Product Design & Business Development

Hi @Johanny Pestalozzi — love your question! So excited to hear our Community’s stories and examples! 

In the meantime, I decided to share a couple of stories that I find interesting and that talk about product design and its role in various organizations:

• How Bancolombia Boosts Design Team Productivity, Creates Culture of Cross-Functional Collaboration 
• Why innovation fails, and how Design Sprints can help by @Ana Oarga and @Raz Burciu 
• Agile Design and Lean Implementation in Miro – Get the Best of Both Worlds by @John White and @Michael de la Maza 

Would super curious to learn how design works cross-functionally in your organization!

Hi @Anna Savina Thanks a lot for sharing these stories! I’ll definitely have a look into them. 

@Johanny Pestalozzi I am not a digital product designer, but I have been a client and I’ve worked inside tech companies as a representative for the customer, who engages with product designers. Something I value about product professionals, in general, is the way that you’re able to look underneath the request that someone is making and get at the heart of the need. When I have been on teams that practice this kind of empathy, customers are generally wowed. In contrast, I have also worked with teams that are, frankly, arrogant and believe what they think is better than what the customer thinks. Without fail, that mindset produced a negative result. So, my two cents = empathy all the way!   

@Alexis Luscutoff Thank you so much for sharing these insights with us! I fully agree with you. Empathy is an essential element to build a customer/user-centric product & organization. May I ask a further question? When you look underneath a client’s request, what approach/techniques do you use? It’d be great to build a kind of toolkit of useful things that help us in this process. 

In my experience, digital product development integrates business goals with design by applying human-centered frameworks while aligning with technical and sustainability constraints. I use design thinking for discovery agile for iterative delivery and data-driven validation to ensure business viability. At CONTUS Tech, the practice involves balancing usability with scalability embedding sustainability by optimizing system efficiency and resource usage so products achieve impact across business, users and technology.

In my experience a good product development services company helps balance business needs and human centered design by using a step by step process that keeps both goals in mind. What I like about the approach used by Brand New MD is that they start with research to understand the real problem, then move into concept, design, and prototyping while always checking what the user wants and what the business needs. This makes it easier to mix strategy, user value, and technology choices without losing direction. Keeping feedback in every stage also helps the team make better decisions and stay aligned with long term goals. This simple and clear flow has worked well for me when trying to bring design and business together.