I've been teaching entrepreneurship to designers for just over a year now, but I've been amazed at swift and powerful the results are. Designers feel able to participate in hard product discussions, uncover and promote insights to improve the business model and even make better decisions about their personal life, from salary negotiation to budget making. That's bc entrepreneurship is a microcosm of business, simple yet complete. Along with technology and user research, business must be a common core in design education. Entrepreneurship is the best way to do it.
2. A Note on these slides
• This talk was given at Interactions 15 at the
Education Summit.
• I have annotated these slides for reading but
they were originally just images.
3. In my opinion, there are two
conversations that are a waste of
time. One is "should designers learn
to code". The other is, "should
designers learn the language of
business."
4. The first is easy to answer.
Architects learn to pour concrete.
5. Painters learn to stretch canvas.
You just have to know your medium
to design well for it.
6. Getting a understanding of code
and databases will make you better
at interaction design. It’s your
medium. Learn it, and then you do
not need to do it again, until your
medium shifts.
8. The second question is harder, because
it's a poorly framed question. Design
rarely asks if it needs to understand
business; there is an implicit feeling
they know enough already.
9.
10. But business is as much a medium
we work in as code. This is not a
linguistic issue. It’s not a culture
issue. It’s a knowledge issue.
11. So, if we ask this new question,
“should designers learn business”,
I'd say yes!
13. When I was at Yahoo, back in 2001 (a cyberspace
odyssey) I was promoted into management. I
took it very seriously, and subscribed to HBR,
read Porter and Drucker and Mintzberg and tried
to use excel.
14. I'd find out later that didn't end well because
I have dyscalculia. I had always thought the
numbers danced around mocking me
because I was a designer, but apparently it
was neurological.
15. The thing was, all that studying of
MBA-type syllabi did not help me
understand why my partners in
business made the choices they made.
?
16. Not once in my career has used the
term ROI, outside of a "talking the
language of design" talks I've attended.
17. Flash forward a few years. I'm
leaving a struggling design agency I
helped found, pregnant with a child
and a startup.
18. My cofounder is an engineer, and
neither of us know enough of the
reality of running a startup, thought
we think we can since we've both
run our own consultancies.
19. We struggle along for awhile, raising
money and signing important people
like Om Malik to our platform.
20. And then a book
comes out, Four
Steps to the
Epiphany and I read
it and it blows my
mind. It's a good
book, but also it was
a book I was ready
to read. For the first
time I had skin in
the game.
21. I have a history
of emailing
people I find
interesting, but
couldn't find
Steve Blank's
email, only a
phone number at
Hass where he
taught.
22. I called it, expecting to reach a
answering machine in his offer. Instead
I got his wife. She said, I think it's one
of your students.
23. I explained who I was, and he invited me out
to his ranch in Pescadero, where he was
staying with his wife. I made some
ridiculous comment like I'd be out there
anyway Wednesday to meet a potential
client and I'd love to swing by and drove out
there to talk to him.
24. We spoke for two hours. It was before
Eric Reis was his student, before he
became the godfather of the startup
surge. But it changed my life.
25. I realized I had no market for the
product as it was. I was a designer
and I had been doing customer
interviews all along. I had all the
facts to tell me that the people I
was targeting couldn't and wouldn't
buy my product.
26. But I hadn’t connected that to my
business health. Because I didn’t
really understand how business
functioned. I'd have to pivot… a
word we didn't use yet… in order to
make money. Or close down.
27. I shopped my company around, and
me, my CTO (my previous cofounder
had left to become a life coach, but
that's another story) and our code base
found a home at Linkedin.
Working for Jeff Weiner again!
28. We informed our customers we were
going away, and we were absorbed into
what would be one of the most
successful IPO's of 2011. Linkedin was
my finishing school, a smart and
nimble company that knew how to
marry mission and money.
29. When I was offered a job at Linkedin, I was
asked a critical question: join design or join
product management.
30. I chose product. I turned my back on
design. After struggling so hard and
long to have my dream come true,
design seemed frivolous and
wrongheaded. They continued to seem
so as I moved through my next few
companies.
