How to Move UX Upstream to Strategy

“Moving UX Upstream to Strategy” was an expert panel featuring Google product design strategy experts Rebecca Blum and Jennifer Otitigbe, hosted in the UX Strategy community (https://bit.ly/3sfg9DQ). This article is a summary of the panel written by the UX Strategy community’s own Prabhakar Bind and Swati Panda. The challenge question for the panel was “How can UX and product team members move upstream from execution-focused activities to have more of an impact on product design strategy and direction?"

The UX Strategy Community has approximately 2,000 members from around the world. You can view a video playback of the panel by joining the community using the link above, and clicking the video link in the #general channel.

The Product Design Process: Birds’ Eye View

We can think about three different lenses in the UX Process/Product Development Process

1. Traditional Double Diamond Lens
2. Agile Product Development Process
3. Lean Start-up Process

Though we still very much believe in the Double Diamond but the environment of how we practice this has fundamentally changed for two reasons:

1. Iteration cycles are a lot shorter now
2. We also have a tremendous amount of new data at our fingertips. The role that data science is playing now in understanding customers is introducing new opportunities to impact the product development process with data and insights.

Way forward:

1. The Double Diamond is still very valid but we should operationalize it in new ways.
2. The challenge moving forward for us as UX practitioners is figuring out how UX works better with the data-centric roles like Business Analyst or Product Analyst. Some of us might have this opportunity of having a quantitative researcher on our team and that’s an excellent resource to have. 

Product Design: Strategy vs Structure

How to think at the individual level?

We would like to think about a) the broader story we are trying to tell b) identify the north star and how do we define that, and c) how can I help and proactively be one of the voices with my UX. How can I as a UXer move upstream?

How to think at the org structure level?

Key question: How should we position the team so that it is best poised to be at the table when having these strategic conversations

Product Design Strategy: Key Challenges

Allocating work across highly specialized roles

The challenges with work division includes the failure to see the big picture. People generally optimize to fulfill their role expectations, and miss out on the larger picture. This approach limits the achievements of teams.

So, if you are a designer and in an organization that’s highly specialized, the challenge here is fighting the uphill battle of influencing the strategy.

The big push on Operations.

Recently, organizations have seen a huge emphasis on Design Operations, and Research Operations. The challenge in adopting this approach includes an unnecessary emphasis on Taylorism or division of task to infinite granular pieces where teams lose out on the big picture of product strategy. Hence, all individuals in UX - whether on the design side or research side need to work hard against it.

The decision-making power of product managers

The maturity of the organization influences what’s expected of teams if you want to be involved in strategy. We were expecting UX Strategy to be a role that has a progression from design roles like visual design etc., but product management was given basically the strategy decision-making power. The problem with this approach is, it takes a lot of understanding to create a strategy and we are not sure that product managers always have the time, inclination or the skills to get as deep into the matter as they need to, to create an understanding especially, in the context of inventing new products or getting into a new space.

So, what’s the way forward?

The ideal scenario is that you have UX, which is both research and design, working collaboratively with the PM and engineering to explore the opportunities, and that way, you are bringing everyone along in the discovery process. When the time comes to focus on your roles you all have this shared common understanding of why it is we are doing and what we are doing.

We think that the strategic role is up in the air and we can move towards that but we usually would have to build that credibility unless it is a very mature organization.

How do we start building that kind of credibility?

What kinds of skills and experiences are helpful for moving from more tactical and incremental work into a more strategic role... especially if the organization is not that mature or if the scale of the products and services doesn’t really allow for strategic decision making?

At the organization level:

1. Understand the business strategy even if you do not have a seat at the table to make those decisions. Understand why things are the way they are. Think about ways that you could help improve the decisions.
2. Be that collaborative partner even if you are not necessarily getting your seat at the table. Try to put your foot in there in a way that is going to help your stakeholders achieve better outcomes.

At the individual level:

1. Curiosity: Even if you are in a very tactical environment or role, find ways to be curious about your domain and that curiosity is going to drive you to be very observant, to anticipate where else could this go, and then also to be able to ladder up. Maybe you found a couple of tactical insights that could be explored and that might take your feature or product in another direction, and people are paying attention to it - you could own that, explore it and amplify it and ladder it up.
2. Communication: It involves 2 things. Firstly, understand your stakeholders and what makes their eyes light up. For everybody, it’s something different. Communication is not one size fits all. For every stakeholder, you need to figure out what makes their eyes light up and then how you can tailor your message, your findings, and your recommendations in a way that is going to hit that sweet spot for them.
3. Storytelling: It’s a skill that helps drive action on your ideas. It helps create proposals for how the experience takes place over a journey, connecting that to the higher story and making sure that our work is seen in the right light and contextualized in the broader strategy.

Strategies to help leadership understand the impact of design and research

Be an asset to the organization

The higher up you go in an organization, the less time you have to understand infinite details which you might have exposure to as a UX practitioner. So, to the degree you can understand the things your stakeholders care about and help connect the dots for them, you are going to be an asset.

Find ways to educate about your role and impact

Also, never assume people understand what UX is, whether UX design or UX research. Not realizing that UX research can help your PM with discovery. Never assume your stakeholders understand your role. Find ways to educate even those individuals who have been along for a long time. It's important to synthesize information for people so that they can understand your role and impact.

Do not share only the insights but also the recommendations

If you are sharing research, you should be sharing not only the insights but also the recommendations so that you are positioned as a Point of View and not just a mouthpiece for what we are hearing in the world. Include an executive summary slide at the beginning of any research deck - here’s what we learned and here’s what we recommend.

Catching impact

Create a deck about what were the projects that you accomplished and the impact it had - it can be one slide per project.

How to better create a connection between what the UX designers/researchers are doing and what the core stakeholders care about?

Bring people along

To get buy-in, getting people to adopt, internalize, and act on key insights, it helps to bring people along, all the way from the beginning in the design and research processes. The more your stakeholders are brought along, the more likely they are to give you both good feedback along the way and also to adopt your findings and your final designs.

Make the process visible

Making the process visible is very powerful for UX. It's going to help people understand that this takes time and effort, that it’s not a 1 or 2-hour task for you to go and create designs. The more visible you can make the effort, the more value people will place on the role.

For generative research, posting insights in visual places, in an easy to understand way that highlights our understanding about where we are in this process builds visibility. We put up posters on the way to the cafeteria with our understanding of our customers and their journey. They might have been criticized at first but then the criticism is what made them better because we got inputs about things that we did not know about.

Have empathy for your stakeholders as well as for your users

We hear so much about empathy, but in this day and age of Agile and Rapid working styles and shortened timelines empathy, most of the time gets only lip service. You need to have empathy for your stakeholders and then you also need to have empathy for your users. You cannot have one without the other and be successful in UX. You need to understand where the tradeoffs need to be made between those 2 points of view.

Can you be a Junior UX Strategist or do you have to work your way up through the tactical roles?

As you are thinking about strategy, a lot of it has to do with business, it has to do with context, and understanding - things that only come with a level of exposure and time. We are not going to put our hands down and say that someone who is junior or new to UX cannot do strategy, but we think there are so many nuances you pick up from having different experiences, varied experiences - things that go well and things that do not go so well in order to be able to recognize what to do in a specific situation.