This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Business models are not usually replaced because someone had a better idea. They are replaced because the old one stopped adding up, and everyone spent two years optimising it before admitting that.

The hard part is not designing a new model. It is recognising that the current one has expired.

Why companies optimise past the point of usefulness

Growth slows, so the response is more effort at the same levers: more marketing spend, more sales activity, more features. The metrics improve marginally and the underlying economics do not move, because the constraint is structural rather than operational.

Meanwhile nobody has decomposed the model into its parts — who the customer is, what they are actually hiring the product to do, how money is made, what a unit costs and returns — so there is no way to identify which part is broken. And the processes underneath were built for the model the company has already outgrown.

Product, economics and the model underneath

Forty-five lessons. Nine on product strategy: the role, finding and sustaining product-market fit, portfolio decisions with life-cycle logic, Jobs to Be Done and journey mapping for understanding what customers actually hire you for, product organisation design, North Star and AARRR metrics, monetisation models with unit economics, scaling and risk, and platform and ecosystem models.

Then twelve on the financial model underneath: what an efficiency-driven business is, how models evolve from start-up to corporation, translating intent into financial targets, finding process inefficiency, goal-setting people believe, the strategy pyramid, budgeting that supports decisions, indicators across four dimensions, Lean Six Sigma, scaling, and what follows efficiency.

Solving the problem and rebuilding the machinery

Then ten on structured problem solving, because redesigning a model is exactly the kind of problem with no available answer: framing with 5W1H, SCQA and MECE trees, root cause analysis, Pareto and Theory of Constraints, SCAMPER and Six Thinking Hats, TRIZ with the Ideal Final Result for contradictions that appear unresolvable, group facilitation, and the standard frameworks.

Then eight on process optimisation, because a new model meets the old process before it meets the market: waste, standardisation, maturity, five types of process map, improvement frameworks, architecture, and the full toolset from 5S and 8D through SIPOC, DRIVE and ICOR.

And six on gamification — the practical answer to getting people to participate in a change voluntarily, across attraction, onboarding, recognition, culture and learning, including options requiring no platform and no budget.

Who is teaching this

Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals — companies at very different stages, which is where the sense of when a model has expired comes from.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all course materials

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Practical assignments and real business cases

• A section with additional courses, tools and resources

Start with the unit

Take one unit of what you sell and write what it costs to acquire, deliver and support, and what it returns over its life. If those numbers are unavailable or contested, that is the first finding, and it explains why the strategy conversations keep going in circles. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.