The opportunity
SBIZ 757, Strategic Business Innovation, is the SCAD course where Master of Business Innovation in Design Management students take a venture concept from a one-page idea to a defendable strategic foundation. Mine became Raft, an early-stage venture I can't yet describe in detail without breaking NDA, but whose shape I can talk about: a service that lives at the intersection of community, accessibility, and meaningful agency.
The course brief was simple: don't build a product. Build the foundation a product can be built on. That foundation has a name in the program, Foundation Document A. It's the single source of truth that future hires, investors, and the build team work from.
I authored mine solo.
The problem
The venture had a clear founder instinct and three pages of notes. What it didn't have:
- A defensible market position the team agreed on
- A business model worth pitching
- A brand voice and design language to brief future hires from
- A roadmap sequenced for a real first 12 months
- Any of it written down in one place
Without that foundation, every conversation re-litigated the same questions. The deliverable had to be a single artifact opinionated enough to make decisions cheaper, rigorous enough to survive an investor's scrutiny, and clear enough that an engineer or brand designer could pick it up and act.
How I worked
The SCAD Master of Business Innovation in Design Management toolkit shaped the process. I worked across four parallel tracks in a single quarter.
1. Research approach
Primary + secondary research designed for a single-quarter window, enough to triangulate, narrow enough to stay actionable.
2. What I heard
Synthesis of the recurring themes, quotes, jobs-to-be-done, the underlying human story.
3. Frameworks
STEPIC + Porter's Five Forces + Blue Ocean Strategy + Value-Curve, used in sequence to map the macro environment, the competitive forces, and the uncontested space the venture should own.
4. Strategic direction
The frameworks fed into a single, opinionated direction, where Raft plays uncontested, what it raises, reduces, creates, eliminates.
5. Concept prototype
A concept-level prototype the venture team could react to, enough product to make the strategy testable, not enough product to commit to a build.
6. User testing
The concept went through structured testing with target users, the goal was to validate the strategic assumptions, not the visual layer.
What shipped
A Foundation Document A, the artifact the venture team can hire, build, and pitch from, plus an 11-slide public-facing version of the work shown across this page.
Specific contents are NDA. The high-level shape:
- Strategic positioning, where Raft plays uncontested
- Market analysis, STEPIC + Porter + Blue Ocean
- Persona + value proposition
- Business model
- Brand voice + design principles
- 12-month roadmap
The document is the kind of artifact that, in industry, takes a small team six months. The course's value was in compressing that into a single quarter while keeping every chapter defendable.
Reflection
Two things this project taught me.
1. Strategy is a design deliverable. The instinct in design school is to chase artifacts that look like products, screens, prototypes, brand systems. Foundation Document A re-anchored me on the artifact that makes those artifacts possible. A strong strategy document is design, it's just structured for a different audience.
2. Documents are interfaces. The Foundation Document is consumed by founders, investors, hires, partners, each with a different reason to open it. Designing the navigation, hierarchy, and pacing of the document was as much UX work as any product surface I've shipped. The cover page, the executive summary, the section breaks, all of them are wayfinding.
If you're a hiring manager or a recruiter and you'd like to see the full Foundation Document under a private walkthrough, the deep-dive CTA below lets you reach me directly.