Business for UX Designers: Connect design to business goals

1. Intro: Hey folks, my name is Vineet and welcome to this course, which is business for designers. In this course, we're going to go through some of the basic introduction to business concepts that you may not be familiar with. Three, work as a designer. So the kind of things that you wouldn't learn if you went to say, a design school. And, and we're gonna talk about the kind of things that your business really cares about. So ultimately, what are the metrics that really drives people in the business? Then using that knowledge will actually look at how you can apply this in the design process. So knowing some of these things that the business cares about, how do you actually connect that to the design work that you're doing every single day. At the end, we'll go through some other resources as well. So there's plenty of opportunities for you to learn a little bit more. This course is really a broad test or to a wide range of different business concepts. So really hoping that you get some interesting knowledge here, stuff that you really enjoy learning about. And you find something that you want to go and learn a little bit more about in the future. Enjoy the course, and please make sure and leave me some feedback in the comments. I'm really, really excited to hear what everyone thinks of it. Thanks. 2. Five parts to every business: Hey folks. So in this class we're going to talk about the five parts to every business and these fog parts, they're going to be in any business, whether you're a lemonade stand or a global empire. So the five parts, every business, what are they? So its value creation, marketing, sales, value delivery, and finance. So obviously if you are eliminates done, they're going to be a little bit different in terms of the complexity and the scale to global empire. But let's go through a few examples of what this actually looks like in the practice. So value creation, it's all about making a thing. So if you're selling services, this might be a little bit different to whether you're creating physical products. But essentially every business exists to create some kind of value for the, for the end users or customers. The marketing side of things is really telling people that you made it. So you made this thing and all you need to tell people about it. And of course, the reason that you do marketing is because you actually want to mix them sales. So you actually want to sell this thing that you've made to people. Once you've then made that sale, you actually have to deliver the value. So this is all about getting that product or that thing into the customers hands and really delivering what you sold. The last part that we wanna keep track of is going to be those finances. So obviously, if somebody's giving you money for the thing that you've made, your going to need to keep track of that somehow. And that's really what, what finance is all about. So regardless of what your business is, these five things going to be consistent across every single business. So what does that actually look like? So let's say we are that kind of lemonade stand. The thing that you're making? Well, it's lemonade. What's your marketing? Maybe it's just a stall with a sign telling people to come by and by your lemonade. How do you sell it? Maybe you've got some kind of payment radar as something like square popular these days for actually completing that sale and then delivered at right. So this is like where you actually put the lemonade and the cup and handed over to the person in terms of keeping track of your finances, I've been pretty generous here to say like XML document, that's a pretty fancy lemonade stand, but maybe it's even just like a pen and paper ledger where you're just recording the sales that you've got coming into the business that particular day. And if at all, perhaps in the lemonade stand example, you'll notice that concerned about that kind of thing. So how does it change then when I go to a consulting business? So in this case, the value that I'm creating is actually my consulting services, marketing. Well, there's tons and tons of different ways that I could do marketing. I could do more traditional marketing through say, print media or television advertising. Or, or maybe something a little bit more targeted and specific like Facebook ads or Google ads online in terms of selling. So usually a little bit different, potentially be issuing an invoice. So in terms of the way that I'm collecting my money, it's perhaps not up front if I'm a consulting firm, actually, maybe it's something that we're I'm collecting the money a little bit later on. And when I'm selling it, I'm actually issuing an invoice and deliver what I sell it. So let's say I'm a freelance web developer. Maybe the website is the deliverable. So that's really the thing that I'm, that I'm going to hand over and deliver at the end and, and then keeping track of things. So again, Excel document could work pretty well here does for a lot of small businesses. But certainly once you get to this level of tracking potentially thousands and thousands of dollars, really you want to start looking at having something like accounting software to start to keep track of your finances in your business. So that's kind of, you know, regardless of what business you're in this, all these five parts are going to remain consistent, but they obviously change with the business. So where does product design play a role here? And for me, design can have a role to play in real specific spots. So while I think it's critical for us as product designers and UX designers to be aware of what these five parts are. I think there's a couple of places in particular that will tend to spend a lot of our time. So to kind of go with one of the ones that I haven't highlighted first, Perhaps you actually are and marketing designers. So in our team, we've got designers who primarily work in our marketing website. And in that case, maybe your focus actually is about telling people that we've met it or really focusing on, on selling that product to people. In my case, I'm working in the product, so I'm really focused on actually making the things and then making sure those things are delivered. So talking to customers to make sure that we're making the right thing. But then also working with our own product development team to make sure that we're delivering the thing that we promised to customers. So making sure that the thing that actually comes out at the end of the process is similar to the thing that we're talking about and that we've promised up at the start. So I think while absolutely designers can have a role to play in marketing, sales, and even the finance side as well. I think the places where we can really focus our time is going to be in these value creation and value delivery. In terms of that example, like hawking a design or be involved in the finance. I think this is something you'll expect to see more as you progress in your career. So when you become, say, a manager, often you're going to have some responsibilities for the staff that you're managing, but perhaps you're going to have things like a budget. So in my case, for example, we've got a user testing budget which we have to manage. And therefore I start to have to pay attention to what's the finite situation? How much money are we actually spend? Need to talk to customers? And is that feasible? Are we getting a good return on investment for that money that we're spending? So while it might be the primary aspect of your job, it's certainly something that you can see coming up, especially as you progress in your career as a product designer. 3. Four things every business cares about: Okay, so following on from the five parts of every business, this sum, we got four things. And this is really the four things that every business cares about. And again, this is whether you that lemonade stand or some kind of, some kind of global empire. The four things, Revenue, Costs, market share and shareholder value. So you might have some idea of a couple of those. A couple might be as clear, but let's do a bit of a deeper dive into what each of those individual things actually is talking about. So the first thing is revenue and really the goal with revenue, we want to increase the money that's coming into the business. So if you want to run a successful business, you need money coming in. And that's really all revenue is. If you want to show the value of design and your business, connecting the work that you're doing with increasing the revenue is probably one of your best ways to get noticed. So most businesses exist to make money. Even a non-profit business is going to rely on revenue coming into that business. And there's a bunch of different ways that we could do this. It's probably the easiest to visualize in terms of what does it actually mean? How can we improve the costs? Or sorry, the revenue coming in? And so attracting new customers is an obvious one. More customers means more money coming through the door and connecting existing customers to use services. So a customer that say pain you 50 or $60 a year, if you can get them to pay 80 or $90 a year, then that's going to increase your revenue as well. And then obviously raising prices. So if somebody's paying you again $50 a year and you do a great job and they want to keep using your service and you raise the price to $55. And there's a pretty chance, pretty good chance they're going to stay on a pretty good chance that you're going to make some more revenue out of that. Of course that's, that comes with the risk as while of, well, is the customer actually going to hang around? So you want to be really careful about how you actually do that. And the same with connecting existing customers to new services, right? If you just start to flood out, advertise to existing customers, maybe you actually put them off a little bit as well. So certainly quite simple to visualize what more revenue means. But in terms of actually delivering on it, it can be a