin to understand the models and strategies used by the people you work with, you’ll become a better partner and a more influential designer. Using visualization skills will help you and your team quickly understand the business around you. This additional context fills in gaps to the design story at your company.

The next chapter demonstrates how to establish the right conditions for maturing design in your organization. By including a business perspective in your work, you gain a more comprehensive view of what success looks like. This view will push designers and their partners to be more rigorous in the decision-making process.

Within a week of starting what I thought was a dream job, I was overwhelmed. At three months, I was really struggling. After six months, I doubted my abilities to fill the role.

What had worked as a design leader at Apple was not working at Electronic Arts (EA).

In the spring of 2011, I accepted an opportunity to shape a new organization called Worldwide Customer Experience (WWCE) at EA. After years of paltry customer-satisfaction ratings, EA tasked WWCE with supporting a transition to a “player-first” organization. In my role as senior manager of customer programs, I was responsible for leading a team of UX designers, program managers, and front-end developers.

I was highly motivated for the challenge and expected to excel from day one. But it didn’t happen.

While quitting and finding another gig was an option, it didn’t feel right. I had taken a big personal risk in leaving Apple to join EA. I told my family it was a risk worth taking, and I felt it was my responsibility to make it work.

Choosing to stick it out ended up being the best professional decision I’ve ever made. By being uncomfortable, yet committed, I opened myself up to learning a new way to succeed. I had to adapt to survive and that meant developing skills in an area I had previously trusted others to handle: business.

Over the last 10 years, I’ve been able to expand and refine these skills while leading design and strategy at companies like EA, Nestlé, and USAA. What I’ve learned is if you understand the basics of the business model and strategies in which you’re working, you’ll be able to spend less time explaining the value of design and more time actually designing. It will also increase your credibility. Developing this understanding may be easier than you think.In an effort to share best practices with others, I created my own company, Second Wave Dive, in 2019. Since then, I’ve worked alongside teams large and small to help mature design in their organizations. In this book, I’ll pass along some of what I learned and what I teach, but first let’s talk about why designers benefit from fostering business skills.

Design is in demand

Design is definitely having a moment. It’s being driven by the popularity of Design Thinking, Design Sprints, and Stanford’s d.School, as well as the business value created by design for companies like Apple, Airbnb, IBM, Ford, Nike, Whirlpool, IKEA, and others. Business leaders now make significant investments to incorporate design to gain a competitive edge.

From startups to multi-national juggernauts, titles like Chief Design Officer, Head of Design, and VP of Customer Experience are now common. Sketching is no longer just an activity for “creatives.” Post-its and Sharpies are tools of the trade across functions, and business leaders across industries develop their organization’s design potential.

In short, we’ve made it. Our favorite Venn diagram worked!

So you may be asking: Why should designers do anything different?

‘Making it’ is different than we expected

When lists of the top innovation companies are published, a lot of familiar faces show up. From Airbnb to Netflix to Nike, these organizations invest heavily in design to gain a competitive advantage. While many popular narratives describe how these companies turn to design, what’s equally important (and less-discussed) is how design leaders at these companies look to business to drive value.

For many design leaders, “making it” involved years of painful business lessons. And there are many more designers out there today who still struggle to learn these lessons on their own. There has to be a better way forward. Here’s my assertion:

1. Designers with the most success in our industry are business-aware.
2. The world needs more successful designers involved in strategic decisions, therefore more designers need to learn the language of business.
3. Applying known methodologies and tactics provides designers with practical steps to develop business acumen faster.

Ethics matter

“Are we enabling others to do harm?” 

“What do we capture from customers in exchange for money?” 

“If customers aren’t paying, how do we make money?”

Be it privacy, security, or politics, many companies face backlash and/or gain a competitive advantage because they align their ethical positions to those of their customers. (Recent surveys confirm ethics has become an important purchasing factor.)

This trend is so significant that the Business Roundtable, the most influential group of corporate leaders in the U.S., recently changed their mission statement for the first time since 1997. Rather than addressing only shareholder value, the new mission statement speaks to valuing customers, employees, suppliers, communities, and shareholders. Even if this move is merely symbolic, leading organizations now realize ethical perceptions matter a lot.

With customers using their purchasing power to support purpose-driven companies, organizations around the globe are aligning corporate values to customer values. As designers gain business acumen, we can influence the ability of our organizations to understand and live up to these values. Also, as employees, we grow more capable of finding companies whose values align with our own.

Organizations need a competitive advantage

Staying one step ahead of competitors usually results in success. To do so, companies investigate different ways to create an advantage. Designers may not always realize it, but our methodologies are uniquely able to help with this.

Take for instance ground transportation. There are public options like the bus and train. There are ride-share alternatives like Lyft and Uber. And there are expensive premium services like limousines and town cars. When companies enter a crowded market with a new product or service, they make strategic decisions to differentiate themselves as the obvious choice for at least one type of consumer.

