Business as a platform
Issue 236: Applying business to your craft
In any role or company size, it’s important to understand how the business affects your craft area. However, it doesn't mean you must go into business and earn an MBA to be impactful. There is an over-indexing of business impact which may hurt your craft. For example, if a designer optimizes too much on revenue at all costs in sacrificing product experience quality, it causes a negative effect. Yes, this also applies to growth designers. Instead of infusing your craft into the business, think of the business as a platform requirement for your craft. The framing is nuanced but drastically different.
This is where thinking of the business as a platform might help with where to invest efforts to make an impact at the company level. A platform and ecosystem have forces of nature that make you think critically about emerging technology, new markets, and other elements that might invoke paradigm shifts.
I like to think of business as endpoints to a platform you're building. If you're a designer, your output is going to be close to the customers based on what they experience offline, on marketing materials, and interface. As a software engineer, you may be building with design on the same features, but you also have to ensure code quality and integrity as part of the job.
Applying the platform to business
Let's look at a few considerations I look at when designing with a Platform in mind that could be applied to business impact.
Identify the key endpoints
When you’re thinking of the business as a platform, consider what the key endpoints are for your craft. Platforms should focus on the global maxima of impact, but what endpoints are important may vary on your craft and sub-disciplines within it. A Growth Designer may be looking at the retention and monetization endpoints whereas a Systems Designer focuses on performance of global patterns. However, both might care about the perception of performance and quality of components and how it affects trust resulting in an increase (or decrease) of retention and monetization.
In my post, Managing towards outcomes, you can leverage the input/output exercise as a way to identify essential endpoints.
Use this as a shared discussion amongst your team in which lens-specific crafts and sub-disciplines might apply the importance of it the business.
Trade-offs between platform dogma and customer value
Every platform team has to make a trade-off of when to be dogmatic about the platform vs. delivering value. Going against the platform incurs debt, but if the platform slows down progress to deliver customer value, you fall behind. Though I believe in designing the most enduring architecture possible where endpoints can be enduring, it's not a realistic way of thinking about things. Most platforms are inherited and have tech debt. Organizations and business also have their type of debt.
Explore new directions that might contribute to the future state of the platform. Let's take a new business opportunity, for example. Instead of rolling out an entire service, the company has to maintain, running a small pilot can open the valve for exploration and investigation.
Future proof the system
Finally, design where the platform needs to support. Don't play catchup. Apply the Ship of Theseus Paradox in a manner where the components are constantly evolving.
Thinking of a business as part of the platform helps you ensure requirements are ingested and the team is constantly thinking about how to foster the platform.
Ways to develop business acumen
How does one gain experience in business? Simple—start a business or join a startup. "Embrace the entrepreneurial spirit" is one of my design philosophies." When constructing teams, I like having designers who've started their own companies or worked at an early-stage startup. It doesn't matter if they had an exit. What's important is they had exposure close to the business.
Another tip is to do desk research and cosplay as an analyst. Whether you're public or private, set up an RSS feed to read news about how the market and analysts are thinking about your space. You should be able to speak about the business the same way an analyst does and drill down to why that's important.
Business acumen isn’t about switching careers or becoming a biz ops expert. Viewing business as a platform clarifies your craft’s purpose—something lost and must be regained.
Hyperlinks + notes
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One of our clients said that they think of us as a platform for exchanging ideas.
Thinking of design service as a platform could be an example of what you shared
One of the deliverables in design is the user experience or user interface, and outcomes are not generally tracked because it’s impossible to do just with the prototype of the UI screens. After all, you must integrate that in the code and let people use it; sometime in the future, you will get some feedback.
So, thinking of design services as a platform is a good concept, but how do we get to the outcomes if the engagement is not long enough and tied to milestones of deliveries