Experience Strategists Approach UX Differently

Recently, people have been asking me about Experience Strategy, a relatively new branch of UX. It turns out that many folks are intrigued by how different the work of experience strategy is from their work today, yet how much it feels like where they’d like their career to go. 

Experience strategy is indeed quite different from other branches of UX. While other branches, such as product design, UX research, service design, or content strategy, focus on designing and implementing products and services, experience strategists operate at the organization’s executive level, focusing on the organization’s top priorities. 

Experience strategists center their work around the organizational challenges their executives are most concerned about. They identify how improving the lives of customers, users, and the organization’s employees would overcome those organizational challenges, and then they orchestrate the implementation and delivery of those solutions.

How experience strategists succeed 

An experience strategist sees success every time one of their projects ends up improving people’s lives in a way that achieves their executives’ top organizational priorities. It’s strategic work that elevates the executive’s perception of UX beyond being the “make it pretty” team.

Experience strategists are doing UX work — just at a more strategic level than other UX folks typically work at.  Let me give you an example.

Case study: Daniella’s story

An experience strategist at one of my clients — let’s call her Daniella — works for a company that makes software for small business owners, primarily tradespeople like landscapers, carpenters, house painters, and plumbers. After completing work for their customers, these small business owners use my client’s software to send invoices.

Now, Daniella wasn’t promoted or hired into her role as an experience strategist. She just started doing the work one day after seeing that nobody else was taking on a UX leadership role at the company. 

There were UX managers who were good at managing, but nobody was leading the company’s UX strategy. So, Daniella stepped up and just started doing the leadership work.

The work to understand the customers’ experiences

She started with an effort to really understand the small business owners who used the software. She hung out with them, watching them go about their business. 

Over a few months, she became the most knowledgeable company employee on the lives of small business owners. She learned details about their customers that no one else in the company knew — at least not yet.

She built her expertise in who these customers were, what made them different from one another, what they needed to succeed, and what their experience as business owners was like. She had studied the ins and outs of what made customers’ most difficult days frustrating and what contributed to their best days.

Identifying the executive’s strategic objectives.

At the same time, she started paying attention to her company’s executives. She went on a “listening tour,” asking them about what they saw as the organization’s top priorities.

Daniella learned that the executives were very concerned about revenue. The company was saturating the market of small business owners, and monthly subscription fees were leveling out. The executives were actively seeking an additional revenue stream.

Daniella connected what she was hearing from her executives with what she was learning about the small business owners who used their product. 

Assembling an experience strategy

You see, her research uncovered that the small business owners were frustrated by how long their customers took to pay bills. Sometimes, it could be weeks or even months before small business owners got paid, and they had their own bills to pay. They had subcontractors and employees to pay, and waiting for their clients’ payments created significant stress on their cash flow.

Now, the software company had already built a feature to expedite collections called Pay Now. Customers could pay their bills online with a credit card, and every time they did, Daniella’s company collected a small interest fee, which, with potentially millions of transactions, could translate into millions of dollars. 

Yet, when the Pay Now feature was released, it was a bit of a dud. It didn’t come close to generating the massive revenue the executives had hoped for. 

Daniella’s research with small business owners uncovered why. She discovered that many small business owners didn’t even know the Pay Now feature was in the product. The few who knew about it told Daniella they gave up because they couldn’t figure out how to integrate it into their invoicing process. The feature was in the product, but very few people used it.

Executing the strategy

Daniella convinced a few of the designers to create a compelling vision for an easier-to-find-and-use Pay Now feature that she could then share with the executives. She also worked with the organization’s data analytics team to estimate monthly invoicing volume. Then she used those numbers to predict what the increased revenue from an improved Pay Now feature might look like. 

Her estimates showed that the software’s business users currently invoice tens of millions of dollars, often taking more than 30 days to collect. Yet, among those few business owners who had successfully used the current Pay Now functionality, most of their invoices were paid within 3 days. That evidence convinced her executive team to support and prioritize her vision of an improved Pay Now feature.

With the executive’s backing, Daniella persuaded the Pay Now product managers to prioritize the design team’s redesign of the feature’s information architecture and installation workflows. Then, she teamed with marketing to launch a campaign that reintroduced the feature to their small-business-owner audience.

Demonstrating impact

After the redesigned Pay Now rolled out, Daniella collected metrics to report back to the executives. She visited more small business owners and watched them work with the redesigned capability, measuring how much easier Pay Now was to locate and install.

With new product instrumentation, Daniella could now track the number of bills business owners sent to their customers with Pay Now buttons, and how many of those customers paid their bills that way. She could report how much faster each business owner collected payment, thereby revealing just how much their cash flow had improved.

In the first month, millions of small business owners saw their previous three-week average cash flow cut to fewer than three days, with a substantial share receiving their payments within a day. These small business owners were ecstatic with the enhanced feature.

And the executives were pleased too, as interest revenue grew tenfold from the month before. The Pay Now feature was finally living up to its potential.

What Daniella achieved

I want to point out precisely what Daniella did to get these results. First, she saw a void in her organization, and without asking for permission or seeking a promotion, she just filled it.

She spent extensive time learning all about her users’ experiences, while also meeting with executives and listening to their priorities. She identified an overlap between the two and orchestrated product managers, designers, developers, data analysts, and others to bring her vision to life. 

Finally, she tracked how the redesign impacted the top priority so she could relay the success to the executive team. It was a team effort, but it wouldn’t have happened without Daniella’s leadership, grit, and tenacity.

Experience strategists don’t do the same UX work

Experience strategists, like Daniella, don’t do the same work as other UX folks. They do not focus on the product’s design or on validating an idea through research. They don’t deliver service blueprints, journey maps, Figma design files, or PowerPoint decks filled with validating insights.

Instead, Daniella took advantage of the deep expertise that came from hanging out with small business owners and studying their experiences. She leaned into her stakeholder management skills, her understanding of how the company worked, her ability to navigate politics, and her strong listening skills.

Nobody asked Daniella to take on this project. She didn’t ask for permission to do it either. She just saw that it needed doing and made it happen.

That’s how the experience strategists I’ve met make it work. Executives never ask for an experience strategy, because they don’t know it’s a thing you can ask for. However, they’re extremely glad when someone provides it, as Daniella did.

Realizing that you can just step up and make it happen is likely the scariest, most challenging part of becoming an experience strategist. And the most exciting.

Many UX folks are making it the next step in their career, which makes me very optimistic for the future of UX. We could use a lot more UX leaders like Daniella in our organizations.