While factors like pricing or availability are important to some consumers, others may be more concerned with ease of payments, scheduling, ratings, or support. As competition in a market increases, designers who understand business are uniquely qualified to highlight how these factors play out in real-world scenarios.

Becoming a leader requires spending less time on craft

Many designers aspire to lead other designers, teams, practices, and organizations.

There are wonderful resources to help new design leaders learn how to manage others, provide opportunity and visibility to designers, and lead junior talent in seeing the forest and the trees. The further designers progress down this path though, the less design craft will play in day-to-day responsibilities. Craft becomes the responsibility of others on the team.

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If you just go into the room and narrowly think about “design, design, design,” and if you don’t value the business or understand why you have to move to market quickly, your contribution will not be felt.

Kate Aronowitz

GV

If you just go into the room and narrowly think about “design, design, design,” and if you don’t value the business or understand why you have to move to market quickly, your contribution will not be felt.

As designers move into leadership roles, they are increasingly responsible for decisions that impact both customer value and the company’s bottom line. This includes managing budgets, allocating resources, hiring/firing, and calculating return on investment (ROI). These responsibilities are building blocks of business, regardless of industry. And while design leaders may not have to crunch numbers every day, they need the skills in order to competently participate in discussing expenses, operational planning, strategy, and the other day-to-day concerns of company leaders.

Ultimately, design leadership is about building better companies and team culture. Those who do it well stretch themselves beyond just design.

We’re the new kids on the block

I’ll be blunt. Designers need to learn business because we can’t expect our counterparts to listen just because we’ve arrived. We need to meet them where they are. That means learning what other functions do, why it’s important, and being able to bridge the communities of business, design, engineering, and product.

Driven by digitization, companies around the globe have created products and services over the last 25 years at an unprecedented scale. They’ve needed engineers and developers to turn big ambitions into practical realities. And now that competition is fierce, business leaders turn to designers to find new ways to create value.

While the power of design is making products and services better, it’s important to remember that we’re joining an ongoing conversation. And the truth is: they could build things without us.

It’s 2020 and design is a key differentiating function for many companies, but it’s still an optional function. To deal with existing cultural norms in a business—and shape new ones—designers must show how they provide value to those functions that have been there all along.

Ending Navel Gazing

Paul Adams gave a direct, and perhaps hard-to-take, view of designers called The End of Navel Gazing at UX London in 2018. It’s a serving of humble pie, but it highlights that we’re not victims of the business environment. That was a lesson I had to learn at EA. Becoming business-aware gave me the ability to contribute to more diverse meetings. By learning the language of business, I was empowered to step out of the victim mindset.

The opportunities ahead

The opportunities designers have in today’s marketplace are robust. Traditional, for-profit companies are transitioning from purely financial priorities to customer-first. Non-profit or government organizations are transitioning from economic models to community- and citizen-led. And designers are being asked to participate in these transformations, large and small.

Business-aware designers have the ability to influence outcomes in ways no other function can. We have the power to impact the professional and personal worlds we want to live in. The next step for designers is to go beyond having a seat at the table, to being a leader at the table. With our influence, we can build healthier societies through healthier businesses. But we must know business to begin.

How to use this book

Business models, financial portfolios, and industry regulations are not typically the focus of a designer’s work. Yet each of these can be impacted by design.

The tools and frameworks in this book are meant to help you evaluate fundamental business concepts. This will put you in a better position to influence strategic decisions beyond the typical purview of design. Throughout the book, I’ll share advice from my experiences leading design, product, strategy, and development teams and organizations. I’ll also share insights from my peers and offer practical tips you can try for yourself.

I’ve divided the book into thematic sections:

• Business basics you should know
• Develop a business perspective
• Transcribe design value
• Communicate trade-off options
• Put it all together

Given that no business or organization is the same, there’s no linear, step-by-step learning process that applies to all situations. Therefore, the book is not meant to be followed like a process or guide. Instead, each section serves as a reference to which you can return as needed to tune your business skills in parallel with the real-world scenarios you face.

Whether working as an in-house designer or at an agency, for a large organization or a startup, the lessons in this book will be relevant. Feel free to skip around to find the content that’s most applicable in the moment. But try to keep the following mindsets as you build your business expertise.

Approach it like a new language

In 2013, my family and I moved to Lausanne, Switzerland, where French is the primary language. While my wife and I had some understanding of French, we quickly realized it would not get us very far in our day-to-day interactions. We had to find a way to learn quickly.

After a recommendation from friends, we began The Michel Thomas Method. A core principle of the method is to remove anxiety from the learning process and boost the confidence of students early and often. While we didn’t become fluent overnight, within a few weeks we were able to have many of the basic conversations we needed, with little stress.

Developing business acumen can be a similar process. Accepting that business is an unfamiliar language, we can take small steps to join conversations and develop confidence through familiar methods. Over time, we’ll begin to understand the different dialects used by different organizations within the business.

