A Day in the Life of a Business Designer
By Jo Roberts and Dries Vaesen, with contributions by Clare Goldblatt
Business design is a growing discipline that combines the tools of business with the ethos of design. It’s an imperative mindset at any organization, as business designers are able to understand and leverage the needs of both the business and end user. The worlds of business and design used to seldom overlap, as it was understood that there was no need to understand the other side’s discipline, but this has long-since changed as more and more designers make their way into boardrooms. However, the field is still comparatively young overall, and many people have difficulty grasping what a business design role might entail. We’ve told Jo’s and Dries’ story to help demystify what a business designer’s day might look and feel like.
Dries Vaesen is a Business Designer @Accenture based in Belgium
Jo Roberts is a Senior Business Design Director @Prophet based in New York
Dries Vaesen
Dries is a Business Designer at Accenture Interactive in Belgium. When he’s not working hard in a highly time-boxed manner, you might find him reading books or out for a long bike ride on the weekend.
MORNING
07:30–08:30
Breakfast, coffee, and catch up on what’s going on in the world
I usually wake up at 7:30 and have breakfast. While I’m eating breakfast, I read a few articles from the local newspaper called De Tijd, which focuses on the economic and financial news happening in Belgium. I like to do this to wake up and to also make sure I’m up to speed with what’s happening in the world. After I’m done with breakfast, I’ll have a shower, grab a coffee, and officially start my workday at my desk at 8:30.
08:30–09:00
Organize the day
I use this time to organize my day and see what my tasks are to tackle before our check-in at 09:00. I’ll double-check and make sure any urgent emails are taken care of, but I typically try to not go in and out of my inbox all day because this distracts me.
09:00–09:30
Daily check-in and setting priorities for the day as a team
We have daily check-ins, sometimes twice a day, for each project we’re on at Accenture. Usually, these take a maximum of 30 minutes. We go through challenges and see how we can support each other with the project, share blockers, give feedback, and essentially, see how we can keep the project running smoothly.
09:30–12:30
Timeboxing Part 1
Based on the daily check-in, I’ll continue working on whatever we agreed I’d work on as a team. We’re currently working on a project for a national lottery company, who’s interested in optimizing their current value propositions and updating their business model. I’m currently helping the team come up with a pitch for their potential new product and business model using business model canvases in order to revamp their value propositions.
I’m a huge fan of timeboxing, which is a Design Sprint principle I learned from my previous jobs. I even have a small analog timer that I use to remain focused! So, for any task I need to tackle, I’ll allow myself a certain amount of time to ensure I stay on task and focused. When I don’t timebox and have my phone on my desk, I have a hard time focusing.
AFTERNOON
12:30–13:00
Lunch
After my timeboxing session, I typically have a short lunch. I try to keep it light and do lots of meal prep, so I can conveniently just grab some healthy, protein-loaded leftovers.
13:00–13:30
Crit Session
After lunch, we have a weekly ritual where there are two 30-minute slots, where colleagues can ask each other for feedback. We act as sparring partners and as support for their ideas and concepts. A colleague of mine was working for an energy company and was working on a smart thermostat app that she wanted some feedback on, so we discussed her project as a group. It’s really interesting to hear my colleagues’ points of view because they all come from a wide range of design disciplines and experiences.
13:30–15:30
Timeboxing Part 2
After the Crit Session, I try to do another focused block of 2-3 hours to get some more work done. Either I’ll take on a big task that requires the entire block, or I’ll break it up into a batch of smaller tasks in 30-minute slots.
What I work on in the afternoon varies greatly and depends on the project I’m on. The current project about the lottery involves us helping them identify what could set them apart from other players in the market so we’re ideating on a lot of interesting ideas as a team. Our work is ideation-focused, but we’ve also used basic value proposition principles and business model canvases to pinpoint new potential value propositions and to point out assumptions within them.
