Business Thinking for Designers

The designer’s job is to create a competitive advantage
To win in the market, organizations need a competitive 
advantage: A condition or circumstance that puts them in a 
better business position than the rest of the field. 
If you recall Porter’s Generic Strategies from Chapter 2, there 
are basic strategies—such as price—that an organization 
uses to position itself. Beyond these, organizations use more 

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Create conditions for design maturity
specific business models and strategies to gain a competitive 
advantage that’s unique to them.
Figure 4-1: Innovations, products, and services are types of 
approaches companies take to gain competitive advantage, but there 
are other approaches. 
Whether you work at a for-profit or non-profit, the designer’s 
job is to help the organization “win” by creating a competitive 
advantage. That’s the perspective of the C-suite.
It’s challenging to show executives how the work you do 
creates meaningful, productive, ethical, and transformative 
value for customers and achieves a competitive advantage. 
Establishing the “right conditions” to build maturity means that 
you must clearly demonstrate how your work with aesthetics, 

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Create conditions for design maturity
interactions, stories, and brands connects to the company’s 
bottom line. In this chapter we’ll discuss ways that you can do 
this: 
• Update the Venn diagram 
• Visualize the perspectives of desirability 
• Connect desirability and viability objectives
• Create a cause-and-effect model with conditional 
statements
• Quantify results with experimentation