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Increase the Impact of
Design on Business Strategy

A course for designers   by designers   

  • Confidently contribute to strategy conversations by tying your design work to business outcomes
  • Ensure you can measure and communicate how design fits into the strategic landscape
  • Align user-centered work to advance business objectives, demonstrate return on investment and strengthen cross-functional partnerships
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Course Syllabus
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Business Strategy & Design

$1,195.00 / One Time +Taxes

As low as $107.92/month with Affirm logo.
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Corporate Training

  • 7 hour course
  • 1-2 sessions
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Live Online Course

  • 7 hour course
  • 1-2 sessions
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Common Roles

This course is for designers and design researchers across various practices (such as service, product, UX, digital and interaction design).

Get a sneak peek of the course

Pragmatic Design courses are facilitated by experts and built within Miro—a visual collaboration platform—for an immersive, interactive learning experience. Explore what to expect in the course with this preview.

What you’ll learn in Business Strategy & Design

Translate your company’s business strategy into design priorities

Understand business context and decision making and apply them to your work.

  • Learn how business strategy guides the work of designers and cross-functional teams
  • Explore the market forces that shape an organization’s competitive strategy
  • Analyze how that strategy will impact the focus of design and allocation of resources

Balance desirability and viability

Navigate potential conflicts between buyer, user and business goals.

  • Apply your empathy and research skills to better understand colleagues’ challenges and goals
  • Find the difference between user, buyer and business goals—determining where they align and where they might conflict
  • Plan how to initiate cross-functional conversations to resolve such conflicts

Communicate the business
value of design

Speak the language of your stakeholders, tying design work to business success.

  • Discover how design can contribute to the product and competitive strategies
  • Identify how user goals can connect to specific business goals

Measure design impact

Develop the right metrics for the value and ROI of your design work.

  • Understand how metrics are used to evaluate business success
  • Identify the metrics most important to your stakeholders and how your design work can impact them

Preview the toolkit: Business Strategy Decoder

The Business Strategy Decoder is your action plan for measuring and communicating how design fits into the strategic landscape. Tools like the Stakeholder Conversation Guide and the Metrics Lexicon will help you apply what you’ve learned back at work.

Preview of Pragmatic Design Business Strategy Decoder

YOUR BUSINESS STRATEGY DECODER INCLUDES

  • Company Life Cycle Model
  • Five Forces Model
  • Competitive Strategy Matrix
  • Company Strategy Template
  • Product Life Cycle Model
  • Product Strategy Matrix
  • Business Metrics Guide
  • Business Strategy Decoder
  • Strategic Design Activity Selector
  • Stakeholder Conversation Guide
  • Strategy Translator
  • Metrics Lexicon
  • HEART Worksheet
COURSE TESTIMONIALS

What your peers are saying

I had an amazing time in Business Strategy & Design. If you want to understand and influence the business considerations that affect our craft, this course is for you! Props to the instructor for leading such engrossing sessions.
Cait GoodaleHead of UX at Drest
I loved everything about Business Strategy & Design; it was valuable and fun. The course helps you better understand how to align with business needs and partners, speak the same language and manage expectations in both directions. Now, in early conversations with project teams, I can actually inject my understanding and perspective and start to influence what the strategy might be.
Matt RussellExperience Design Senior Manager at Pfizer
Business Strategy & Design shows how design tools can be applied to business and product goal setting. The emphasis on using design skills to solve internal communication, prioritization and cross-functional problems—not just product ones—was a really helpful takeaway. And the through-line of examples made it feel pragmatic.
Eric BellPrincipal Product Designer at Vineti
This is a great course for designers and design leaders alike! It shares how business and product strategy are defined to better inform your design approach and priorities and help you communicate more easily with cross-functional team members. And it provides a lot of useful, actionable frameworks.
Ashley WillhiteHead of UX at Addi
Business Strategy & Design was the perfect course to help me on the project I’m working on at my company. It was also really lovely to chat with others in the UX field. I feel refreshed and eager to apply the learnings to my everyday work process.
Jyoti BockUX/UI Designer at Propeller Health
I liked the structure of this course—connecting business strategy to tactical design work. It reminded me that I need to be thinking about the big picture business strategy, not just the product itself. There are also plenty of examples in the course which helps with understanding.
Tianqi “CoCo” FengLead Product Designer at Stitch Fix
This course shares great insights into how design impacts business goals and vice versa. I would especially recommend it to designers who work closely with product managers.
Filip AleksandrowPrincipal Designer at Microsoft
I appreciated how this course reframes the relationship between business and design. It gives you the tools and language as a designer to better engage with business stakeholders.
Lindsey NelsonIndependent strategy, design and research consultant
Teresa Brazen has spent 15+ years working in the design industry as a design consultant, educator, business leader and executive coach. She’s helped teams at NASA, Rail Europe, Cisco, Clorox, Charles Schwab and more adopt human-centered ways of working and designing products and services. Prior to Pragmatic, Teresa spearheaded the global expansion of Cooper Professional Education—a leader in design and creative leadership training—to 10 countries. Her mission today is to help professionals expand their potential and increase their impact.
Teresa Brazen
Teresa Brazen
Shannon McGarity has spent more than 20 years solving clients’ design challenges in roles ranging from head of product to UX director. Prior to Pragmatic, Shannon was a director at strategic design firms Cooper and Designit—leading teams on projects, creating curriculum, coaching innovation teams and teaching service design, design leadership and more. She is also a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach, focusing on leadership coaching.
Shannon McGarity
Shannon McGarity
Lisa Pertoso is a learning designer, facilitator and organizational coach. The driving force behind her 20+ year career is helping leaders prepare for the future of work by developing our most important human skills: adaptability, communication, creativity, innovation, empathy and self-awareness. Lisa has educated design, tech, business and nonprofit leaders in the U.S., Asia, Australia and Europe. Her past clients include BMW Group, Brooklyn Public Library, Hyper Island, Parsons School of Design and TBWA.
Lisa Pertoso
Lisa Pertoso Portrait
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Instructors

Pragmatic Design instructors have proven expertise in facilitating learning experiences for design practitioners and leaders and coaching teams to increase their impact.
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Business Strategy & Design

  • 7 hours
  • 1-2 sessions
  • No travel
  • Team exercises

Our learning experiences are developed by experienced facilitators and instructional designers—focusing on interactive learning and practical application.

Our training provides immersive, hands-on practice with the skills that matter for expanding the influence of design in your organization.

We offer live online training for teams who want to engage with instructors in real time without the hassle of travel. We also offer an onsite option for corporate training clients who want to bring their team together in person.

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