really complex thing. Of course. The next thing that every business cares about is costs. So very much the flip side to revenue. And the goal with costs is, how can we decrease the costs that are going on? So obviously we want more money coming in and we want less money going out. So when it comes to costs, less is obviously better. And it's yet the opposite to increasing revenue. Reducing costs will also make people sit up and take notice. So this is another great way for you to show impact as a designer. And as we talked about in that F5 parts of every business, There's a few kind of add many things that you can certainly do if maybe you're in more of a leadership position in terms of looking at the way your team is actually spending money. But in terms of actually design itself, in design process, there's plenty of ways that we can do it there. So one way is improving workflow. So let's say you've got a support team. You could actually look at something like, well, how could we actually reduce the amount of calls coming into that support center? Because if that support center exists at every day and they taking calls every day for a year, being able to decrease the amount of calls coming in, and then being able to multiply that across the year, you're gonna start to see a pretty huge reduction in costs on something that a lot of people are going to sit up and take notice of. Probably a more interesting way, and potentially a little bit less obvious, is actually using something like research to eliminate BAD ideas before they hit costly development. So there's that quite contentious term ought there of MVP. Like what is an MVP or minimum viable product actually mean? But what we actually could be doing is looking at ways to experiment so that we can validate ideas really early on by using things like MVPs before we go and invest lots and lots of development time on something. So if it's going to take our developers six month to build a feature and it's actually going to end up that nobody uses that feature. Or we much better spending, say, one month upfront doing a little bit of research to figure out if that feature is something that our customers actually want. And I think especially when we're talking about trying to get some money for doing things like user research. We should be really clear about what the end goal of that research is. And a lot of the time you can actually position that as something which is going to save the business money in the long term. So I think while cutting costs can be as easy as you know, let's pay less money for incentives or, you know, maybe we don't go in that kind of work audience for a nice dinner at the end of the year. Often that's going to make much less of a difference than something like actually proving that your research is going to really help reduce the risk and something getting built that costs the business a lot of money. So really important to look for. Interesting ways of connecting the design process to actually decreasing the cost is going out of your business. Okay, so the next one is market share. So there's really two potential goals here when it comes to market share. You might either want to have more of the pie or you might actually want to have a bigger pie. So you could be trying to increase your share, are actually increasing the size of what it is. So you can either look at the market that you're operating in and tried to own more of that market. Or you can actually try to expand out into a bigger market and then be satisfied with potentially a smaller share of that bigger market. So if we use our lemonade stand example, what does that actually look like? So let's say I start by selling lemonade on my street. That's a relatively small market, right? Because I'm really just looking at my straight and serving the people that exist on my street. If I'm doing a really great job at that, maybe I decide actually I wanna go beyond my straight. I really think that I want to go to my whole neighborhoods. So I'm going to open up a few different lemonades Dans in all these different corners of my neighborhood. So that's one way of me really focused still on selling lemonade. I'm not changing my basic business, but by adding new locations in more places. I'm, I'm really trying to increase the amount of reach that i have in terms of selling more lemonade. So that's one thing that I could do is so that's me looking at the lemonade business and going, okay, I want to expand my lemonade business into, into bigger areas. But actually, another thing that I could do is look at selling more than lemonade. Because I can keep opening lemonade stands for the rest of time. But if people don't want lemonade, they're never going to care about me. So perhaps actually decide, you know, what a more efficient way for me to gain market share is actually to stop just thinking about lemonade and start increasing the amount of things that I'm going to sell. So perhaps I just wanted to become a refreshments play a slight, maybe there's a bunch of fitness phonetics and my area. They won't protein shakes. And all of a sudden I start making fancy protein shakes as well as my eliminate. Because I think that's actually going to increase the different people that are potentially interested in stopping by my business. So you can see there's a couple of different strategies there. One is really stick to the thing that, you know, I just basically open more and more different stores. So that's really looking at the market that I'm operating in. I'm going to try it ONE more, that market and really dominant lemonade. Or actually, I could try to expand into a bigger market and say, yes, I'm going to have more competition in this bigger market, but actually there's a lot more opportunity out there. So even though I'm not going to own as much of that kind of bigger pie. There's actually still going to be more revenue opportunities for me than if I'm just selling lemonade. I think it's important to consider that there's one opportunity to actually dominate the market that you're in and own that market. But actually potentially you want to go and address a much larger market. Some term that you might actually hear that references this is the total addressable market, also known as the time. So that's one of those terms you'll hear thrown about in business quite a lot, which is really what, what is our time look like for this particular product. So in this case, I'm talking about the time of the whole business. But potentially, every time you're talking about really seen a new feature or solving a new problem for your customers. It's really important to consider what is the actual breach of that problem. Because if it's something which has got a lot of rage, you're gonna get people really interested in it. So I think being aware of that concept of time or total addressable market is something which is really useful beyond this kind of high level looking, looking at what market share actually means. So a really good concept to, to kind of keep in mind, especially as you're discussing new opportunities within the business that you operate in. Okay? And the last one of those four things that every business cares about is shareholder value. And really hear shareholder value is all about keeping the people happy. So showing over turnover and a return on investment for those who have believed in the business. And ultimately every, everything really comes back to shareholder value. So the result of increasing revenue, the result of decreasing costs or improving your market share will all increase the shareholder value that they're seeing. And it's important to note that while usually more's better, not all businesses are trying to build empires. So obviously we want to turn a profit. We want to have more money coming in, then we have going on. That's typically going to be a good outcome. But not every single business exists to try to just grow and grow and hire more people, especially in the small business community, a lot of people are just happy to keep their business going year to year because it's actually more about the lifestyle and the flexibility that they get out of that business. If you're in a bigger, more corporate organization, then of course you're going to be looking at a trying to potentially grow that business and shareholder value becomes a very different thing in that circumstance. It's also worth mentioning that even not for profit businesses, so businesses that actually when they make a profit, it, it's not something that they're, they're putting into their own pockets. They still want to get shareholder value. They still want to actually turn a profit. It's just that, that money is not actually necessarily going back into the pockets of the people who invested in it. So if I'm a publicly listed company, shareholder value can very often mean money in my pocket, so I'm going to put money into your business. And as a result of that, when you make a profit, I'm going to get lots of money back out of it. With a not-for-profit, they still want to turn a profit. It's just not necessarily going, going back into people's pockets in the same way. So just a really key distinction. But essentially, I think whatever activities that were undertaken in the business, it's all about making sure that the people who have actually invested in that business are seeing some kind of outcome for their investments to encourage them to keep that investment there. And because if they don't see that, they're going to pull their money out. And all of a sudden, it, it's going to get a lot harder to keep the business going. So shareholder value is probably the most critical of all of those four things that the business really cares about. 