Designing Moats: Where Design Meets Business Strategy
At Designing Moats, we believe design is the next great competitive advantage in a world of rapidly commodifying software services. What Network Effects and Growth Hacking did for software companies in the 2010s, thoughtful design will do for them in the near future. Users gravitate towards products and brands that they feel some sort of connection to, and those feelings start with design.
Who We Are
We're the team at Discohouse, a product and brand design agency based in Denver, CO.
What We Offer
Designing Moats delivers a potent mix of content to fuel your design and business strategy:
1. Deep-dive Essays: Twice a week, we publish essays on how design decisions impact business metrics, user engagement, and brand loyalty. We evaluate common software patterns and outline how design decisions can elevate those patterns to benefit both you and your users.
2. Design Breakdowns: Our sharp, concise breakdowns of standout designs in the wild offer practical lessons you can apply immediately to your work.
Who This Is For
Whether you're a UX designer looking to tie your work more closely to business outcomes, a product manager seeking to harness design as a growth lever, a brand strategist aiming to create lasting market differentiation, or a founder wanting to build design into your company's DNA from day one—Designing Moats is an essential resource.
Our Principles
We don’t do trends or throw-aways. We believe in timeless design and building things that endure. We write earnestly (with sprinkles of cynicism, where appropriate) about how we think about design and business.
Design is - at its core - about finding solutions for the problems that we encounter. This is also the genesis of many startups, and yet so many of them don’t put nearly enough emphasis on solving their users’ problems with considered design decisions. We aim to shed light on the ways these design decisions can ultimately impact the performance and growth of your business (while also solving real-world problems for your users).