Did you know?

Twenty years ago, few business leaders understood design. Agencies like IDEO, Frog, Adaptive Path, and Cooper began teaching Design Thinking to business leaders as a framework for innovation. In large part, it’s been so successful because it reduced the stress and anxiety of learning a new approach to problem solving. As a result, business leaders simultaneously learned the language of design and bought into its value.

Recognize patterns to anticipate

At the beginning of Michel Thomas’s instructional audiobooks, he demonstrated that I already knew more French than I realized. Many English words ending in -able, -tion, -ical, and -ary have the same meaning—and similar pronunciation—in French. In giving these examples, Thomas provided basic patterns to build on.

As a designer, I’m confident in my work when I can anticipate what users do, and I have methods and tools to familiarize myself with patterns of user behavior. But when business leaders first began inviting me to meetings, I couldn’t anticipate what they would do. As a result, I was intimidated by the people in the room and their conversations. I assumed it was all very important, complex stuff, and my confidence was shot.

I was fortunate though. I had a wonderful mentor at the time, Jeff Bradburn. During one of our daily walks, he reminded me that I researched humans every day and that the people in those meetings were “just humans.” It was at that moment that Jeff demonstrated that I knew more than I realized. I had the methods and tools to familiarize myself with patterns of behavior. I just needed to apply that knowledge to learning business.

Now I know, most business meetings are quite ordinary. The more I witnessed status updates, task delegations, and pats on the back, the more I recognized behavioral patterns and could anticipate what people in the room would do. Learning business is as much about anticipating needs and behaviors as it is learning terms and concepts.

Similar patterns of behavior exist inside most organizations and industries, and the questions business leaders ask of design leaders and their teams are remarkably the same. In the sections that follow, I’ll point out basic patterns to help you anticipate what happens next and prepare for meetings with business leaders.

Rely on your design skills

Design, at its core, is applying an intentional approach to problem solving. As you apply processes to different problems, you broaden your relevant knowledge and vocabulary. The same can be true of learning the language of business.

For example, while still at Apple, I applied design methodologies to a business management problem while prototyping several digital applications. The end result went beyond expectations and ended up having a positive impact on employee retention. My point is, we can still do what we’re good at—design methodology—but apply it to all the needs of the business, not just the customer or user experience. Doing so helps us better communicate and partner with other teams, understand the broader effects of our work, and progress in our individual careers.

Methodologies like Design Thinking, Double Diamond, Lean UX, or Human-Centered Design do more than create an interface. By applying those powerful tools to solving business problems, you will level up your business knowledge and impact.

Identify the intersections

Have you ever seen those crazy storm chasers who try to get as close to a tornado as possible? They speed around in vans and trucks with one eye on the clouds and another on the radar. Their goal is to know where the big cell is, which direction it’s heading, and when it’s expected to get there so they can find the right moment to meet it. The same is true for designers who want to get close to the action.

Every project or product you work on will have a variety of elements that influence how well the project will go. Timelines, values, goals, personalities, etc. are all factors to consider in finding the right moments to converge with your colleagues.

To level-up your business impact, it’s critical to know where business partners are, where they’re headed, and the factors shaping their viewpoints. Throughout this book, I’ll teach you how to know where your business is and where it’s going so you can be at the right place at the right time. Some of the exercises will be introspective in nature and may be challenging. But they’re well worth the time.

Three steps to anticipate the intersection:

• Step 1: Identify the direction, velocity, and intensity of your business partners
  Analyze where they’re coming from, what they’re looking for, what their priorities are, what expectations they have, and what they get when they arrive.
• Step 2: Discern the direction, velocity, and intensity of design
  Are you considering the same factors as your colleagues? Are you working from shared values? Do you have the same priorities? Are your expectations the same? Analyze where you’re coming from so you can both head in the right direction.
• Step 3: Project the potential intersections
  Identify places to meet up along their journey. Suggest options of new destinations after you connect. Provide them with accountability to stay aligned in the new direction.

Use the scripts

Meeting the expectations of business leaders is a learned skill. While we all have different ways of learning, a handy script can often quicken the process.

In this book, I provide scripts to limit your frustration and keep you moving in a productive direction. Scripts are useful reminders that you typically don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Designers deal with similar business scenarios and behavior patterns across industries. The scripts—along with other tools and frameworks—should accelerate your progress.

The step-by-step scripts are provided for real-world scenarios. Examples of those scenarios include:

• Getting buy-in from business partners
• Calculating the ROI (return on investment) of design
• Connecting design objectives to business objectives
• Negotiating with non-designers
• Communicating trade-off decision risks and benefits

Conclusion

Now that you know how this book is intended for use, you’re ready to dive in. Just keep in mind that learning any new language takes time and patience. But with design methodologies in your tool belt, you’re better equipped than most to investigate and recognize patterns. And soon, you’ll understand how intention can directly and indirectly shape decision-making in your company.