4. Retention and Churn: Okay, so next up we're going to talk about some fundamental business concepts. We're gonna talk about a few key words and terms that you'll hear. So things like CLV, things like CAC. I'm really just do a bit of a quick overview as to what those things actually mean. And if you're really interested in them, you can kind of pick up on this and read about them a little bit further and maybe how they apply to your business as well a bit later on. So the first thing that I'd like to talk about is churn and also retention because these things are really different sides of the same coin. And this is really just, you know, you'll see a lot of different ways that you can measure churn and retention. I just want to give you a really basic introduction so, so you get a feel for what might be done. So let's, let's pick some pretty simple Ron numbers. So let's say at the start of the month, I'm running a software as a service company. So basically I accompany where our customers paying me a subscription much like they would with say, Netflix or Spotify, $10.15 dollars a month, whatever it is. So let say at the start of the month, I have a thousand customers paying me that $10 a month. And during that month I have ten customers that leave. So at the end of the month, I've got 990 customers left. Note that I'm not taking into account here any new customers that are added during the month. So this is a really important thing to call out because obviously if we signed up, say, 15 new customers this month and I'm going to have a positive number. What we're really concerned about when we talk about churn and retention is the behavior of our existing customers. So this set as sit slightly to the side of acquisition of new customers. So I've got 1000 customers, ten customers leave at the end of the month, I've got 990 customers left. So doing the math on this, it's pretty straightforward. Ten out of a thousand, that's 1% of my customers. And, and this is what I would call my churn rate. So my churn rate is the amount of customers who leave, and that's 1% of my customers. So that means in that month I've got this churn rate of about 1% of my customers. So what is retention? Well, retention is basically the complete opposite. So retention is one minus my churn rate. So if my churn rate in this case is 1%, it's basically a 100% minus the 1%. And in this case I get 99%. So you could say that my retention is 99%. And it's a little bit of a, is the glass half empty or half full? Which way you want to look at this? You want to focus on retention or, or do you want to focus on churn? And in our case, like you see in different businesses, they, they use different things in different ways to describe this. There is a little bit of a difference when you get into the details of this. But at a high level, your attention is basically one minus whatever your churn rate is. So in this case we've got 99% retention. Now that sounds really good, right? Like 99% retention, like that's most of our customers. Sure, we don't want to lose anybody, but that still sounds pretty good. What you'll actually see in practice is that because we are often talking in terms of say, like this example is a one month term. One month is a really short period of time. So what you'll often see a business doing is actually extrapolating this and going, well, what does this actually look like over a year? And this is what you'll see called unutilized retention. And the reason for this is because one month seems like too short a period of time. And we actually want to say, well, what if this behavior actually happened over the course of a year? So in order to calculate that, we really have one minus our churn rate multiplied by 12. So in our example, our churn rate was 1%. So we're going to multiply that by 12, so we get 12%. So you can say in this case our churn rate is actually 12% annually. Or if we're going to be a little bit more optimistic about, it, would say that our unutilized retention ends up being idiot present. So the reason that we do this is really just to make sure that we're considering things over not too short a time frame and think, Well actually what if this behavior was to occur for a year? So whenever you look at retention, you'll see all different kinds of ways of measuring it. This is one way that you can measure it. And, and it's really worth looking at in your business, how do they measure it? Because maybe they actually don't use the annulus retention. Maybe they actually look at retention over just a twelv month period, not a month to month period. So I'm not saying this is the only way to do retention, but it's really important that you understand that there is more than one way. And it's not just as simple as how many customers leave in the month, for example. And, and, and as I mentioned at the start, you've got churn really the opposite to retentions. The two sides are very much the same coin. 5. Some more popular terms: Cool, so that's our retention churn. Really common popular metrics that you'll see. Let's actually look now at a couple of other metrics that we have. So the first metric to look at is something called ARPU. And that means average revenue per user. And this is really, as it says on the tin, it's the average revenue that you're getting for every user that you have often over a time period, something like a month, you might actually see it referred to as Marcu, or monthly average revenue per user. And if you are looking at over a month, or potentially, you will average revenue per user. Like there's lots of different ways you can adjust it. And essentially what you're saying is a2 of r. In this case, I'm gonna use the example again. We're, we're a monthly subscription company, let's say Netflix or Spotify. And we're actually just looking at, for all of our users, what is the average amount of money we're getting every month? So if we've got someone giving us $20 a month, someone ten, a couple on five. We averaged out at about $10 per month. Obviously, increasing the average revenue per user means increasing the average revenue coming into the business. And this is always something that we're going to want to increase. So we might actually start to really look into the insights of who is on what plan. We might start doing some marketing around. How can we get these $5 per month customers to upgrade and domaine $10 or $20 per month customers. And this is something that will really be able to keep an eye on. If we do some design work to say increase this ARPU, it's something which is really easy to measure as well. So it's a really good one for being able to connect designed to value. Of course, that's very much a business problems. So in order for us to actually turn it into a customer problem, like we need to make sure that we're not just going How can we get this person from $5 to $10 per month? That's not a customer problem and that's not going to get us anywhere. And that should be something that we actually see through the work that we're doing when we're talking to customers. For example, that the customer who's paying us $20 per month is probably getting a lot more value than the customer paying $5 per month. And while not every single customer pain as $5 a month is going to become someone who pays us 20. And I'm sure there's a good subset of them who, who may be really interested in services that we can offer us. So certainly something worth thinking about. How can we actually increase the amount of money that our customers are giving us? The next term that we'll talk about is customer lifetime value. Again, one that pretty much does what it says. It's the value of a customer over their lifetime, often abbreviated to CLV. And yeah, definition the value of customer contributes over a lifetime. This is a really common. So if you actually Google image search customer lifetime value, you'll see lots of graphs that look very similar to the one that I've got on here. And it's, there is some really complex formulas around how you can actually calculate the customer lifetime value. And I don't think it's worth us going into that at that level in this particular course. But just to give you some example of what it might look like, so. What this graph is saying is that as time, so you've got time on the x-axis and you've got the number of customers that you have on the y-axis. And basically, the longer that a customer stays with you, the more profitable that they become. So if you have a customer join you and they actually leave within the first couple of months, you may not actually have made any money off that customer because the amount that it costs to say, get them up and running and things like that. Perhaps you're actually at a loss for the first little while. And it's only after a certain amount of time that that customer becomes a profitable customer. What you'll then tend to see is that the longer they stay with you, the more and more profitable they become. They've kind of paid off those initial costs of acquiring them. And really they're just adding value and adding profit to your business. You can also see from this graph that the kind of way that that usually shakes out. So you want the majority of your customers being profitable. And then you'll often find that the two sides, that there's kind of a smaller group of the very profitable and a smaller group, hopefully, of those customers that are non-profitable. So this is certainly something which is really interesting, especially for a startup to be looking at, is to hug quickly, can you get a customer into being someone who's actually profitable? So you wanna get them from that first to the second part as quickly as possible. Because obviously, the longer that they're profitable, the more value are going to be over their lifetime. So that's, that's customer lifetime value. It gets quite complex when you get into the formula. And, but at a simple level, we're really talking about that value that a customer contributes over their lifetime. K. And the final concept that we'll talk about for this part of the course is the customer acquisition costs, also referred to as Keck, CAC, whatever you wanna call it. And really this is where we look at how much it costs for every new customer that we want to win. So again, I'll, the formula here is not something that I would ever use in practice, but I think it does a good job of