31. There were always a few individuals I
loved working with, but most designers
seemed to always be advocating choices
that would break the business model,
destroy revenue or erode competitive
advantage.
32. And once burned, twice shy. I liked
working with engineers, I loved
working with analytics folks, but
designers made me nervous now. Their
choices seemed whimsical and
dangerous.
33. But after leaving
my last job as a
General Manager, I
found myself slowly
returning to my
roots and my early
love. I met with
Kristian Simsarian
to talk about
teaching at CCA.
34. I knew what I'd teach. I'd teach
entrepreneurship. The Designer
Fund had started, AirBnB was the
poster boy for entrepreneurial
designers, and 500 startups kicked
off Warm Gun, declaring design as
the next silver bullet
35. I went to CCA excited to share my hard
earned learning at the newly minted
topic studio, Designer as Founder.
36. Any teacher will tell you: to learn anything well,
teach it. I taught them Steve Blank, Joined by
Eric Reis's Lean Startup and the newly released
Business Model Canvas from Alex Osterwalder.
37. If you don't know the holy trinity, let me give you
the 10000 foot bird eye's view.
38. Steve Blank said you should
talk to your customers as you
develop your offering. He said
there were no answers in the
building, you must go out into
the world if you want to make
something people want.
39. Eric Reis said you should build small things, test them,
learn, then build the next thing until you find successes.
40. It all sounds like Experiential
Learning and UCD, doesn’t it?
From Ed Batista http://www.edbatista.com/2007/10/experiential.html
41. And that’s how I taught it; We
spend 16 weeks in teams trying to
make an business that can fly.
42. Alex Osterwalder said you should
look at all aspects of the business
and design them collectively to
assure a successful ecosystem.
43. While all three hold a distinctly
user-centered design approach,
Osterwalder is the first to state it
unambiguously, using design tools
and innovation games throughout
his book and calling them that. It is
a designed book, in every sense of
the world, and it was written in
collaboration with a group of beta
readers.
44. All three, at their hearts, are user-
centered designers. They just
happen to design business.
45. While it is true my designer students
still balked at doing market sizing, they
were terrific at customer development
and rapid iteration. That said, their
relationship with math changed when I
gave them one key assignment: Map
out their personal burn rate. They had
to, in order to determine how much
money to raise, and how much to
charge for their product.
46. First the first time for many, they
added up their rent and food and
transportation. They went on
salary.com to find out how much an
engineer would cost them (and boy,
were they mad about their major
when they found out.)
47. They had thought they knew what
their business model was. But the
math told them otherwise. If they
were making an ap, they found out
they'd have to sell to everyone on
earth to break even.
48. Job's 99 cent world didn't seem fair
anymore. Advertising had similar
problems.
49. And like Barbie, they said, math is
hard. But for them, it meant the
math of survival is hard.
50. One thing I didn't
expect is that design
students made better
entrepreneurs than
most of the startups
I advised.
Like most senior
people in the Valley,
I had a handful of
startups I spent time
with. Most struggled
to get traction with
their target market.
51. Once designers got
over their prejudice
against business and
fear of spreadsheets
they were fearsome
entrepreneurs.
52. In fact, I took many of
the techniques
developed in that class
as well as a summer
version of it I taught in
Copenhagen at CIID,
and brought them to
the Lean Startup
Conference and to my
Stanford class in the
Leadership program.
High demand at Lean
53. It's not just being user centered that
makes designers great. It's they way
they work. It's the post-its, and the
walls covered with research and photos,
and the drawings and the paper
prototypes.
It's the way we play, and are wrong and
try again.
54. It's how designers think not only with
their minds but with their bodies and
with the world. Call it design thinking,
distributed cognition, or just call it
plain design, but it matters.
55. When I teach business people to act like
designers, they think like
designers. They put the end user in the
center of their thinking. They playfully
experiment, and test their hypothesis
with real people. They develop
empathy, and refine their businesses.
They make better things. Sometimes
they make truly good things.
56. This matters because
we all want a better
world, and right now
entrepreneurship is
the way to accelerate
progress.
