Truth about UX Strategy

I spent a good portion of my career working with the strategic part of design. At times, I called myself a UX Strategist and other times, people around me called me a design strategist or similar. Now comes the confession… UX Strategy never really had a huge buy-in from stakeholders.

One can easily attribute this to many factors.

1. There is an abundance of strategies in any company.
   Almost all companies run on multiple strategies. People will have a hard time understanding the implications of one more document or narrative that they need to digest.

2. Product people think strategy belongs to them. Not to design.
   My chat last year with Jamie Levy — who literally wrote the book about UX Strategy — also confirms that designers butting into strategy sometimes rubs the product people the wrong way. Product or business people do not like any “strategy” coming from other specialist functions.

3. No one asked for it. Therefore it could not land anywhere.
   In most of the cases I created a UX Strategy, there were only a few from the client or business side requiring such an output. This did not mean they did not need it but it did mean that the landing strip for the output was permanently clouded.

4. It is a relatively unknown concept.
   It takes almost the same time to explain what UX Strategy is to create the strategy and get the buy in for it. I have had more than a few conversations about this with UX Strategists and Design Strategists from other companies — including FAANG giants. They also admitted that even the designers themselves had a very vague idea of what this mysterious concept was.

Before going any further, I need to insert my old definition of UX Strategy for the reader who is not that familiar with the concept.

“UX Strategy is all the structured prep work before actual UX activities start so that all touch-points are continuously harmonized towards the users’ needs.”

And towards the end, I will tell you why I changed my mind about this definition.

…

I know that none of the factors listed above are valid reasons to give up on UX Strategy altogether. Instead, it is helpful to see what overlaps this approach have with some other well-known strategy frameworks.

Playing to Win Strategy Choice Cascade

My personal favorite and the closest to my heart. If we take the strategy choice cascade created by Roger Martin at face value, we would be hard-pressed to find the user focus at first glance. Martin himself after the publishing of his seminal book Playing to Win started to talk a lot about customer focus and uncovering hidden needs.

Porter’s Five Forces

These are five forces that can bring a company down or build it up equally easily. Even though they are the basics of building any corporate strategy, none of them address how the users are experiencing the company or its output. The bargaining power of customers is the closest Porter comes in trying to address the risks of competitors stealing market share.

Blue Ocean Strategy

A powerful framework amplifying the need to innovate by finding a new “blue” ocean instead of a red one bloodied by the losers. This is one of the frameworks that explicitly mention finding people who are not customers yet and building products that will fulfill unmet needs.

Lean Product Canvas

Since it was previously called “Lean UX Canvas”, it is clear that the author Jeff Gothelf had a very clear view of how this framework can address the needs of the users, customers and most importantly the prospective customers.

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)

Even though OKRs are not exactly a strategy framework, sometimes they are cited as one. Here we can see the focus on users since any decent practitioner of OKR knows that the Key Result has to be an outcome which is simply a desired change in user’s behavior.

There are several more strategy frameworks, methodologies that I can’t list and compare here since the exercise is to see what overlaps or differentiates these frameworks from UX Strategy.

…

Examples from my real life experiences

As I mentioned in the intro, I have had differing degrees of success in getting buy-in about UX Strategy from stakeholders, especially the ones on the business side. The best approach for me to get buy-in was almost always not calling this activity UX Strategy at all. When people come across a new unknown concept, they have to first align themselves with it from an outside in perspective. Your experience as a strategist — especially from other companies — would not count as much as you think. Here are a few examples from my own experiences:

Spotify Car Thing — “Minimize time to music in older cars.”

The first and possibly the last hardware developed by Spotify. It was one of my proudest moments upon launch which became a source of learning that I could not have anticipated. Here, during the process, I did not really mention UX Strategy but that was indeed what I was doing. We were trying to find the best marriage between a form factor, use cases and the necessary controls / configuration. I only guided the team to follow a user-centric process (typically rare in hardware design projects) by experimenting a lot with live prototypes.

The Car Thing product is no longer with us but I and Spotify learned a lot during the progress and especially when it comes to how public experimentation can reduce uncertainties, even if it is a hardware product.

Jabra — “Marry the advantages of hearing aids with wireless earbuds.”

Leading a cross company innovation initiative, our task was to understand the relationship with hearing health and the passion of users for experiencing audio all day long in their ears. This time, I pronounced my role as a UX Strategist more but without pushing for it. We worked really hard on creating a long-lasting strategy that can support Jabra as an underdog player in the newly minted arena of “true wireless” earbuds. Note that this work was done before AirPods were released so we had to create a lot of paradigms without reference such as charging the buds in a case.

This time, the result was more timeless and crisp. It created buy-in and excitement of finding a niche without fighting Apple head on.

IKEA Home smart — “Democratize the smart home beyond the geek of the home.”

As a stable home furnishing company, IKEA seldom creates new product lines, maybe once per decade. So it was a privilege and a bit scary to be a part of the journey of designing a smart home eco system for this home furnishing giant. Much of this story is public as a Figma Config talk and also more than a few articles on The Verge.

The results speak for themselves in many ways for IKEA Home smart. It is seen by many as the most inclusive smart home system. We managed to discover a niche that fits both the brand and brings the phenomenon of smart homes beyond the dudes going around with phones in their pajama pockets at home.

This time, being the leader and manager of UX for home smart, I had a wider audience and expectations for working on a UX Strategy. This came in many outputs such as a strategy canvas, many guidelines, archetypes and a lot of struggle to keep the user in the center all the way through the noise of technological and business hurdles. Even though I never called myself a UX Strategist at any point in time, our approach to UX was solid, consistent and simple enough to constitute a strategy.

…

What you can do

Here is the short TL;DR of all of my learnings… Do not push for UX Strategy onto your organization. Instead ask: How can every strategic movement take the users into account?

In short, my new definition is:

“UX Strategy is about making any strategy care about users.”

It is much easier to have a great UX Strategy when you stop calling it a UX Strategy.

You can use simple tools like User Stories as mini strategies. Even if the definition of a user as an archetype — with their unique situation and mindset, their pain point and the expected outcome all sound like table stakes, believe me when I say it is a rarity to see a good user story even in the most mature of organizations. An effective user story is the smallest effort you can do as a UX Strategy.

The formula for an effective user story.

…

Whether you call yourself a UX Strategist or not, I can guarantee that your organization needs user focus in their strategies. Even if it is a tech strategy, there is a user out there for all kinds of output. Therefore it is the responsibility of the UX people (even if it is a sole individual who holds UX together) to make sure everyone cares about their users.