explaining what customer acquisition costs actually means. And really it's where we look at what's the cost of the sales and the marketing, and then how many new customers have we acquired with that sales and marketing. And then you can actually work out roughly how much it costs to acquire one single customer. So you'll see that different industries, these customer acquisition cost and customer acquisition costs, will vary wildly. In some industries, it's not uncommon to see literally thousands of dollars spent acquiring customers. In other industries, you know, 1020, $30 that you're going to pay. A good example would be something like a home loan. So you'll often see bonuses for signing up for a new home loan of literally thousands of dollars or $1000. So if you sign up for a home loan, will give you a $2 thousand cash bonus or something like that. And that's a hell of a lot of money. But that's because we're talking about a home loan and the actual value of that customer. So if we looked at the customer lifetime value, it's incredibly high, and therefore we actually can afford to spend a little bit more money trying to sign them up in the first place. And for something that's I guess the other side of that too. Like when we're talking about a mortgage, we're usually talking about 25-30 years. So it's a really long-lasting investment as well. And if we're talking about, let's say like a can of Coke, for example, or something that's a little bit more like a grocery store product. We're not going to be spending thousands of dollars there to acquire new customers, right? Just a very different kind of transaction that we're dealing with. So they're absolutely still will be customer acquisition costs because there's a cost of sales is cost of marketing. There's a number of customers, but it's going to vary pretty wildly from industry to industry. So again, from a design point of view and relating this back into UX design or product design. This probably isn't one that I would use very often, but certainly having knowledge of what this actually looks like in the industry that I'm operating in is really important and really useful as well. So that's customer acquisition costs. 6. Useful reports: Hey folks. So the next thing that we're going to talk about is some useful financial reports. And we're not gonna go too in depth into this again, because I think this is something that you're not going to be using day to day. But I do think it's worth at least knowing your balance sheet from your profit and loss to the most common financial reports you'll see. Particularly useful if you're going to do some freelancing or run your own business at some point in time. So profit loss, first of all, really, your profit and loss tells you what to my incoming and outgoing look like over a period of time. So I've got to assemble that we've exported here on the right-hand side. I'm not going to go through it in a lot of detail. But probably the key thing to take away here is that it is over a period of time. So it's looking at, say, September, how did I do this September versus how did I do in August versus how did I do in July. And it really lets you see, you know, how much income was coming in that period of time and then what money was going on? What were my expenses. So it's really a good way of telling month to month while you're tracking. Really good to say compared to the year before whenever you had the same training conditions. And how did you go and based on that year before, the balance sheet is a little bit different from the profit and loss because it's actually talking about the current state of the business at a specific point in time. So obviously, in this case, we're not talking about Oh, what did my sales look like from kind of the first of September to the 30th of September. We're saying, hey, today's the 30th of September. What is the overall set of my business? How much money do I actually have in the bank as a result of all those transactions which have taken place. So it's really more a point in time measure as opposed to looking at a specific period in time. And it gives you that clear picture as to if I was going to sell the business onto somebody else, like how much is the business actually worth? That's the kind of thing that I can learn from looking at a balance sheet. So in each of these examples, I've kind of showing you an export of what a report or a PDF might look like once you actually go into your accounting software. So this is just an example from a demo file that I have here in our county in software, you can actually do things like compare. So you can see with my Profit and Loss report, maybe I actually want to compare it to last year. Maybe I want to compare it to the year to date as well. And and I've got this debt range where I'm going okay, what's it It from? What's the two? And that's very much because it's over a period of time. And that's going to look a little bit difference when I go to the balance sheet. Because with the balance sheet, I've only got one option in here. In this case, we're actually talking about a single point in time as opposed to over a range of time. And you can also see that the actual detail that's in here is going to be a little bit different as well. So I've still got the option to do things like compared to last year. And the balance sheet is very much at that point in time as opposed to how has my business been tracking over a certain period of time. So there are probably the two main business reports that you'll hear talked about. There is like, you know, even looking in this software, there's tons of different reports that you can run for all different reasons. But I think it's really good to have a fundamental understanding of the difference between a profit and loss and what the balance sheet actually is. 7. Design's role in business: Sonars. Are we going to look at the role that a product designer or UX designer plays in their business. And really answer that question of, where can you have the most impact in the business in which you're operating? I want to first of all reflect on this diagram. So this is something that Paul Adams, who's the VP of product at intercom. He talks about this in a recent talk that he did. And it's really a bought designed, not being at the center of the world. So as product designers, as UX designers, we obviously see design as being one of the most critical things in the business. We think it's something that's absolutely invaluable and that's why we have designed as our job. An absolutely having really great design can be a really huge strategic advantage for the business as well. But we have to remember that the people in leadership for them design is just one of the many spokes of a massive wheel. So especially in a bigger company, there's lots and lots of other departments on things happening in the business of which design is only one small part. So I think it's really important whenever we're communicating to people like the leadership of the business that we're bearing in mind those four main things that they really care about at all times and really communicating in their language. Because they're dealing with a lot of different people having a lot of different conversations. And it's really easy for us to kind of get caught up in that noise. So first of all, we're just really wanted to reflect and focus on the fact that, yes, design is extremely important to the business. But that doesn't mean it's the most important thing. And certainly from a leadership point of view, they're going to be looking at all these other factors in the business. This is a pretty common design process, so this is a double diamond. In this case, I've taken one from thought works and you've probably seen some variation of this before. It's like a 100 different ones out there. So I just picked up a pretty generic one to, to tell a bit of a story. Really, this is a very common process for us to go through as designers. So we get some kind of problem or some kind of feedback at the start. And we basically take that very much through a process. So let me break it down into a bit of an example for you. So let's say I'm working on an app. And we've got lots of customer requests for a particular feature for an application. What we could do if we were a bad product team is we could actually just take those customer requests, kind of jump ahead, ignore that first diamond, and just start to execute on a solution. So we can just listen to what the customers asked for and we can just start building that thing. Sometimes that will work out. Sometimes it will actually be the thing that they want. But it can also be quite a limiting solution. So if we don't truly understand the problem that they're having, perhaps we build a really narrow solution or really short-term solution. And maybe one of our competitors actually does the job properly understanding that problem. And they build a much more compelling solution for the customer. So something to be, to be really wary of. What's actually better for us to do is take that whatever the customer saying. So take that feedback from the customer. And start to truly understand it. So when they're asking for that feature, rather than just building not feature, let's start to understand why they're asking for that feature. So let's start to ask why. And what will actually start to find is there's lots and lots of potential reasons why they want this feature. And perhaps for every customer they're not actually trying to do the same thing. So, so perhaps while a lot of customers are asking for this same feature, maybe they're actually all tried to have slightly different goals. And that's something that we can really start to target. Well, which one of these problems do we actually want to solve? So then we can start to really define on a really solid problem statement. And from there, when we get to the execution stage, we have a much better idea of the problem. We're not kind of just listening to what the customer is saying. I'm going straight in without any