The Butter Society is a design consultancy founded by Heike Rapp after she discovered her superpower: translating impossibly complex technical concepts into experiences that most humans can actually understand and like to use.
The Butter Society specializes in Design Strategy. We use collaborative problem-solving to get you the richest outcomes, which can range from ethical AI development to your organisation’s design.
Design Strategy is one of the few cross-functional disciplines in business. It shapes what the business makes, how it works internally, and what the customers experience.
Design is giving shape to ideas, and it is about creating a visceral version of the future. Industrial and product design shapes what gets made, and the design process can also restructure internal processes. Design is about how humans interact with technology.
Strategy is about the choices where to compete and how to win. This determines product scope, internal resource allocation, and what customers are promised and delivered.
Culture is perhaps the most underestimated. What a company believes, what it rewards, and how people talk to each other shapes what products it has the courage and creativity to build, how efficiently and honestly it operates. Culture shows up in how customers are treated at every touchpoint. Culture is the operating system of a company.
Systems thinking / operations can shape the product architecture, internal workflows, and the reliability and consistency customers experience. For example, Amazon’s obsession with operational systems is inseparable from both its product decisions and its customer promises.
Brand & Story is often an underappreciated area, yet it is of significant importance. of A strong brand faces outward to customers, prospects. More importantly, it ties a company together, unifies all functions. The brand and company story give employees a filter for decisions. Brand & Story creates the interpretive frame through which customers experience everything. Brand is what people say when you leave the room.
Ethics are a company’s actual (not just stated) values and principles. They determine what it will and won’t build, how it treats employees and partners internally, and what customers can trust.
The thread connecting all of the areas is that they’re all sense-making disciplines. They answer the question “what matters and why”, and this affects what gets made, how the organization runs, and what customers feel.
Interested in how your firm could benefit from Design? Let’s chat.
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