Business Thinking for Designers

Integrate with familiar methods and practices
In social psychology, there’s an effect called the familiarity 
principle. Basically, it means that people prefer things they’re 
familiar with over things they’re not. 
As a designer, when you introduce a new workshop, research 
finding, or design, keep this principle in mind. Because your 
colleagues will be more open to what you share if they’re able 
to associate it with something they already know. 
A smart way of increasing your influence is to incorporate 
your information into existing processes, meetings, rituals, or 
presentations. If you do this, your collaborators will feel more 
comfortable, and they’ll be more likely to sort and classify the 
information you present in a useful way.
During my time at Electronic Arts, my team worked closely with 
the IT organization. Our colleagues in IT were very familiar with 
the phase-gate process (waterfall) of project management. 
To help transition the team into modern, agile product 
management processes, we re-used the word phase-gate to 

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introduce new ways of working. For example, “Here are the 
phase-gates for launching digital products.” 
Figure 6-1: Product Management phase-gates by Ryan Rumsey
Reusing familiar language helped my colleagues understand 
that decisions had to be made in phases (something also 
familiar to them) while allowing us to introduce the phases of 
a product life cycle and the different types of decisions we 
needed to make (something new). 
Pro tip
Integrating these lessons is not foolproof. Like any method 
or process, they may not work exactly as directed. What 
level 4 and 5 teams do better than most is test and apply new 
approaches again and again to learn what works and what 

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doesn’t. Treat these lessons as features to test with your 
colleagues.
As mentioned in Chapter 1, there’s no linear process for 
applying the lessons in this book, but my advice is to start 
with empathy, then visualize the business model and strategy. 
By doing so, you can quickly assess what is familiar to your 
colleagues before breaking new ground.
Rather than reinvent the wheel, here are some scenarios for 
how you can incorporate the lessons into familiar methods and 
practices.