Designers always consider the end-user or customer when creating physical or digital "worlds." Their focus is on making solutions desirable and usable. Business design adds another layer to this: ensuring the solution is also profitable.
The latest guest on the Minimum Viable Podcast is Alžbeta Ivanovičová, who has been working in service design and business design for several years. Michal Blažej talks with her about what business design is, how it works in practice, and how anyone can benefit from it.
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Minimum Viable Podcast is brought to you by the CX design studio Lighting Beetle*. It's usually recorded in the Slovak language, however, you can read an English transcription of this episode below. For more English content, including case studies and handouts, visit our Journal.
Today, we’ll talk about something called business design. Where did the concept of business design actually come from?
I think business design has always been around; we just didn’t know to call it that or realize we wanted to call it that. Designers, when creating physical or digital worlds, have always focused on the end customer. They care about whether their design is useful, whether people can use it, and whether they want to use it. That approach is great but has its limitations. Let me explain with an example.
I have pretty long legs. Every time I travel by plane, I think, why can’t budget airlines—or any airline, really—make the seats bigger so I can stretch my legs and feel more comfortable during the flight? But when you look at it from a business perspective, giving passengers more legroom means fewer seats on the plane. Fewer seats mean fewer passengers, which drives ticket prices up.
Then the question becomes, would anyone want to take a weekend trip to Milan if the ticket price skyrocketed? Essentially, business design recognizes that not all customer desires can be met. It puts pressure on designers to align their work with the business context of the company they’re working for.
How can this design approach help businesses?
It can help in three ways. First, it brings structure. It ensures that we don’t stray too far from the business challenge and approach it in a systematic way to solve it effectively.
Second, it fosters understanding among stakeholders—whether customers, employees, or collaborators. It helps everyone see why a particular solution is important and why it’s the best fit for the specific context.
Finally, there’s impact. Business designers are hands-on. They tackle challenges by creating prototypes—concrete solutions—and testing them with customers. Then, they take it a step further by implementing these solutions. This means they cover the entire lifecycle of a service, from creation to integration into the business ecosystem.
You mentioned thinking about problems from a business perspective. Does that mean business comes first in business design, or is the customer still the priority?
In my view, every organization should have a strategy—an idea of where it’s headed—and from that strategy, business challenges naturally arise. When I talk about business challenges, I don’t mean specific issues faced by a single salesperson. I think of them more as goals the organization wants to achieve. Customer insights should serve as inspiration for solving these challenges. So, it’s not about one taking priority over the other; it’s about finding a balance—they go hand in hand.
It sounds like if I have a challenge I can’t solve alone, I’d turn to an external consulting firm. Is business design different in this respect? Is there competition between the two?
Management consulting certainly has its place, and some people excel at it. In my view, the difference is that consulting often relies on tried-and-true solutions or approaches. It’s built on years of experience and proven methods. Business design, on the other hand, tends to be more exploratory and tailored, creating solutions that fit the specific needs and context of the challenge.
I read somewhere that business design focuses more on the top lines of the profit and loss statement, while management consulting focuses on retaining as much of those funds as possible and achieving profitability. From my perspective, business designers are often more integrated within an organization. They create specific solution proposals, prototypes, and meet directly with customers. It's not about providing generic advice. Many times, qualitative or quantitative research guides our thinking, helping us outline the next steps for a project.
What specific problems can business design address?
For example, struggling to retain customers, losing them, or being unable to increase revenue that's stagnating. Or cases where the competition is doing better than we are, or a new product we developed isn’t successful and nobody uses it.
There are also challenges related to organizational structure. For instance, rapid growth that we couldn't manage well, wanting to achieve more but feeling lost, or processes taking too long. Customers might expect changes or innovations that we can’t deliver because of organizational, technological, or other internal limitations.
How can business design tackle such significant challenges?
The approach is key. You use methods that break the challenge into smaller pieces to identify the underlying problems. Then, you systematically search for solutions, test them in practice through experimentation, and implement what works. In medium or large organizations, it’s challenging to validate and sustainably roll out solutions without causing disruption that could create new problems.
How does the analysis differ when addressing an internal organizational problem versus involving management consultants?
I’d say it’s valuable to have insights from consultants to understand the situation objectively.
In organizations, different people often focus on different issues and sometimes forget that they are all working toward a common goal.
What's unique about this approach is that it centers on the customer and their inputs. By analyzing feedback, motivations, needs, dissatisfaction, and expectations—whether through existing sources or customer research—you build a clearer context around the business challenge.
Do you have examples of clients who successfully addressed major challenges using this approach?
One example is our project with the Bratislava Water Management Company. They wanted to improve cash flow by encouraging customers to pay invoices faster and reduce the number of calls to their support center regarding confusing invoices.
We analyzed call center recordings to understand customers’ questions and identified what made the invoices unclear. Based on this, we redesigned the invoices. Then we conducted guerrilla testing in a shopping center, asking people if they understood the new design. As a result, invoice payment times improved, boosting cash flow, and customer experience also got better, as people no longer had to decipher the invoices.
My favorite approach is that when faced with a significant business challenge, you can always refine or narrow the scope of the task. You can either focus on a specific target customer group or specialize in a particular product or service. By narrowing the business challenge this way, you can work much more effectively with the subsequent analysis, research, and solutions.
