I remember the first time I sat in a board meeting at Jubilant Foodworks.

I was heading design. I had been invited because design was now part of the conversation at that level. That felt like progress.

And then the meeting started.

New customer acquisition. Retention curves. Funnel drop-off. EBITDA. Words I had heard before, enough to nod at the right moments. But why one metric was being prioritised over another, why a particular number made the room go quiet, why a specific decision was being deferred despite everyone agreeing it was right, I had no framework for any of it.

I was in the room. But I was not in the conversation.

That feeling has a name. Most people call it imposter syndrome. I think it was something more specific. It was the gap between being user-smart and being business-literate. And I had spent the better part of my career becoming very good at one of those things.

The question I had to ask myself

Around the same time I came across Joe Natoli's thinking on the value loop. The idea that design is not just about solving for users but about creating value that connects user needs to business outcomes. That reframe hit differently.

I was already an MFA. I held CUA and CXA certifications. I understood user centricity deeply. But was business centricity the differentiator I was missing? Was that the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be?

I started looking at MBA programmes. I had options. Private institutions, tier two and tier three government colleges, and ISB Hyderabad. ISB was the most expensive option on the table by a significant margin. It was also the most rigorous, the most respected, and the one where I would be in a room with people who would challenge me hardest.

I chose ISB. Not despite the cost but because of what that cost represented. A serious institution for a serious gap.

One thing I noticed when I joined was that many of my batchmates had a clear expectation from the programme. Exec MBA equals better paying job. I understood why they thought that. I did not share it. I knew an exec MBA is not a placement cell. My objective was not a salary event. It was a thinking event.

That clarity changed everything about how I experienced the programme.

What I expected versus what actually happened

I went in expecting to learn jargon. New business terms, a few leadership frameworks, perhaps some financial literacy to get through conversations I had previously nodded through.

What I got was entirely different.

Game theory. Macro and microeconomics. Leading not just teams but horizontally and upwards. Balance sheets and income statements I could actually read and interpret. Productivity and efficiency as strategic levers, not operational details. And somewhere in the middle of a quantitative methods module, algebra and calculus came back like muscle memory I had not used in years.

None of this was what I expected. All of it was what I needed.

The concept that hit hardest was opportunity cost. Not as an economics term but as a design leadership principle. Every time a designer waits for pixel perfect before sharing work, there is a cost to that wait. Every time a team debates a component for three days, the business is paying for that debate in ways the team cannot see from inside Figma. Zooming out and understanding what time actually costs a business changed how I made decisions and how I communicated them.

Pixel smart versus business literate

Before ISB I was pixel focused and user focused. Both of those things are good. Neither of them alone is sufficient at a senior leadership level.

The sharpest shift was not in what I knew. It was in what I could empathise with. I started understanding why a product manager was pushing a requirement that made no design sense on the surface. I could see the business logic underneath it, the OKR it was tied to, the stakeholder pressure behind it, the trade-off they were navigating. That empathy changed how I engaged in product conversations entirely.

I also started understanding the VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world that organisations operate in. These are not excuses for poor decisions. They are the actual conditions inside which leaders have to make good ones. The MBA gave me a vocabulary and a framework for navigating that environment rather than being overwhelmed by it.

The moment it crystallised

In earlier years I used to sit in high-stakes meetings and listen. Absorb what I could, contribute where design was directly relevant, and defer on everything else.

After ISB those same meetings felt different. I was actively participating. Why a particular feature should go live before another. How a specific decision would move OKR numbers. What the experience cost of a particular trade-off would be over time. How to read the anxiety in the room when a PM was under pressure and translate that into something constructive for my team.

That shift, from listener to participant, is the one I am most grateful for. Not because being heard feels good, though it does, but because design thinking applied at that level actually changes what gets built.

What design school gives you. What ISB added.

Design education teaches you to solve for users. That is its purpose and it does it well.

What it does not teach you is how to navigate the system around the user. The business model that funds the product. The metrics that define success for the people commissioning the work. The organisational dynamics that determine which good ideas get built and which ones die in a review.

An MBA does not make you a better designer. It makes you a more complete design leader. Someone who can hold the user and the business in the same frame at the same time, and make decisions that serve both without sacrificing either.

I did not do the MBA to get a better job. I did it because I was in the room and I was not in the conversation.

Before ISB I was pixel smart.

After it I was business literate.

The difference is not a credential. It is a completely different way of seeing.

What is the gap between where you are and where you want to be, and what are you actually doing about it?