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Open Introduction

Business Thinking for Designers

Business Thinking for Designers is the guide to increasing your impact and value at work by learning how design connects to the bottom line. Discover the essential vocabulary and strategies to effectively communicate with your business partners, plus tools, tips, and frameworks that you can put right to work.

This book will equip you with the knowledge and know-how to transform your career and company by bringing a business mind to design. Written by Ryan Rumsey, founder of Chief Design Officer School School, a training company, and veteran of Apple, Electronic Arts, Nestlé, and USAA.

As of October 2025, Business Thinking for Designers has been read by over 60k designers around the world.

Copyright © Second Wave Dive, 2020

Open About the author

About the author

Ryan Rumsey is the CEO of Second Wave Dive, a creative studio meets HoldCo where he builds profitable, bootstrapped businesses… then find aspiring entrepreneurs to run them. Ryan is also the founder of Chief Design Officer School.

Ryan is the trusted partner to many of the worlds leading designers and teams. Whether as the executive coach to Directors, VPs, and CDOs, or working with companies like Google, Zillow, Uber, and ANZ, his programming and insights have helped over 3000 designers around the work accelerate their careers and impact.

Ryan has a hybrid background in interaction design, front-end development, and product management. Previously he led digital product innovation and transformation at Apple, Electronic Arts, USAA, and Nestlé. His life experiences include working on a farm and acting in a Staind music video. Ryan is a dad, partner, and massive fan of the Liverpool Football Club.

Open Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

Thank you to everyone who contributed to the written version of Business Thinking for Designers

Editors: Aarron Walter, Bart King, Rob Goodman, Jessica Dawson
Illustration: Ranganath Krishnamani
Creative Direction: Aaron Stump

These people were instrumental in the writing of this book: Sally Rumsey, Nguvet Vuong, Sarah Mills, Susan Price, Chris Wilkinson, Keith Aric Hall, Lucas Coelho, Greg Storey

Open Table of Contents

Contents

Chapter 1

Why you need to know business

Understand the business impact of design

Chapter 2

Explore business concepts

Essential vocabulary, models, and strategies

Chapter 3

Develop your business perspective

Your business partners and you

Chapter 4

Create conditions for design maturity

Gain perspective of how design connects to business

Chapter 5 [

Communicate the options

](https://books.thecdo.school/2/business-thinking-for-designers/39/chapter

Open Chapter 1: Why you need to know business

Chapter 1

Why you need to know business

Understand the business impact of design

Within a week of starting what I thought was a dream job, I was overwhelmed. At three months, I was really struggling. After six months, I doubted my abilities to fill the role. 

What had worked as a design leader at Apple was not working at Electronic Arts (EA). 

In the spring of 2011, I accepted an opportunity to shape a new organization called Worldwide Customer Experience (WWCE) at EA. After years of paltry customer-satisfaction ratings, EA tasked WWCE with supporting a transition to a “player-first” organization. In my role as senior manager of customer programs, I was responsible for leading a team of UX designers, program managers, and front-end de

Open Chapter 2: Explore business concepts

Chapter 2

Explore business concepts

Essential vocabulary, models, and strategies

About six months after joining Apple, I moved from a team focused on internal training to one responsible for customer-support programs. When I joined the new team, I struggled to convince my peers in Program Management that dedicated time for research was an important part of the design process. 

As I reflect on that experience, I realize I simply lacked the language to get others on board with my ideas. I was speaking design, but my colleagues were speaking business. I didn’t take the time to get to know their unique needs and objectives before I made suggestions on how I could improve things. To help you avoid my mistakes, here are some essential conce

Open Chapter 3: Develop your business perspective

Chapter 3

Develop your business perspective

Your business partners and you

Now that we’ve reviewed basic business fundamentals, this chapter will cover practical steps to get to know your business and business partners. 

It’s fundamental to your design work to understand the models and strategies specific to your business and the people who use them. With your creative problem-solving processes you can:

• Visualize your business
• Anticipate the needs of your partners
• Analyze the effects of culture on decision-making
• Reflect on how you are or aren’t having an impactVisualize your business model and strategy

Visualize your business model and strategy

To ge

Open Chapter 4: Create conditions for design maturity

Chapter 4

Create conditions for design maturity

Gain perspective of how design connects to business

InVision’s groundbreaking report, The New Design Frontier, explores the behaviors, practices, and outcomes of high-performing teams in ways that support the ideas in this book. The report identifies five organic levels of design maturity at which design has increasing levels of influence on a company’s bottom line. 

One of the biggest jumps design teams strive to make in their maturity is moving beyond design as a service for basic aesthetics and creative problem-solving techniques (Levels 1, 2, and 3) to a model in which design collaborates in strategic decision-making (Levels 4 and 5). I’ve seen many design teams stuck at Levels 2 and 3

Open Chapter 5: Communicate the options

Chapter 5

Communicate the options

How effective communication helps business partners understand design

As mentioned in Chapters 3 and 4, increasing organizational trust is a matter of getting to know your business, your business partners, and aligning your work to viability. In reality though, those steps alone are not enough, because your partners are suffering from decision fatigue. 

Decision fatigue is when the quality of decision-making deteriorates simply because there are too many decisions to be made. But designers can help the situation through effective communication.

The ability to communicate clearly is the single most important skill you can deve

Open Chapter 6: Put it all together

Chapter 6

Put it all together

How effective communication helps business partners understand design

Regardless of the design role you’re in now or what your next role might be, the lessons in this book are intended to be universal. While you’ll be faced with different business challenges at every company you work for, the basics remain the same.

So let’s talk about how you can apply them in your current role and organization. Whether using SWOT or SCR, Strategy Maps, or the Negotiation Canvas, these methods and practices are all rooted in the same basic outcome: increasing the business impact of design.

This chapter will share effective ways that you can begin incorporating these lessons inside your organization:

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Open Bonus Articles

Appendix I

Bonus Articles

Additional resources to become a business savvy and street smart designer

Now that you've become good at business, here's a bunch more writing I've done over the years to continue raising your influence, and position design to win.

Get good at leading design orgs…

• The CDO School Design Leadership Playbook
• You're now in charge. What's the plan?
• 5 things Design VPs are paid to do differently than a Director or Manager

Get good at strategy…

• [Four Fits to make Design crucial at your company](https://thecdo.

Open Bite-Sized Videos

Appendix II

Bite-Sized Videos

Quick, pragmatic lessons to see business stuff in new ways

OKRs for Design Orgs

Data and Statistics for Designers

Get Good at Winning Allies <iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/1074101134?badge=0&amp;autopause=0&amp;player_id=0&amp;app_id=58479" width="960" height="540" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay;

Open Book Reviews

Appendix III

Book Reviews

A handful of the reviews and messages I've received over the years

Today (April 10, 2025) is a special day. Business Thinking for Designers turns 5.

It was released 3 weeks into the global pandemic, without much fanfare or celebration.

My wife and I were knee deep in trying to figure things out how our family would survive, how we'd be able to give our kids a sense of fun and curiosity when everything around them was scary, and how we'd maintain any capacity for our own energy so that we could be present for our kids.

I was six months into my entrepreneurial adventure. I had no idea what I was doing, was worried constantly how I'd be able to make enough money to pay for the basics, and saw all the momentum I had been building quickly fade away.

Meanwhile, this little book was re