57. If we leave it to the
MBAs who should be on
Wall Street pushing
around pretend money,
we abdicate an
opportunity to make
real and lasting change
for the better in the
world, in favor for those
who want to turn
change into another
profit game.
58. But if we choose to teach our
students what a healthy business
ecosystem really can be, they will be
make the next B-corp, or healthy
sustainable nonprofit or maybe
even a business that actually
respects the people it profits form,
rather productizes them.
60. At the end of the Designer as Founder
class I asked my students to write 500
words of a lessons learned for the
class. This sums it up for me:
61. "I think about design differently
in the sense that our design
work doesn't exist inside of a
bubble.
…we influence many aspects of
a business with our work but
they also have huge influence
on what we design...
Whether we like it or not.”
62. Thanks to all who make their work
available via creative commons on Flickr
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63. Thank you!
Follow me at @cwodtke
I can’t be bought, but I can be rented.
www.eleganthack.com
Hinweis der Redaktion
In my opinion, there are two conversations that are a waste of time. One is "should designers learn to code". The other is, "should designers learn the language of business."
The first is easy to answer. Architects learn to pour concrete.
Painters learn to stretch canvas. You just have to know your medium to design well for it.
Getting a understanding of code and databases will make you better at interaction design. It’s our medium. And then you do not need to do it again, until your medium shifts. Which it does.
Getting a understanding of code and databases will make you better at interaction design. It’s our medium. And then you do not need to do it again, until your medium shifts. Which it does.
The second question is harder, because it's a poorly framed question. Design rarely asks if it needs to understand business; there is an implicit feeling they know enough already.
But business is as much a medium we work in as code. This is not a linguistic issue. It’s not a culture issue. It’s a knowledge issue.
So, if we ask this new question, “should designers learn business”, I'd say yes!
When I was at Yahoo, back in 2001 (a cyberspace odyssey) I was promoted into management. I took it very seriously, and subscribed to HBR, read Porter and Drucker and Mintzberg and tried to use excel.
I'd find out later that didn't end well because I have dyscalculia. I had always thought the numbers danced around mocking me because I was a designer, but apparently it was neurological.
The thing was, all that studying of MBA-type syllabi did not help me understand why my partners in business made the choices they made.
Not once in my career has used the term ROI, outside of a "talking the language of design" talks I've attended.
Flash forward a few years. I'm leaving a struggling design agency I helped found, pregnant with a child and a startup. My cofounder is an engineer, and neither of us know enough of the reality of running a startup, thought we think we can since we've both run our own consultancies. We struggle along for awhile, raising money and signing important people like Om Malik to our platform.
Flash forward a few years. I'm leaving a struggling design agency I helped found, pregnant with a child and a startup. My cofounder is an engineer, and neither of us know enough of the reality of running a startup, thought we think we can since we've both run our own consultancies. We struggle along for awhile, raising money and signing important people like Om Malik to our platform.
Flash forward a few years. I'm leaving a struggling design agency I helped found, pregnant with a child and a startup. My cofounder is an engineer, and neither of us know enough of the reality of running a startup, thought we think we can since we've both run our own consultancies. We struggle along for awhile, raising money and signing important people like Om Malik to our platform.
And then a book comes out, Four Steps to the Epiphany and I read it and it blows my mind. It's a good book, but also it was a book I was ready to read. For the first time I had skin in the game. These words weren't theory, they mattered. I have a history of emailing people I find interesting, but couldn't find Steve Blank's email, only a phone number at Hass where he taught. I called it, expecting to reach a answering machine in his offer. Instead I got his wife. She said, I think it's one of your students.
And then a book comes out, Four Steps to the Epiphany and I read it and it blows my mind. It's a good book, but also it was a book I was ready to read. For the first time I had skin in the game. These words weren't theory, they mattered. I have a history of emailing people I find interesting, but couldn't find Steve Blank's email, only a phone number at Hass where he taught. I called it, expecting to reach a answering machine in his offer. Instead I got his wife. She said, I think it's one of your students.
