Globally, business problems are becoming increasingly complex, interconnected, and intractable. Despite many companies focusing on design as a differentiator, they don’t fully grasp what a design-led approach can accomplish. As a result, companies are investing in designers who can tell what design actions to take to improve their financial performance, leading to the birth of business design.

What is business design?

Business design boils down to two things; value capture and value creation. Value creation involves creating value for your customers based on their needs. The more value you make, the better. And value capture consists of capturing the value created and converting it into profit. All in all, it’s about mapping design efforts into direct, sustainable business impact.

So what’s the role of a business designer?

Since business designers are relatively new positions, their responsibilities vary between companies. Most business designers practice customer research, data synthesis, opportunity hunting, ideation, prototyping, testing, and road mapping. On paper, these can all sound good, but in my experience and observations from corporate clients, business designers in this day and age still fall short.

And what’s the gap with business designers today?

Suppose you are currently a business designer or intend to become one. You might be considering your designs’ impact, from turning an organization’s focus from product-centric to customer-centric to facilitating frequent design workshops to educate internal stakeholders about sustainable design. But before you smile and congratulate yourself on a job well done, I hate to say this, but you are just putting a fresh coat of paint on the walls.

Many designers with decades of professional design experience may not have the business knowledge or experience to convert design knowledge into business profits. Moreover, by managing design thinking workshops and holding design sprints in turtleneck tops, they will be seen primarily as facilitators of a team-building activity rather than genuinely committed to fostering an agile or innovative culture within the organization.

Great design is beyond form or function; it’s serious business.

As businesses adapt to the new normal, business designers need to shift beyond user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX) to the business of experience (BX). It’s time to move from focusing on how to make a product or app more customer-centric to concentrating on helping customers achieve their intrinsic goals. Here are three common mistakes business designers should avoid if needed to succeed and be treated seriously in the boardroom.

Mistake 1: Not going beyond brainstorming and sticky notes.

Design Thinking is an excellent way for companies to identify insights and think creatively about problems and systems. Unfortunately, business designers often misunderstand the process and implement them superficially.

Designers facilitate sessions with people yelling out dozens of ideas in a room and pinning them on sticky notes. At the end of these sessions, half-baked insights/concepts are often seen as formulas for success because they focus too much on ideas rather than solutions. Let’s face it, everyone in business loves recipes for success. But this insight/concept is not yet a success. It has not proved the value it creates nor got a revenue model to capture this value.

So please don’t fall into this trap of thinking that the business design part is done. On the contrary, the actual job of business design has just begun. Now is when business designers need to move beyond just designing minds to designing hands and work even closer across a company’s value chain. So start getting comfortable with revenue streams, cost structure, change management, and operational optimization processes. As highlighted in Maria Guidice and Christopher Ireland’s book: Rise of the DEO: Leadership by Design, business designers today needs to be a hybrid of strategic business executive and creative problem-solver.