thought. So when I talk about this and the reason that I talk about this is because I believe that much more value can be added in that upfront stage. So if we just go straight in and execute on solutions, were really denying ourselves the opportunity to learn much more about the problems that our customers are facing. And actually, this is the point where we can really start to add value. We've already got development teams who are going to be really focused on that solution stage and where we can really play our part is actually better understanding that upfront side of things and really plain apart with our product managers or product owners in terms of defining the strategy, more value can be added up front. And really if we want to have more of an impact, that's where we should be spending more of our time. I think it's also important, we are designers. We do have to execute things. So there's going to be times where we need to focus on the execution side. An absolutely, we will still continue to do that. But this is just really making the call that if we can spend more time upfront, we're ultimately going to be able to deliver really more value for the business in which we're operating in. So Marty Kagan is a great product thinker and he works for a company called Silicon Valley Group. And he's written a few great articles about what he sees and product designers and UX designers responsibilities as, and he sees it in these kind of five men key buckets. I think the bottom three pretty much speak for themselves. So prototyping, getting kind of quick prototypes that we can, we can create really quickly and get ideas tested in our customer's hands. User testing. So whether it's prototypes or with real software, kind of getting feedback on that software as customers are using it. And then interactional interaction and visual design, which is really just the design artifacts themselves. I think that probably more interesting thing to look at is the first couple of points that he raises, which is a Ron product orientation and the holistic user experience. So if we think about product orientation, we're really talking about designers as being a core part of that product team. And working really closely with those, whether it's product managers in your company or maybe it's product owners. But really those people who are focused on the product as much as they are delivery. So really focused on that upfront, understanding the problem part just as much as the kind of implementing the solution later on, I think is designers that can get really fun. A lot of us come from, say, graphic design or digital design background, where we actually really love working on solutions. But if we can spend more time upfront understanding problems, I really believe that we can have much more of an impact. And if we're just spending all our time worrying about every single pixel, I think part of that product orientation also means really being tied to that teams outcome. So understanding that the end goal isn't to have this beautiful pixel perfect design that's implemented exactly as you imagined it. But more that customers are actually using the thing and seeing value from whatever it is you've created. And being much more focused on the customer and the outcome for the team in terms of the goals that you set yourselves as opposed to just was my design something that I'm proud of or is my design really good? Like yes, absolutely, that's important, but it should not be the number one thing in your mind. When we talk about holistic user experience, we're really talking about understanding the whole workflow. And again, this might seem like an obvious thing, but I don't think we realized just how few people are really focused on that whole workflow from end to end. You may find that somebody like again, I'll use the example of a product manager. They're often thinking very much at the strategic level. And then you've got the developers or development team who may be thinking more on the nuts and bolts and the details. And what the designers can really play a part is thinking how the whole thing fits together. And I think especially along the edges of that experience. So how do people actually onboard to this feature? How do they learn how to use it? So one thing, building a great workflow, but if nobody can ever find it, like did you really create a great workflow? What was the point? And the same thing with support, right? Like it's not going to be something that customers can use every single time or perhaps there's times when things go wrong and how easy it is to recover can be just as important, perhaps even more important than whenever everything's working perfectly. So I think in terms of thinking of the Designer's responsibilities, we need to really think about water, the things that we can do best that nobody else on the team can do. And I think looking at things like that, holistic user experiences is probably the most critical part of our role as a designer. So I think really what we're talking about here is thinking about the product workflow. Where can designers have the most impact on? I think that while absolutely we're going to have some impact on delivering some solutions and working with our developers to implement solutions. We want to make sure that we're spending enough time upfront, understanding problems, talking to customers and defining problems. And for me that's actually the area we're going to have much more of an impact than just purely moving pixels around on the screen. 8. OKR's: So in this section we're going to talk a little bit about objectives and key results, which you'll often hear shortens to OKRs. And OKRs are a way of measuring business results. Pretty popular. There's a great book called measure what matters by John Doerr, written a few years ago, where he details lots of case studies about why companies use this technique and what the success and benefits are of using it. I'm just going to talk about it at a really high level today just in case it's something that you haven't been across yet. And typically the way that okay, I was work is you'll set up a series of objectives and key results that cascade down the business. So for example, I could have a business and at the top level of the business, we have a revenue goal of hitting a certain amount of money. That might be, let's say one million dollars. One million dollars. It's something which is super easy to measure, which makes it a really good candidate for a key result. And a key result is something that should be really easy, easily measurable. It shouldn't be something that you're questioning whether you hit it or not. So let's say that's one of our key results, or us, you'll often see it short into a k, r. So another kind of key result that you might have as a certain number of users, right? It's really easy to measure the amount of people using your product. So Let's say we've got 50 thousand users. And that's another key result. So again, something that's quite easy to measure. And you can tell at the end of a period of time, be it a quarter, a month, a couple of weeks, and whether you've met that goal or not. So you might have these key results and they might be tied together by some kind of objective. So the objective might be, and the objectives tends to not be something that's measurable as a key result. And it's something that multiple key results can link up into the same objective. So it could just be something like become the market leader in our segment. So if I just say become a market leader, and that would be my objective. So you've got this kind of high level objective, which in itself isn't all that measurable. But then you've got these different key results that actually drive to that objective. So if you say, okay, what's the best way for us to become a market leader? Well, we'd actually see that our revenues are increasing to a million dollars and we'd see 50 thousand users. And we believe that's going to tell us that there were a market leader. So that might be something you define at a business level. And the way that OKRs are supposed to work is that this would then cascade into the teams. So that might be the goals for the whole business, but maybe your team is just responsible for a particular subset of that. So in this instance, let's say you've got a team of a few different people. And maybe you're focused on, in order to become a market leader, you're focused on a particular segment of the market. So an even smaller segment of the market. And perhaps in that segment, you know, existing, you've got 5 thousand users. Maybe your goal is actually around 10 thousand users. So the KR or the key result for you would be 10 thousand users. And you might share the exact same objective. Maybe you change the flavor of, of that objective a little bit. But essentially what you're doing is cascading those high level goals down into your team. And it becomes really clear to see how your team is actually impacting the overall bottom line of the business. So this is a really high level and basic example of how this might work. And there's lots and lots of stuff out there about how this is used in practice that you can read into, but an OKR, it's definitely worth mentioning because I know that being popular with a lot of different people, in particular in Silicon Valley over the past ten to 15 years. And so definitely something worth knowing about. 