Business Thinking for Designers

Start with empathy
Trust is a foundational element of any good relationship. 
Whether you’re new to a role or have challenges with an 
existing work partnership, it’s natural to want to jump in and 
start “fixing” things right away. But don’t rush to act. Instead, 
spend some time building understanding and trust.
To do this, you need the answers to two basic questions: “Who 
are you working with?” and “What are they trying to achieve?”
Empathy Maps are a great visualization tool to quickly capture 
“good enough” answers to these two questions. The exercise 

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Develop your business perspective
helps you to understand partners in a new way so you can 
empathize with their perspectives.
Kara DeFrias from Intuit on understanding colleagues through 
empathy (Watch online)
Empathy Maps
You may already be familiar with the Empathy Map, which was 
originally developed by XPLANE. Traditionally used as a quick 
way to develop empathy for customers, the maps are now 
used by business teams around the world to improve cross-
functional partnerships. Since it was released, the tool has 

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Develop your business perspective
undergone many iterations by different users. But my favorite 
is the 2017 version from the XPLANE team. 
Figure 3-4: Empathy Map from XPLANE
As an exercise, the Empathy Map first walks through a step-
by-step process to identify a specific person and their goal, 
and then views the work ahead through their eyes. Doing so 
gives designers a better understanding of what business