When completing my portfolio last year, I set out to strengthen my knowledge and skills within the Business and Entrepreneurship expertise area, as I considered it crucial for bringing your products to the people that need them. At the time, I felt confident in designing meaningful products, but less so in understanding how they could realistically reach users in the world.

From a business perspective, stakeholder management is all about understanding the different parties involved in the creation and use of your designs. We often only think about the direct user of our product, when often the picture is much bigger than this. We need to understand the manufacturers who will make our products, the marketing team who will promote it, the person who will buy the product (as often this is different from the end user), and so many more stakeholders. I learned about this both in a lecture within my P3 squad, where we were taught how to use stakeholder onion maps, which proved very useful in the Innovation Methods course, where we looked at how to improve the value proposition of Tony’s Chocolonely. This helped me realise that mapping out stakeholders early on helps identify key perspectives and influences on your design.

At the beginning of the year, I took an Industrial Engineering elective, ‘Entrepreneurship in Action – Ideation’. This course showed me how to generate ideas and make decisions that are business-conscious. This is where I was first introduced to feasibility, viability and desirability, and how we can consider these ideas when we are generating ideas for products to ensure that they can lead to a successful business. This was further emphasised in Introduction to Business Design, where I first learnt how to create a Business Model Canvas. I looked specifically at the product-to-service shift; this showed me that my existing perspective on business models was narrow-minded, as I only really thought about the sale of products directly to the user. This idea of different business models, alongside the diverse set of stakeholders, showed me that there are so many different aspects to a business. It really changed how I view the lifecycle and delivery of a design.

I had the opportunity to further develop this in Design Innovation Methods, where I learnt a variety of different tools to examine the best ways to design and organise a business. For example, how you can map users’ journeys to understand untapped potential with a product, as well as looking at how to analyse competitors to see where your product does or should stand out. This course also helped me realise that we don’t need to have a complete or perfect product to gain insights on whether a business will be successful or to know the direction to go in. By using a minimum viable product, you can still gain these insights early and adapt accordingly.

I look to use a minimum viable product in my FBP to better understand how users interact with it and engage with it whilst it is still in development or early stages. I will also include a diverse set of stakeholders from the beginning of my project – ensuring that I don’t restrict myself to just considering the end user. I plan to apply tools like the stakeholder onion map again to structure this engagement and make informed design decisions throughout the process.