13 business questions for your next design project
Designers and business people live on two islands. Luckily, the islands are connected by a bridge. But it’s poorly built. It’s kind of unsafe for crossing. So, each community likes to stay in its own cozy place and stay away from the scary bridge.
But to have the impact we want to have, we need to start walking over that bridge and reinforce it.
The easiest way is to start gaining business empathy. To understand the context in which we design. The context that is embedded deeply in the business world.
And the best way to gain business empathy is to start design projects with some simple but powerful business questions. Here is a list of my favorite ones.
What is the goal of the project? Raising revenue? Decreasing costs? Ultimately, every project should either help a company increase revenue or decrease costs. Use a tool called profit tree to figure out what it is for your project.
What other projects have already been attempted to achieve this goal? Why were they (not) successful? Don’t repeat the same mistakes.
What do we want to achieve (and learn)? Know what success looks like, set hypotheses, and the main metric. This is a great way to understand every project as a learning experience. Even if we don't reach our goals.
What are the opportunity costs of this project? Sometimes we get so tunnel-visioned that we only see what is directly in front of us. But we need to be aware of other opportunities. If we wouldn’t work on this project, is there another thing that would help us achieve better results with the same investment?
With which other products will customers compare what I am creating? This helps us understand who are the biggest competitors that we are competing with and how they are solving customers' problems.
With whom else could we soon compete? Usually, we only think about current competitors. But in today’s world, we need to think about potential competitors as well. Apple, Amazon, and Google are entering new industries all the time. Could they enter yours? Are there other companies that are showing interest in your industry? How could you compete if they would?
What is our business model? The only way to create a good design is to align it with a company’s business model. So, how do we make money? What needs to happen for us to create our product or service? Who uses a product? Who pays for it? Learn how you can visualize a business model here.
How many customers will be using this product at full scale? We need to design a product that is used by hundreds of people (e.g. concierge financial service) completely differently from a product that is used by millions (e.g. music streaming). Use prototyping with numbers to estimate the full scale.
What are we uniquely positioned to do? Every company has its natural advantages. It could be that you already have thousands of customers and their trust. It could be your proprietary technology. It could even be the SEO ranking. Be aware of your company’s strengths and amplify them with design.
What is the hypothesis behind this project? What is the reason this project even exists? What do we believe to be true? Do we know that this is true? Or should even this fundamental hypothesis be tested before we go deeper? For example, the hypothesis behind starting a new service could be that your competitor is seemingly doing really well. They raised millions and added thousands of customers. So, let’s copy them, right? But a simple interview with a competitor’s ex-employee could uncover that they are dealing with bad unit economics.
What are the fundamental trade-offs of this project? Business strategy is nothing more than making trade-off decisions. What trade-offs are baked into your project and your design? Free vs expensive? Small vs Big? Fast vs deliberate? Open vs Closed? Understand where you want to play in the spectrum and lean into extremes. That’s where the success is.
What is the business language of this project? What keywords are colleagues outside of my department using to talk about it? Write them all down. Especially those fancy words that you haven’t heard before (e.g. customer acquisition cost, break-even point, etc.). Look them up and note them down in your project vocabulary. That will come in handy when you need to present the project results back to colleagues.
Can we kill the project? Can we downsize it? This is my favorite question! There is nothing worse than wasting time on a project that is not worthy. After answering all the other questions, we may learn that we can either do this project on a much smaller scale or that we don’t have to do it at all. Oh, by the way, if your verdict is to kill a project, just make sure you present an alternative activity.
Of course, this is not a complete list of business questions. It’s just a collection of my favorite ones. And I would love to hear what your favorite questions are. Drop them in the comments below.