Business Foundations for Designers
Jacalin Ding
Product Leader, 2xFounder, Seed-B Raised
Entry Level Business Acumen For Junior / Mid-weight Designers
🎁 Introductory Price: Take 20% Off for first 50pp: 20OFF
Many junior and mid weight designers face these challenges:
👉🏽 Produce outputs without understanding the business priority behind it
👉🏽 Unable to explaining decisions beyond “it’s better for the user”
👉🏽 Fear about AI will replace their skills to build
You don’t need a business background, a senior title or access to create impact. It's time to go beyond “How do we design this?” to “Why is this worth doing?”
This course is the answer to connect your design skills with practical business knowledge - starting from the basics.
✅ Learn how businesses make money, what shapes their priorities
✅ Learn how your design decisions can shift the needles
✅ Build the confidence to ask strategic questions
✅ Communicate your product thinking to business partners with confidence
This course teaches you the knowledge you can take into every role that follows.
Products, employers and AI tools will change. Understanding priorities, making thoughtful decisions and communicating your contribution are transferable skills you can keep using across teams, industries.
What you’ll learn
Apply each lesson to a current, past project, at your own pace.
Identify who uses the product, who pays, how money comes in and the main costs.
Use business-stage and competitor examples to explain what matters for your design decisions.
Use the Strategy Tree Framework to connect direction, goals, product priorities to your design initiative
Explain your expected contribution and identify the weakest assumption to evaluate
Show the value of everyday work
Learn to evaluate business, product and customer metrics that fit your project
Able to identify what should improve and what must not get worse for customers. Identify the evidence you still need.
Build a business case-study draft around your decisions, rationales, with supporting reasoning and evidence.
Explain choices, tradeoffs and your role for a portfolio, interview or promotion conversation.
Recognise your impact beyond design deliverables
Learn directly from Jacalin
Jacalin Ding
Product & Design Leader | 2x Business Founder | Seed to Series B Advisor
Who this course is for
Junior to mid-level designers who want to understand business priorities and contribute confidently in product discussions.
Designers preparing a portfolio, interview or promotion story who want to explain the choices and business value behind their work.
Senior designers been on crafts and ready to step up and fill in foundational business gaps as well as improve communication skills.
Prerequisites
Beginner Friendly
No Business Background Needed
What's included
30 Self-paced lessons across six topics
Build business foundations through recorded lessons and practical examples. Work through the topics in order and revisit the business-model examples that fit your project.
Four connected assignments
Use one project throughout: follow the money, map your contribution, choose meaningful measures, and assemble a business-aware case-study draft. Each step builds on your earlier work.
Guided worksheets you can reuse
Use the shared MIRO worksheet and case-study structure to organise your thinking. Keep evidence, assumptions and unknowns clear as you apply the learning to your own work.
Certificate on completion
Share your achievement
Build with your own project
Walk away with a finished case study and full clarity to how and why it matters to the business
Community of peers
Engage within self-paced learner community to exchange ideas and uplift each other's work
Certificate + Linkedin credential
Share your new skills on Linked profile with your employer
Maven Guarantee
Your purchase is backed by the Maven Guarantee.
Course syllabus
27 lessons • 4 projects
Let's go 🚀
Start here: Welcome to Maven
Make the most out of this course
Course Modules
How do businesses make money?
How design adapts as a business grows
Understand business competition
Connect design decisions to business outcomes
Know what to measure—and why
Communicate your design impact with confidence
Free resource
Becoming a high performing strategic designer
Future Proof Design Career by Improving Strategic Thinking
Understand business decision-making and think like a business leader with a heart of a designer.
Gain Trust by Influence Strategically
Learn to align design with business goals and become an influential partner.
Manage Up and Across Effectively
Practical tips to boost performance in your day-to-day work to improve working relationships with leaders and your team.
Frequently asked questions
Maven for Teams
Reimbursement
Get your company to pay
Everything L&D needs: email template, receipts, and certificate of completion.
Get reimbursedPrivate cohort
Run a cohort for your org
A dedicated cohort with a custom schedule and curriculum, tailored to your team.
Book a private cohort$480
USD