For example, this client allows customers to donate a certain amount of their winnings to charity, and we’re experimenting to see if customers would like to select which charity their money would go towards. Also, we’re looking into the idea of having a sort of financial advice column for customers, because if they ever do win any money, they might not know where to start investing or saving their newly won funds.
We all work in Miro to gather all of our design, research, and business ideas. Usually, our process involves each of us working alone and then coming together with our ideas. Together Alone is another Design Sprint principle I learned, and it works quite well for coming together to present ideas. My colleagues and I repeat this principle throughout the day, so we have time to focus individually and then come back together and share our ideas.
15:30–16:00
Answer Emails
I try to take a maximum of 30 minutes to check my email in the afternoon, but typically this only takes about 20 minutes. I hold off on looking at my emails for as long as possible to keep my focus.
16:00–17:00
Connect, Read or Write
Most days, I try to reserve time to have a casual chat about anything, both for my colleagues and for contacts I’ve established in my network. A chat with a contact might take 30-45 minutes on a typical day. During this time block, I also try to read something business design-related, or I’ll write something on Twitter or Linkedin. This hour of the day is a nice way to keep my skills sharp and connect with people.
EVENING
17:00–17:30
Tie Up Loose Ends
I like to keep a to-do list board and make sure that I haven’t missed anything. If not, I try to finish work at 17:00 or 17:30. If I still need to prepare something for the next day, I try to get it done the evening before to set myself up for the next day. I used to work really late, but now I’m more dedicated to a healthier work-life balance, so I try to stop at 17:30.
I established this routine exclusively in lockdown since I started this job post-pandemic, but I will try to stick to this routine even if I do have to go to the office. The office is an hour away, so the latest I’d stick around there is probably 18:00 since I’ll still have to drive a full hour to get home from the office.
Jo Roberts
Jo is a Senior Business Design Director at Prophet. She’s an avid reader as she used to work in publishing and her go-to activity is walking around New York City.
There’s usually two archetypes of days I have at my company, Prophet, a global business and design consultancy. I’ll either be working in a deeply-focused manner on deliverables, or I’ll be having lots of meetings and workshops where I’m presenting all day and don’t have time for deliverables. This day was a little bit of a mix, where the morning was focused work, and the afternoon involved collaborative-client-facing tasks.
MORNING
08:00–11:00
Coffee and Deep Focus
I usually have a coffee and get started straight away in my kitchen. In the morning, I tend to tackle all things that require the most mental power, as this is when I have the most energy and then I tend to feel unblocked for the rest of the day. I also subscribe to a newsletter called Stratechery by Ben Thompson, and I tend to read that in the morning.
There were 2 big problems I had to tackle this particular day, one of which was designing a business model innovation training for designers and strategists within the company. We’re starting to do larger-scale transformation work for clients, which often requires us to help clients come up with a new business model. We’re developing this training to help our colleagues think more divergently about potential business models that they could apply, in addition to having different tools and processes to identify what type of business model could be the best for a future business. I was thinking of activities we could do in the training, which will probably be a few hours over the span of 3 days. We’ll probably go through the typical design process, where we diverge, converge, test and iterate. I had to brainstorm on activities we could use for each convergent and divergent point within the training.
Another big challenge I faced that day was helping a client within the healthcare space come up with a roadmap for the next 10 years. I’m working on a narrative for their leadership on what this should look like in the short, mid and long-term. I wrote out a potential for the narrative and came up with a framing structure and shared it with the team. Once we had the story locked down, we started preparing it to be pitched to the client.
A lot of my day is used for client work, but I always try to repurpose frameworks and facilitation techniques that I've developed on client work into internal knowledge sharing material that can push the business design practice forward.
To conclude the morning, I’ll try to package what I’ve done so far, send it to the team, get their feedback, and regroup on how to move it forward.