And then a book comes out, Four Steps to the Epiphany and I read it and it blows my mind. It's a good book, but also it was a book I was ready to read. For the first time I had skin in the game. These words weren't theory, they mattered. I have a history of emailing people I find interesting, but couldn't find Steve Blank's email, only a phone number at Hass where he taught. I called it, expecting to reach a answering machine in his offer. Instead I got his wife. She said, I think it's one of your students.
I explained who I was, and he invited me out to his ranch in pescadero, where he was staying with his wife. I made some ridiculous comment like I'd be out there anyway wednesday to meet a potential client and I'd love to swing by and drove out there to talk to him.
We spoke for two hours. It was before Eric Reis was his student, before he became the godfather of the startup surge. But it changed my life.
I realized I had no market for the product as it was. I was a designer and I had been doing customer interviews all along. I had all the facts to tell me that the people I was targeting couldn't and wouldn't buy my product. But I hadn’t connected that to my business health. Because I didn’t really understand how business functioned. I'd have to pivot… a word we didn't use yet… in order to make money. Or close down.
I realized I had no market for the product as it was. I was a designer and I had been doing customer interviews all along. I had all the facts to tell me that the people I was targeting couldn't and wouldn't buy my product. But I hadn’t connected that to my business health. Because I didn’t really understand how business functioned. I'd have to pivot… a word we didn't use yet… in order to make money. Or close down.
I shopped my company around, and me, my CTO (my previous cofounder had left to become a life coach, but that's another story) and our code base found a home at Linkedin. We informed our customers we were going away, and we were absorbed into what would be one of the most successful IPO's of 2011. Linkedin was my finishing school, a smart and nimble company that knew how to marry mission and money.
I shopped my company around, and me, my CTO (my previous cofounder had left to become a life coach, but that's another story) and our code base found a home at Linkedin. We informed our customers we were going away, and we were absorbed into what would be one of the most successful IPO's of 2011. Linkedin was my finishing school, a smart and nimble company that knew how to marry mission and money.
When I was offered a job at Linkedin, I was asked a critical question: join design or join product management.
I chose product. I turned my back on design. After struggling so hard and long to have my dream come true, design seemed frivolous and wrongheaded. They continued to seem so as I moved through my next few companies.
There were always a few individuals I loved working with, but most designers seemed to always be advocating choices that would break the business model, destroy revenue or erode competitive advantage.
And once burned, twice shy. I liked working with engineers, I loved working with analytics folks, but designers made me nervous now. Their choices seemed whimsical and dangerous.
But after leaving my last job as a General Manager, I found myself slowly returning to my roots and my early love. I met with Kristian Simsarian to talk about teaching at CCA.
I knew what I'd teach. I'd teach entrepreneurship. The Designer Fund had started, AirBnB was the poster boy for entrepreneurial designers, and 500 startups kicked off Warm Gun, declaring design as the next silver bullet. I went to CCA excited to share my hard earned learning at the newly minted topic studio, Designer as Founder.
I knew what I'd teach. I'd teach entrepreneurship. The Designer Fund had started, AirBnB was the poster boy for entrepreneurial designers, and 500 startups kicked off Warm Gun, declaring design as the next silver bullet. I went to CCA excited to share my hard earned learning at the newly minted topic studio, Designer as Founder.
Any teacher will tell you: to learn anything well, teach it. I taught them Steve Blank, Joined by Eric Reis's Lean Startup and the newly released Business Model Canvas from Alex Osterwalder.
If you don't know the holy trinity, let me give you the 10000 foot bird eye's view.
Steve Blank said you should talk to your customers as you develop your offering. He said there were no answers in the building, you must go out into the world if you want to make something people want.
Eric Reis said you should build small things, test them, learn, then build the next thing until you find successes.
And that’s how I taught it; We spend 16 weeks in teams trying to make an business that can fly.
Alex Osterwalder said you should look at all aspects of the business and design them collectively to assure a successful ecosystem. While all three hold a distinctly user-centered design approach, Osterwalder is the first to state it unambiguously, using design tools and innovation games throughout his book and calling them that. It is a designed book, in every sense of the world, and it was written in collaboration with a group of beta readers.