Don’t you get feedback that narrowing the target audience excludes other users?
We often hear that concern—companies wanting to target everyone. However, I believe there’s always a dominant customer group. Strategically, every company knows who their long-term priority customers are.
Can you share another example of a business problem?
Sure, let’s talk about NAY Elektrodom, the largest electronics retailer in Slovakia. They wanted to shorten the time it took to serve each customer in-store. They felt their process wasn’t efficient enough. We conducted customer research to understand their shopping journey for electronics and also analyzed the in-store service process.
We found a conflict: online sales were competing with physical store sales. Customers viewed buying large appliances as an important decision—they wanted to research in-store, consult with staff, then go home and buy online. This left sales staff frustrated because they lost commission.
We focused on improving the customer experience in the sense that we developed an app that helped sales staff provide better advice and prepared an online order for the customer. The customer received a list of recommended products via email, and the salesperson still earned a commission.
By improving the employee experience, we enhanced the customer experience, shortened service time, and reduced frustration.
Are there any principles on how business design should work?
Our approach always relies on several pillars. One important aspect is customer orientation and all other stakeholders involved. Every project includes a phase where we identify the customer group or determine who will ultimately benefit from solving the business challenge and who will gain value from it.
Then, the second pillar is data, both quantitative and qualitative. We usually use quantitative data to determine the impact or to define the problem. So when we identify the business challenge together with the customer, we also want to know how big it is, whether there is a possibility of return on investment, and if we’ll really make an impact within the organization.
Another important pillar is visualization. We usually try to capture all our findings, whether they’re quantitative or qualitative. For example, it could be a service blueprint or a customer journey map. In this way, we try to visualize the insights so that stakeholders within the organization better understand the sequence of individual steps.
I’ll stop you here for a moment, you mentioned visualization. Why is it important?
Different people within an organization usually focus on different things, and sometimes they forget that they’re all working toward the same goal. And that goal is, let’s say, providing quality customer service. So they’re all co-creating the customer experience. That’s why everything should work together and logically follow one another. When employees look at a visualization, they understand, “Ah, this is where I am, this is my agenda, but it influences these other people and processes within the company.”
And then, another important pillar is prototypes. Once you know the starting point and have some potential solutions, it’s good to create prototypes—small designs you can try out in practice.
Do you have a specific example? I can imagine a webpage prototype, but what if it’s a larger change in organizational processes?
Let’s take an insurance broker as an example. Based on analysis, you realize that customers don’t fully understand the details of the insurance coverage. You can take just this small part and iterate on it. You give these proposals to, let’s say, 10 salespeople and ask them to try out the prototype, and then you ask them how the customers reacted.
Then I also think about A/B testing, which we did with one of our retail clients. How would you handle that?
When you’re dealing with a retail chain with several stores, scaling can be quite difficult. You need to do a lot of tests in one location to determine what the functional model is, and then move on to other locations. But there might also be regional differences. However, you can define certain principles. For example, the product should be displayed in a way that doesn’t get in the way, it should invite the customer to visit your store, and it should be relevant to them.
What should the first step be to get things out quicker and confront them with the user?
You need to identify the business challenge, i.e., what you want to solve. Then, you should be able to define hypotheses related to the issue and conduct either quantitative or qualitative research. After that, you need to ideate possible solutions and create prototypes, and then it’s also good to know how to implement the changes—how to manage that change.
What tools do you use for change management, and how does it look?
We often use stakeholder mapping to understand who all is involved in the business challenge so that no one is left out. If there’s resistance to change, it’s usually because some needs haven’t been heard.
Business design helps to build and maintain a competitive advantage.
It’s also about evangelizing the approach, explaining why we’re doing this and what it should bring. Positive examples are very effective, as well as communication about what has been achieved, and on the other hand, sharing lessons learned from what didn’t work. Being open about this kind of transparent communication tends to work well for us.
The key to all of this is being willing to experiment and learn. And to have persistence, be flexible, and react promptly when something doesn’t go as expected. That’s why communication and involvement from the start are so important—so everyone understands.
Finally, I’d like to look a bit into the future. Is business design the answer to the challenges that organizations might face? Is it a tool for the future?
Yes, for the future, but also right now. You can already work on an organization's business challenges, and there’s no reason to wait.
Business design is something that helps you build and maintain a competitive advantage. So, listening to customers means that you’ll not only serve your existing customer base well but when something changes in that base or a new customer segment emerges, you’ll be able to respond to their needs and innovate your products and services. Plus, thanks to business design, you’ll be able to monitor what’s happening in the market because you’re in direct contact with it.
The full interview with Alžbeta Ivanovičová in Slovak:
To see this content on our site, you need to agree to usage of 3rd party cookies. Or you can follow a link that will redirect you to following address: https://open.spotify.com/episode/143nvMXpv8ilGL89YwSbcF
Minimum Viable Podcast is brought to you every two months by the design studio Lighting Beetle*, which focuses on creating an exceptional customer experience.
In Minimum Viable Podcast, we use relatable language to dive into customer experience design. We invite unique guests to chat about how Customer Experience influences business success. A special thanks to Mojmír Procházka for his production support.
We are looking forward to every listen, follow, share, and suggestion for improvement. You can send us your tips for interesting personalities with whom we can talk about design to podcast@lbstudio.sk.
Enjoy!