11:00–12:00
A long New York City walk and podcasts
Then I like to go for a walk. Usually, I go out for a long walk and pick up lunch on the way back. I like to listen to the Daily, a New York Times Podcast, and Sway, by Kara Swisher while I’m out for my walk. There’s no more commute in lockdown, so I like to get out and stretch my legs even though I’m working from home. These 2 podcasts are about a half an hour each, so they’re perfect for a good hour-long walk. There’s a really good place near us called Rice and Miso that has Bento boxes, so I picked that up and brought it home. It was delicious and had rice balls, miso, and edamame.
AFTERNOON
12:00–13:00
Leadership
Next, I attended our Leadership Meeting. These are meetings you can eat lunch during and get up to date on what’s happening. They’re pretty casual since they’re all internal. People submit topics ahead of time and then we just go through those topics. I haven’t met a lot of people in person since I started the job remotely. It’s nice to get to know more faces and to see who might be interested in business design and figure out how to connect with them.
13:00–14:00
Recruitment
A lot of my time is being spent on recruitment, since we’re rapidly expanding at Prophet. We do a mix of behavioral and portfolio reviews. This one was a bit of a mix, getting to know their background and gaining insights into the work they’ve done. For business designers in interviews, I’m testing to ensure that when speaking about a problem, that they approach it from both a human value and a business value lens. Most people come into business design as either someone with a business background who then worked at a design-intensive job, or people come in with a design background but then through their design role moved into a more strategic role. I have to test these two types of candidates differently. When I interview designers going into business, I want to make sure that they’re able to talk about business models, whereas when I interview business people going into design, I need to make sure they’re able to talk about personas, journeys, and customer pain points. It’s really interesting to see the different ways people enter the field.
Something I love about design approaches to projects is that the work is very collaborative, but everyone has ownership of a topic. I like to test candidates and ensure that they’re able to work collaboratively with the team and that they’ll be comfortable taking ownership of the work.
This particular interview itself ended at 13:45, and then I always like to take 15 minutes to take up my own personal notes about the candidate.
14:00–16:00
Client Workshop
Then we had a client workshop with a healthcare client. We’re trying to help with where they want to be in the market in 7-10 years. We’ve developed different scenarios for them of what that future market might look like based on trends, both behavioral and business. For example, if people are more proactive in managing their health based on biometrics and in-the-moment recommendations, that would enable more direct-to-consumer business models in healthcare. Ultimately, we’re trying to get them thinking more creatively about the future and to identify what will be the most difficult problems to solve in the future.
EVENING
16:00–17:00
Regroup after a long video call and workshop
I’m not sure whether workshops are more or less tiring online, but I can’t go straight from a client workshop into another meeting. I regrouped with the team and we discussed what went well from a content and facilitation perspective. We also prepared what content needed to be prepared for the next day. I also caught up on emails and had a bit of down time to wind down from the workshop.
17:00–18:00
Team Catch-Up
Next, we had an account all hands meeting. That’s where all of us working on the account meetup and discuss what’s going on with all of the separate workstreams. I don’t have day-to day-visibility into all the workstreams, so it’s great to see what’s going on with the other projects.
We have a program manager who does a great job of engaging all of us remotely, so she introduces new team members in a fun, interactive way. We also showcase one of the workstreams and get to know the project in detail. I like to see how I can inject my business design knowledge into those other workstreams, and am always happy to share all of my previous assets and workshop materials if it’s helpful for colleagues. For example, I recognized that a team working on another workstream may benefit from one of my favorite activities called brand takeover, where we imagine that a new company has acquired us, and we adopt components from their business model. For example, if we were acquired by Airbnb, how might we use their two-sided platform to create new forms of value?
We always close the all hands meeting with a thank you and acknowledging everyone. It’s a nice moment to recognize people across the account.
18:00–19:00
End of Day Walk and Talk
I then try to end my day with another walk. Then, I’ll usually call someone to catch up with them. My good friend from home is in Michigan and we usually chat about once a month. So I gave her a call after work and we caught up while I walked around the neighborhood.
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