9. NPS: So we've got objectives and key results that, that I've talked about before. Which is really so some common metrics that you might see across the business. And I really want to take this away from design to begin with and just talk about some broader business metrics. So first one, retention. So we talked about that a little bit earlier on in the course and on hopefully you have an idea, but what retention means? Really the amount of customers that we're retaining each month or each year. There's Net Promoter Score, NPS, which we will go into in a little bit more detail, and which is really gathering sentiment from your customers. And another one I thought I'd bring up just to mention in passing and COGS or Cost of goods sold. So we talked earlier about the four things that every business cares. What I'm one of those is really around cost. And a really common one that you'll see referred to is this idea of cost of goods sold, which is really looking at, okay, so we created this amount of value for our customers, but actually how much did that cost us to make? So this could be in the technology business, things like how much does it cost to actually host all of those different databases that we have for a customer. And obviously if we can reduce the cost of that bowl, that's going to, that's going to help us make more revenue or more of a profit on our customers. So really common one that you'll see referred to, perhaps not the one that designers will be spending their most time thinking about. Net promoter score, I think, is the real one that, that we want to spend a little bit of time on here. So let's do a bit of a deeper dive into what net promoter score actually is. So you're probably wondering, why did I put a skull and cross bones beside the net promoter score? This is one of the more contentious metric, so I'll let you do your own googling all of it. If you want to look into it a bit more detail, there's plenty of people out there who think the Net Promoter Score is terrible. And there's plenty of people out there who swear by it and absolutely love it as well. And I probably sit somewhere on the fence so I can see I can see why it's used to. I fully agree with it and think it's the best metric. Note. I don't. But I think it's worth talking about because it's used in a lot of different businesses. And I think at least understanding how it works, you might start to see some of the pros and cons with net promoter score. So in essence, it's really all about this one question, which is how likely are you to recommend whatever the business is, whatever the feature is, whatever the software is to a friend or colleague. So you can probably tell straightaway up front, like for example, I work on a content software and we get comments on our NPS surveys that say things like, I don't sit at barbecues talking to my friends about accounting software. So they'll give us a 0 because they just think it's a really silly question. So that's one of the criticisms you get is actually just the language of it. And the other criticism is around the way that it's actually calculated as well. Really the intention of NPS. It's, it's really focused on how many people really love your product on are referring it and promoting it to other people. And it's really focused on looking at the people who are highly passionate and really like your product. Looking at the people who are really against your product and trying to see is the more people that are really for your product, or is there more people really against your product? It's usually most effective at kind of brand level. Because a decision to say Recommend Something is often based on much more than just one specific feature or one specific workflow. It's usually a whole bunch of experiences which could be the onboarding experience they had, the support experience they have. And it's really hard, especially from a design perspective to say that, you know, may improving one workflow, how to really tangible impact on the NPS? Because it's such an all-encompassing question that we're asking. So I think there's better ways of asking some of those more specific questions are on specific workflows are screens that were working on. And ps is better at a higher level. So let's have a look at MPS and how it's actually calculated. So whenever we asked this question, so how likely are you to recommend product to a friend or colleague? And the survey you will actually get on this 11-point scale. So you'll get, you can either recommend is 0, right up to a ten. And what you'll see so that the 012 to six, they're what's called detractors. So if I score is something that 0 out of ten, or if I score is something that six out of ten, I'm actually what's called a detractors. So the red means bad. It's actually taking away. The passive is seven or eight. And that basically means that, you know, I don't hit it, but I also love it. And the promoters are only the ones and tens. So this is certainly something that caught my eye the first time I saw it because I thought eight out of ten. But that's usually a pretty positive score to me. But for the purposes of NPS, eight out of ten basically means 0. It kinda puts you in the, in the middle of not, not loving it, not hating it. So what, what does that actually mean? Like grit. So I give it a six out of ten, I'm at attractor, I gave it seven on the passive. I give it nine out of ten. I'm a promoter. There is actually a formula that we use to calculate a score. And that score can go from minus 100 to 100. So if I asked the survey to ten people and all of those people are detractors, then I'm gonna get a score of minus 100 because everybody's a detector. If I asked ten people and they're all promoters, I'm gonna get a score of positive 100 because they're all promoters. So it's really that percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors. And that will leave you with your overall score. So that can result in a few interesting things whenever we get into the details. So I've just got a few examples of some of the weird situations which, that, which that might kind of bring upon us. The score it discards passives. If you score a seven or an eight, you're just not even considered in that calculation. We're really focused on the promoters, on the detractors. So ten responses of all ten, you get positive a 100. If you had ten responses that are all six out of ten, the score would be minus 100 because everybody's that attractor. And that's the exact same as if everybody scored you 0, you'd also get minus a 100. So you can see why some people have a problem with the calculation because, you know, you'd think ten responses of six is very different to ten responses of 0. But according to net promoter score, that has the exact same result. If you had ten customers who all give you an eight out of ten, your score would be right in the middle, 0 as well. So you can see here that it's quite a, quite an interesting way of calculating it. And perhaps not what, what everybody would think of right off the bat. And just to kind of make that a bit more visual. So let's say in this case we had to five people go through the survey. We had a couple of seven. So there passives, We have a couple of motors, 910, and then we have a detractor who was a six. We basically end up with 40% of the people that have done the survey or promoters. 20% are detractors, and therefore in this case it's 40% minus 20%. So our MPS it would be looking at is plus 20. So you'll find that I'm across different industries, that the score is in terms of what's a good thing or what's a bad score, will, will differ. And typically anything above 0 is a good sign because it means you've got more people raving about your product, then you do detracting from it. And of course, you, you'd love to be up there in the high seventies, eighties, nineties. And realistically that's not always going to be the case. But you'll find that you might be able to do some benchmarking in your industry if you are using the score to try and get an idea for how your score compares to other people in the industry as well. 10. CSAT: Okay, so we've talked about MPS as being one way that we might be able to measure the sentiment of the customers towards our product. And we've talked about some of the flaws of NPS as well. There's other measurements that you can use and they're more specific around the customer experience or usability. A really popular one I find is CSAC, which is customer satisfaction, which is something where you can actually measure the customer experience at a workflow level. So similar to NPS. Quite formulaic question that we ask, which is how satisfied are you with and then the name of the workflow. So let's set sending an invoice has satisfied are you with sending an invoice? The customer rates between one to five, going from not at all satisfied up to very satisfied. And generally, you'll see different ways of measuring it. We often take a percentage of the customers who read it, either satisfied or very satisfied, and then report on that percentage as the percentage of customers who are satisfied. And that way we can be a little bit more specific. So we get something that a workflow level as opposed to NPS, which tends to be more at that brand or product level in general. So the CSAC allows us to be a bit more specific. The UN UX light is actually two questions that combine. So the two questions are, how useful is this product and how usable is this product? And basically you answer them both on a one-to-five scale. And I'm not gonna go into the details of the calculation, but like a lot of the rest of this course, just bringing it up as something that's really useful that you might want to read into farther yourself. So if it is something that you find interests you, I would advise you to quick Google for it and you'll find a couple of great articles about UNM UX light. And in a similar vein is the System Usability Scale. So this one's being around a little bit longer than, than some of the other ones. Dating back to the mid eighties, I believe, actually. And it's basically a ten question survey asking a range of questions around the, the usability of a product. So I find this one tends to give you some really interesting and quite accurate results. The more challenging thing is that it's ten questions, so it's a little bit harder to squeeze it into your product and a little bit harder to find that customers have enough time to actually answer it. And it can be really good if you're doing usability testing because you've actually got them in there with you in a test and it can be quite quick to run through. It's, they're all multiple choice questions and it's just a CSAC. It's quite easy to get into your product whenever customers actually going through the workflow, the System Usability Scale, a bit, a bit more detailed. It's also a little bit of a higher level survey too, so it's kinda hard to ask it just based on say, an invoicing workflow. It's something you'd want to ask a bit more of a product level, but absolutely worth mentioning anyways, so definitely check some of these if you're interested in how you might measure customer experience or usability. 