Alex Osterwalder said you should look at all aspects of the business and design them collectively to assure a successful ecosystem. While all three hold a distinctly user-centered design approach, Osterwalder is the first to state it unambiguously, using design tools and innovation games throughout his book and calling them that. It is a designed book, in every sense of the world, and it was written in collaboration with a group of beta readers.
All three, at their hearts, are user-centered designers. They just happen to design business.
While it is true my designer students still balked at doing market sizing, they were terrific at customer development and rapid iteration. That said, their relationship with math changed when I gave them one key assignment: Map out their personal burn rate. They had to, in order to determine how much money to raise, and how much to charge for their product.
First the first time for many, they added up their rent and food and transportation. They went on salary.com to find out how much an engineer would cost them (and boy, were they mad about their major when they found out.) They had thought they knew what their business model was. But the math told them otherwise. If they were making an ap, they found out they'd have to sell to everyone on earth to break even. Job's 99 cent world didn't seem fair anymore. Advertising had similar problems.
First the first time for many, they added up their rent and food and transportation. They went on salary.com to find out how much an engineer would cost them (and boy, were they mad about their major when they found out.) They had thought they knew what their business model was. But the math told them otherwise. If they were making an ap, they found out they'd have to sell to everyone on earth to break even. Job's 99 cent world didn't seem fair anymore. Advertising had similar problems.
First the first time for many, they added up their rent and food and transportation. They went on salary.com to find out how much an engineer would cost them (and boy, were they mad about their major when they found out.) They had thought they knew what their business model was. But the math told them otherwise. If they were making an ap, they found out they'd have to sell to everyone on earth to break even. Job's 99 cent world didn't seem fair anymore. Advertising had similar problems.
And like Barbie, they said, math is hard. But for them, it meant the math of survival is hard.
One thing I didn't expect is that they made better entrepreneurs than most of the startups I advised. Like most senior people in the Valley, I had a handful of startups I spent time with. Most struggled to get traction with their target market. Once designers got over their prejudice against business and fear of spreadsheets they were fearsome entrepreneurs.
One thing I didn't expect is that they made better entrepreneurs than most of the startups I advised. Like most senior people in the Valley, I had a handful of startups I spent time with. Most struggled to get traction with their target market. Once designers got over their prejudice against business and fear of spreadsheets they were fearsome entrepreneurs.
In fact, I took many of the techniques developed in that class as well as a summer version of it I taught in Copenhagen at CIID, and brought them to the Lean Startup Conference and to my Stanford class in the Leadership program.
It's not just being user centered that makes them so great. It's they way we work. It's the post-its, and the walls covered with research and photos, and the drawings and the paper prototypes. It's the way we play, and are wrong and try again.
It's how designers think not only with their minds but with their bodies and with the world. Call it design thinking or just call it design, but it matters.
When I teach business people to act like designers, they think like designers. They put the end user in the center of their thinking. They playfully experiment, and test their hypothesis with real people. They develop empathy, and refine their businesses. They make better things. Sometimes they make truly good things.
This matters because we all want a better world, and right now entrepreneurship is the way to accelerate progress. If we leave it to the MBAs who should be on Wall Street pushing around pretend money, we abdicate an opportunity to make real and lasting change for the better in the world, in favor for those who want to turn change into another profit game.
This matters because we all want a better world, and right now entrepreneurship is the way to accelerate progress. If we leave it to the MBAs who should be on Wall Street pushing around pretend money, we abdicate an opportunity to make real and lasting change for the better in the world, in favor for those who want to turn change into another profit game.
But if we choose to teach our students what a healthy business ecosystem really can be, they will be make the next B-corp, or healthy sustainable nonprofit or maybe even a business that actually respects the people it profits form, rather productizes them. We need business an design to come together.
But if we choose to teach our students what a healthy business ecosystem really can be, they will be make the next B-corp, or healthy sustainable nonprofit or maybe even a business that actually respects the people it profits form, rather productizes them. We need business an design to come together.
At the end of the Designer as Founder class I asked my students to write 500 words of a lessons learned for the class. This sums it up for me.