Development
My development across the Expertise Areas.
Business and Entrepreneurship
Past
When completing my previous portfolio, I actively set out to strengthen my skills within the Business and Entrepreneurship expertise area, as I saw it as essential for ensuring that meaningful designs actually reach the people who need them. At that time, I felt confident in designing impactful concepts, but less confident in understanding how these ideas could realistically be brought to market.
A key learning was stakeholder management. Through courses such as Innovation Methods and Design Innovation Methods, I learned that designing does not stop with the end user. Manufacturers, marketers, buyers, and other indirect stakeholders all influence whether a product succeeds or fails. Tools such as stakeholder onion maps helped me visualise these relationships early on, which proved especially valuable when improving Tony’s Chocolonely’s value proposition.
Courses like Entrepreneurship in Action – Ideation and Introduction to Business Design introduced me to feasibility, viability, and desirability, as well as tools such as the Business Model Canvas. I became particularly interested in the product-to-service shift, which challenged my earlier assumption that products are always sold directly to end users. These experiences reshaped how I think about the lifecycle, delivery, and sustainability of a design.
Present
During my internship at Signify (Philips Hue), this expertise area developed significantly through hands-on experience as a Product Management intern. I worked directly within the New Product Development Launch (NPDL) process, supporting decisions related to strategy, positioning, pricing, and feature definition across the Hue Secure portfolio.
I worked on creating value propositions for future products such as a Hue Secure Keypad and Indoor and Outdoor Motion Sensors. This involved combining user insights, market data, competitor benchmarking, and business constraints to determine whether a product should exist at all, and if so, why. I gained experience working with financial stakeholders, analysing margins, pack sizes, and go-to-market strategies, and learned how business decisions are often shaped through dialogue rather than certainty.
This experience showed me how much of product development happens before anything is designed visually, and how crucial it is to align user value with long-term business strategy.
Link to Professional Identity and Vision
This expertise area directly supports my ambition to design solutions that are not only meaningful, but also viable and sustainable. I want to avoid designing ideas that only work in theory. Understanding business models, stakeholders, and data allows me to make decisions with more precision and realism, ensuring that my designs can have lasting impact in the real world.