11. Proxy Metrics: So let's talk a little bit about proxy metrics. So highly recommend that you read, there's an article on Medium and written by Gibson Bedel from Netflix. And he's a head of product at Netflix, where he talks quite in detail about, about these proxy metrics. And really the idea of a proxy metric is that you're looking for a stand-in for your overall higher-level metric. And then you're going to seek for a correlation between your higher level metric and your proxy metric. And you can work out to prove causation and later time. So it sounds a bit abstract. It hopefully makes more sense when we go into some detail. I hope you appreciate the wonderful stock photo photo that I've used on here as well, which is the first thing that came up whenever I was looking for, for metrics. So in our example, we're actually going to use engagement as a proxy for retention. So I've talked quite a lot throughout this course about the importance of retention. And in this case I'm going to talk about it a little bit more. But also, but also talk about engagement. So let's say, you know, as a business, retention is something that's, that's clearly going to be quite important to us. Retention could be impacted by nearly everything. So one customer support calls could actually cause somebody to leave. One bad experience on your website could cause somebody to leave, like, there's no end to things that can have an impact on retention. And let's say in our case, in our business, we've done some work and we think that actually engagement is one of the most important things. So we find that customers who are more engaged with our product, they tend to be the ones who have a much higher rate of retention. So therefore, we want to really concentrate on how might we improve the engagement of our product. We might actually break that down again and go, okay, so engagements really important. Who are the most engaged customers? What do they look like? And let's, let's use the example that we're YouTube. So we're gonna go, okay, engagement is a great proxy for retention. And let's look at engaged customers. Actually a customers who follow five or more channels when they're setting up their YouTube Khan, they're the ones who tend to be the most engaged. So if we focus on getting more customers to follow five channels or more channels, then we think that that will have a knock on impact on engagement, which will then have a knock on impact in terms of retention. So you can see how you can actually break down the different levels to find a hypothesis or some kind of experiment that you can run to test if you're actually correct later on. So this is a really kind of simple example. What you could actually do is, you know, start, start doing some testing. So start building some prototypes. I'm trying to encourage people to sign up for five channels earlier on, so figuring out, okay, how do we actually get people? I'm following five channels. And what you can then do is actually measure that later on, right? So you can actually go and look at the data to see, OK, do the customers have fallen more than five channels? Like was that actually correct? We made an assumption that that was correct. Can we look in the data and see that those customers actually are in fact more engaged and actually do in fact have a better writ of retention. So if you want to create some of these experiments, which I'd highly encourage you all to. There's a few different things that you want to bear in mind in terms of picking those, those best proxy metrics. So it's really important that it's measurable. You can't run an experiment if you actually don't know whether you're going to be right or wrong at the end of that experiment, it needs to be movable so you don't want to pick something that's impossible to achieve mixture at something that's relatively within your control. And in this case, you know, looking at engagement or return users, that's certainly an achievable metrics. So it's certainly something we'd says movable. You wanna make sure it impacts the high-level metric. And of course that might take some testing later on. So it's okay to have some hypothesis about these things that you can test live. But certainly you want to make sure that it's got a good chance of impacting that higher level metric. And worth calling out that there's a difference between you and existing customers. In our case, maybe this following that the five channels, maybe that's most important to happen within the first two weeks of signing up for YouTube. So maybe we're actually just focused on the new customers because it's going to be a much harder deal with existing customers. So we're splitting up, you know, is it's about new customers, is it about existing? And the last one is we want something that's not gamble. So as soon as we start focusing on a metric that can potentially encourage the wrong behavior and where people just really want to gamify that metric. And we want to make sure that this is actually true. So we want to actually make sure it's impacting our retention ultimately. So be careful to pick something that's not easily gamble by people. So they can just kind of see the number that they want to see at the end of it. But that's just a little bit about proxy metrics. So as I said, highly recommend reading and Gibson Godel's article on it. It's really interesting. But this should give you a good idea of what you might do it to start off with a couple of different experiments to run. 12. Google HEART: So we've talked a lot about different kinds of metrics that you can use in the business. And whether it's the higher level business metrics like okay, ours, whether it's NPS or maybe you're measuring workflows with something like CSAC. I also wanted to introduce you to this Google heart framework, which might actually help you come up with some of these goals that you want to track or some of these metrics that you're wanting to track. And it's a framework that I found really useful, especially for sitting down as a team and going, okay, let's, let's actually create some goals here as a team. The idea is, and you can see on the left-hand side that they spell out the letter heart or sorry, the word heart. So you've got Happiness, engagement, adoption, retention, and task success. And, and for each of these, you're going to have particular goals that you might want to go after. You've got signals. And a signal is basically giving you a signal that you've met your goal. And based on that signal, what is something that you could actually measure, which would be your metrics. So let's actually get into an example except we'll make this a little bit clearer. So let's say as a team, we've decided that this quarter we really wanna focus on adoption. And our goal as a team is that more customers are using our product each month, and especially new customers. So more new customers are using the product each month. What would be a signal that we're achieving that goal? Well, it's likely it we'd see an increase in sign-ups, right? Like that's a new customer has to sign up. So if some if there's an increase in signups, that means that we're getting more customers using the product each month. And what's a metric? Well, this one's pretty easy, right? It's the number of sign-ups per month. So we can actually look at that metric of the number of sign-ups per month. And perhaps that's the thing that we're going to track. And we can set ourselves as a specific number that we want for a goal. But really the actual outcome that we're looking for is that more customers are using the product each month. So that's one example using adoption. Perhaps another one you want to look at is happiness. So in this case, the goal is that uses or finding our product to joy to use. So ultimately we want customers to be really happy with the product. The signal about that would be that perhaps more customers are leaving as positive ratings about our product. If it's an app in the App Store, perhaps we see a trend and in the App Store ratings, what metric could we, as for that, we could use something like App Store ratings. Although that feels like there's a lot of play there, a little bit like MPS, it's quite a high level metric. Maybe a customer has just had a bad experience not being able to login to our product. They leave us a 1-star rating and we're actually not learning a lot from them. And perhaps what we could look at is customer satisfaction. So every time they go through a particular workflow it in the application, there's maybe some survey and we want to see a result of 80% on that survey. This way we're, we're looking at that goal, which is we want our customers to find our product a joy to use. But the actual metric that we're going to use is customer satisfaction. And ultimately that will tell us if we're achieving our goal. So something to really help at a task or sorry, a goal-setting level. So if you're struggling to think, you know, one of the things that we really need to focus on, maybe you can't find a really good connection with your company's objectives. Maybe you can use this Google heart framework to come up with some really good goals. And then based on metrics off those goals as well. 13. Designer's impact: Okay, so we're arriving at the end of the course. And I hope everyone's got plenty of value out of this so far. And I think the last thing I really just wanted to talk about was beware of diluting your impact. So everyone loves designers. I think I wish that was true more than it's actually true. But certainly product designers