https://www.beyondusers.com/guides/what-is-business-design-guide
You need to understand what drives business value, how executives think, how they make decisions, and master business tools and frameworks.

Business Empathy**
In the early stages of a project, we want our team to not exercise only customer empathy but also business empathy. We want to find the best balance between customer and business goals. Only then can we expect a successful product.
Business Empathy is my term for bringing the business lens to the research phase. It covers two activities. First, asking business-minded questions in customer interviews. Second, interviewing business stakeholders to better understand their goals.
So, in the business empathy workshop, business designers work with their team to add business-minded questions to the discussion guide. This would typically cover areas such as:

  • How big is the pain of interviewee’s problem? How much time/money are they spending on solving it right now?
  • Who is the decision-maker? Who will pay for the solution (and who will use it)?
  • What trade-offs are customers willing to make for their solution? (think about strategic trade-offs discusses later in the business design prototypes section)
  • How and when would they ideally want to pay for the solution? How are they paying for other similar solutions in their life?
  • How is value created and exchanged in the value chain?
  • etc.

Secondly, together with a team, you would define the most important project’s stakeholders. Who is investing in it? Who will be affected? Who could block a project? Who would benefit from it? Create a shortlist and interview them too. In these interviews, you want to learn four things:

  • Goals - what are their quarterly, yearly and long term goals
  • Their Challenges - what is blocking them in achieving those goals
  • KPIs - how are they measuring goals
  • Organization - how are they organized

If you do this well, you don’t only learn about business expectations. You will also identify the vocabulary that you need to use in your project deliverables in order to convince decision-makers.
Blue Ocean Workshop
Whenever you need to design a new business strategy, I would suggest conducting a Blue Ocean Workshop. It will help you get valuable input from your team and business leaders.
In essence, the Blue Ocean Strategy facilitates making strategic trade-off decisions. We need to decide where we want to compete, who we want to target, and what we will invest in.
Before trying this workshop, you should familiarize yourself with the Blue Ocean Strategy. Best way to do that is by reading the Blue Ocean Strategy book.
The basic tool we will use in this workshop is the Blue Ocean Canvas. The workshops can be structured as follows:

  • define competing factors (what companies in an industry invest in),
  • draw the dominants strategic groups lines (what other strategic groups in the industry invest in),
  • and draw your blue ocean offer (by answering what competing factors you will eliminate, reduce, raise, and introduce).

Financial Planning Workshop
Towards the end of the project, business designers sometimes prepare a detailed financial plan. This covers projects’ estimated revenue and costs, which helps us understand the size (and viability) of a business opportunity. This exercise usually involves making many educated assumptions so there is a high degree of uncertainty, which can be reduced by bringing others into the process.
Prior to the “financial planning workshop”, business designers already prepare the first version of a financial plan. In the session, we present a prototype to get feedback from our team. Even if the rest of the team is not business-minded they still have a really good feeling for certain assumptions.
If a client/investor is involved in this workshop, we can provide certain data that helps us hone the financial model. For example, when I created a financial model for a new product that would need a team of 10 developers I could only guess how much they are paid. But my client knew exactly the average cost of a developer so I after talking to him I could plug in the exact number and decrease uncertainty in my model.
A quick tip: For financial planning, I would suggest using the Discovery-Driven Planning (DDP) instead of a regular business planning approach because DDP helps us turn our assumptions into experiments (for the final stage of the project)

How do business design deliverables look like?

These are too many deliverables for me to cover in this guide so here is a short overview of the most common ones:

  • Competitor research - Who are we competing against?
  • Industry analysis - What role should we play in the industry and why?
  • Ecosystem Map - How would the business model look like?
  • Revenue potential - How much can we expect from this project?
  • Business Strategy - How we compete against others?
  • Organizational charts and implications - What needs to change on the organizational layer to execute on the vision?
  • Proposed metrics - How will we know if we are on the right track?
  • Timeline - How will we go about making it happen?
  • Go-to-Market-Strategy - How we plan to enter the market?
  • Suggested Pricing Plans - How and much would we charge for a product?

Let’s begin with my favorite business model tool. An ecosystem map that shows how our product or venture will actually work. It consists of four building blocks:
Recommended resources - 图1
The Ecosystem Map (business model visualization) for Netflix.

  • Actors: Who is involved in creating, delivering and capturing value (individuals, companies, partners, etc.)?
  • Flow of information: How is information flowing among actors? What type of information?
  • Flow of goods: How is a product or service flowing from a provider to a customer?
  • Flow of money: Who pays whom? How does money travel?


Books for designers to read
Start here:**

Then read this:

  • Hacking Growth: How Today’s Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success by Morgan Brown, Sean Ellis
  • Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur
  • Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters by Richard Rumelt
  • Play Bigger: How Rebels and Innovators Create New Categories and Dominate Markets by Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, and Kevin Maney

Finish with these:

  • Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works by Roger Martin and A. G. Lafley
  • Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors by Michael Porter
  • Discovery-Driven Growth: A Breakthrough Process to Reduce Risk and Seize Opportunity by Rita Gunther McGrath, Ian C. Macmillan
  • Numbers Guide: Essentials of Business Numeracy by The Economist

Books for BA to read

Immerse yourself fully:

  • Find a 3-6 month project or internship at a design agency or design team
  • Take IDEO U course: Insights for Innovation
  • Read all Medium articles on IDEO’s Design Research Methods
  • Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want by Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda, Alan Smith, and Trish Papadakos
  • Discovery-Driven Growth: A Breakthrough Process to Reduce Risk and Seize Opportunity by Rita Gunther McGrath, Ian C. Macmillan
  • Take IDEO U course: Designing a Business (a venture design course that is based on business design mindset)

Polish your skills with these:

欢迎大家联系我分享更多这个领域的知识！
You are most welcomed to collaborate this piece together!