can often be very popular members of their team. And which actually means that they end up getting quite stretched in terms of the designer can do that. And all of a sudden you're doing a 100 different things. And you gotta remember that you are a finite resource, so you gotta be careful not to over promise and under deliver and you end up just diluting your impact that you can have. So don't try to change everything at once. So this is certainly something I can speak from experience about because I've been in this position before. So let's say I'm one designer across three different development teams. Not, not an ideal scenario, but also not an uncommon scenario either. I've got a couple of different options in terms of how I might approach my work. So maybe the most obvious thing is to go Okay, team three, they, they need me a little bit more than the other two teams. So I'm going to spend a bit more time with them. But broadly, I'm just going to split my time across all three teams. What that means is I end up going to say three sets of team standups, three sets of metros, three sets of rituals for different teams. And actually most of my calendar is not taken up and just keeping up to date with all these three different teens. And I'm leaving myself less and less time to actually do any design work. And in fact, whenever I actually get to doing my design work, I'm trying to do the work of three different teams. So the quality of that work is naturally going to suffer and I'm not going to be able to give my all because I'm just going to be all over the place. We talked about Designers being able to really focus in on that holistic user experience. And if my mind is going to be scattered across different teams with different contexts, then there's no way that I'm going to be able to really understand the user experience for every single one of those teams. So I think it's really, it's really easy to fall into this and try to keep everybody happy. But if we do this, we're actually going to produce subpar work for each of the teams that were working with. Or we're going to be working 8090 hours a week, which is not something that we we're generally going to want to do. So what can you do it? Well, maybe you can just focus most of your time on the one team. And notice that this doesn't say 10000. This isn't a robot completely ignoring the other teams. But it's about understanding that if I'm going to have an impact, I'm gonna really focus my energy on the one spot that I know is going to be the most important for the business and the most important for the customers. The other team's, I'll jump in and help them whenever they need it. But I'm going to be really clear that Hey, I'm just gonna keep these teams going. And most of my focus on all of my energy is going to go into this one team. So obviously this isn't going to be feasible and every single project that you work on. But I can assure you that if you really go in with this attitude and communicate to other people that hey, I'm a finite resource. If you want me to work up my best, I need to be focused on one thing and sure I'll go and help out the other teams, but most of my energy is going to be in the one place. This is going to produce the best results if all of a sudden, the first team is producing all the really good work on the other two teams aren't producing such as good work. Someone's going to ask the question, what's, what's going on with that first seem wise, there works so great. And then the answer is we'll actually, they've got a dedicated designer spending a lot more time with them. All of a sudden, maybe you unlock some budget to get a designer into those other teams. So I think it's really important to show the value of design by making sure that you're not over committing yourself and spreading yourself thin and really diluting that impact. Really the big secret. So this whole course in terms of business for designers and what that actually means for me, the big secret is that being a good designer just requires being a good business person. A lot of the things that we've talked about throughout this course, a lot of these concepts that you've learned. It's really just the foundations of being a good business person. And whether you're a designer or product managerial developer. Just knowing these concepts and foundations really helps you become a good business person. Understanding what those board different things that most businesses care about will, will also ultimately help you just be a good business person. And just remembering that people won't see what you did in FISMA. I've been using sigma throughout this course to present some of my concepts. Great tool, absolutely love it. I'm not trying to knock it. What I'm really getting at is that customers won't see the stuff that you've just designed. They'll see what the developers have implemented. And it's really important that if you want to have influence on get your ideas to customers, you're really focused on those outcomes. You're not just focused on the stuff that you're designing and your design software, you're focused on what actually gets implemented. And as I said earlier, it's really focusing on what are the customer problems, on how are we solving them? And are we doing that in the right way? Because that's ultimately going to be much more important than just the layout of the pixels on the screen. And of course, there's a place to care about pixels. And that's something close to my heart as well. But generally that the most important thing and the place that we can have the most impact as designers is really that the up-front part of the process where we're truly understanding our customers and then also able to relate that back to our business. And when we can relate that back to our business, all of a sudden people start to really see the true potential of design. And you've got a much higher chance of getting more designers around to help you walk. So I really hope that you'll find some value in this course and that some of these concepts you'll be able to take into your day to day work. And I'm really welcome any feedback that you want to leave for me as well. So thank you very much, everyone and enjoy the rest of your day. 14. More resources: Folks, so we've reached the end of the course. I hope everyone got plenty of value out of that. And I'm hoping there's a few different things that you've got really interested in and are keen to learn a little bit more about. And as promised, I thought I just follow up with some really good resources that have certainly helped me along the journey. And I thought it would be good to, to reach out and learn a little bit more if there's anything that got your interests in particular. And first one, so this person will NBA book, really good summary book to a lot of different business concepts. And it's actually one of the things that really piqued my interest in this topic. There's lots of kind of two-page introductions to various topics and a list of about a 100 different business books. And so perhaps if you don't get enough recommendations for me, you can actually go in there, grab like an extra 100. Really, really good. And envision also recently released a book called Business thinking for designers. So this goes probably a little bit more into the strategic business thinking and some more foundational concepts. And it's a little bit of a different flavor to the stuff that we've done in the course. But I consider it a really good compliment, plus it's free as well. So you can never complain about free. Kind of their more recent books. If you want to go back a little bit, there's some real classic business books. So an author like Clayton Christiansen and the innovator's dilemma is a real classic of his. And there's actually two or three books worth reading. And that's just one to kind of get you started if you're interested in learning a bit more of the classical business thinking approach and going back even further, there's actually a couple of other good books. So high output management by Andy Grove, Effective Executive by Peter Drucker. Little bit less on that businessy side. A little bit more about management. But in saying that the High Output Management talks a little bit about OKRs and similar concepts as well. And Patrick colistin, who's the CEO of stripe. And I'll listen to a podcast from him a few years ago. And these were two books that he said were really fundamental in his career and to really good, relatively short reads as well. Once you've kind of exercise all that reading. And the other thing I'd recommend is couple of different courses online and on the likes of Coursera. So if you go into Coursera and search business strategy, there's honestly hundreds of courses. I've done a couple of ones on there. I'm currently in the middle of doing a financial fundamentals course as well. So if there's a particular part of this course you liked, I reckon, go into Coursera and, and have a look, you'll probably find something on there and the Zim in any of those online learning platforms. So the same platform that you're actually listening to this course, I'm sure you can, I'm sure you can get into some more deeper business stuff on there as well. And, and the last kind of shot art is just following people on Twitter as well. So, and this is really good product management people on Twitter. And I find that they're talking about things that are really relevant for designers. But often they've got that slightly more business angle on things because they are product managers and they have a different focus to us. So I've got a couple of names on the screen there and who were definitely people that I think are, are worth a follow on. You'll certainly learn a little bit more from them as well. So hopefully with all that you've you've got plenty more stuff to keep you going. And as I said, really hope you enjoyed the course. I'm open to any feedback, so please make sure and whether it's a comment or semi-private message, I'm really happy to hear from you. Thanks a lot. Case.