For UX, the Future Must Be Strategic

The world is undergoing some massive changes. The rise of AI, political turmoil, climate change, massive economic disparities, and other factors seem to be too much. Even within the bubbles of our jobs, it’s hard to ignore the changes and factors that seem to be simultaneously pushing and pulling us.

As stated in its name, the UX field should focus on the users’ experiences. However, in far too many organizations, the key focus is on business priorities to increase profits, reduce costs, or sustain growth, and less on what’s good for our users, customers, and fellow employees. 

In too many organizations, UX doesn’t make a profound strategic contribution to the organization’s success. It should. After all, the experience of our users is what drives them to our products, keeps them as customers, and delivers our value to them.

Instead, UX has been relegated to a minor organizational player role as a clean-up function, often considered the “make-it-pretty” team. Executives and senior stakeholders usually see the UX team, if they’re even aware of its existence, as a nice-to-have luxury only needed immediately before they push a product out the door.

This reduced perceived value frustrates the more experienced UX folks, who believe their contributions could be much more. They dislike being stuck in a feature factory mode, where they’re just churning out designs and research insights as they build and validate other people’s ideas. They often feel that they rarely contribute to their products meaningfully.

The need to do something different

This tactical approach to UX has hit its limits in many organizations. Focusing all your resources on trying to “build things right” without understanding if you’re “building the right things” ends up, at best, delivering uninteresting, mediocre products and services that don’t come close to living up to their potential customer value.

For UX, something must change. UX must become strategic.

This shift is starting to happen. UX Leaders are emerging globally to take their organization’s UX efforts to the next level.

These leaders emerge from experienced individual contributors and UX managers, to bring a strategic approach to their organizations. They’re uncovering valuable opportunities to improve the lives of their customers and product users. Their executives and senior stakeholders are now seeing the true power that comes from delivering unparalleled user experiences. Those organizations are emerging as market leaders with innovative products and services.

(Side note: You don’t need to be a manager to become a UX leader. Individual contributors make great UX leaders. All you need to become a leader is to attract followers. The way you attract followers is with a compelling vision of the future. And for emerging UX leaders, having UX play a strategic role in their organizations is quite persuasive, attracting followers from across their organization.)

What UX needs to become strategic

When a team becomes strategic, it takes a very different approach to its UX work. The team contributes at a higher level in the organization, driving the direction of the products and services based on a shared, in-depth understanding of the customers’ and users’ experiences. 

Four distinct traits separate tactical UX efforts from strategic approaches:

Outcomes over outputs

Tactical UX efforts revolve around deliverables — personas, research insights, design mockups, journey maps, Figma files — intended for handoffs to product and development partners. The goal is to keep the machine fed so the factory never stops. 

The point of deliverables is to produce something, independent of whether it’s good or bad. Saying you’ve delivered it is all that’s required to claim success, even if what you’ve delivered doesn’t make the product better.

Strategic UX leaders take a different approach. They focus on the outcomes for their customers, users, and fellow employees. They identify how better-designed products and services can improve people’s lives.

It’s those improvements that capture the imagination of their coworkers and stakeholders. Everyone can see how much more valuable their products are when customers experience these UX improvements in their lives.
Being strategic means relentlessly emphasizing the outcomes the organization delivers.

Experiences over product

Tactical UX efforts fixate on making (often minor) incremental improvements to the product. While consistent improvement is good, it rarely increases the product’s value substantially. 

And, all too often, those improvements are only driven by trying to reach functional parity with a competitor, which never allows the organization to gain an advantage. At best, they are equals. More often than not, they are playing a never-ending game of “catch up.”

When adopting a strategic approach, UX leaders raise their teams’ attention to their users’ experiences, including their customers and fellow employees. They conduct in-depth experiential research that uncovers the daily lives of people who interact with or are affected by their products or services.

The teams compare users who have great experiences with those who struggle. The teams identify opportunities to turn frustrating struggles into a delightful experience. 

They can develop innovations that will distinguish their products from competitors. Those competitors aren’t paying attention to anyone’s experience, only to incrementally improving their products.
Being strategic means identifying market-leading advantages for your organization by developing a deep understanding of people’s experiences.

Proactive over reactive

Tactical UX efforts come during the later stages of product design and development, after stakeholders have already decided what you’ll build and why. UX professionals find they’re locked into constraints that prevent them from creating results that will benefit users and customers.

In these later stages, UX work is under tremendous pressure to shorten the process and eliminate steps to ensure nothing delays the product’s delivery. Yet, those shortcuts often eliminate vital opportunities to do their best work and frequently create technical or UX debt that will be costly to the organization later. The UX folks can’t do their best work because they’re always reacting to the priorities of the moment.

Strategic UX leaders look into the future product roadmap items. They get a head start on more in-depth research and design work, long before the product and development teams need it. This proactive approach changes the game, allowing teams to deliver higher-quality work.
Being strategic means getting teams out of feature factory mode and into a process that allows for more deliberate, thoughtful work.

Building expertise over validating insights

Tactical UX research efforts frequently start after the product team or other stakeholders have chosen the functionality they want to deliver to customers. This late start substantially decreases the value of the research, since too much has already been invested in ensuring the new capabilities are released. 

Only recommendations that suggest minor improvements are embraced, while more critical insights are often shelved due to how costly it would be to act on them. The result is a validation-only approach to research that limits how responsive the team can be to delivering game-changing innovations.

Strategic UX leaders increase research’s value when they change from validating designs to building expertise about who the users are, what those users need, and what current experiences people have. The goal becomes to make the entire organization the world’s foremost experts on its users and their experiences.

This switch expedites the rate of discovering innovations, as every decision-maker now has a substantially larger trove of knowledge about customers, users, and employees who use their products and services. More informed decision-makers lead to better-quality decisions, which lead to delivering higher-value products. 
Being strategic means informing the most critical decisions with up-to-date expertise on customers, what they need, and what they value most.

Creating a foundational UX strategy

When transforming their organization to become strategic, UX leaders must assemble their playbook to increase UX’s perceived value across the organization. The playbook will contain a set of high-value activities for the UX leaders and their principal team members to execute.

While the specific plays vary depending on the organization’s and stakeholders’ particular needs, there are several foundational plays that almost every team needs.

Establish strategic UX metrics for visibility

Smart metrics tell a story of change. As the UX strategy starts to take hold, strategic UX leaders must demonstrate that they’re making progress.

Outcome-driven UX metrics have the distinct advantage that they measure two critical aspects of strategic UX. They measure how the UX effort is improving people’s lives and the costs to the organization when it delivers less-than-optimal user experiences. Combined, these make it easy for UX leaders to communicate the value of UX to the executive team and senior stakeholders.

Establish strategic UX research to provide expertise

The experiential nature of strategic UX research revolutionizes organizations in a way that no other influx of research can. Learning how your customers experience your products and services brings a dose of reality that can inspire the entire organization to take heroic action.

We’ve been repeatedly surprised at how much benefit a little exposure can bring to every corner of the organization. Once people are exposed to proper research, they see immediate improvements in their decision quality.

Establish a strategic UX vision to spread inspiration

A key piece of any strategy is the goal. Where are you trying to get to? For a UX strategy, you need a UX goal.

The best UX goals are a vision of a great experience. If we do a great job over the next five years, whose lives will we improve, and how will we improve them? When you answer that question, you get an inspirational view of where the organization is trying to go through the lens of strategic UX.
UX leaders start with their strategic research into today’s customer and user experiences, then develop a long-term strategic UX vision for the organization. That vision becomes the North Star objective to inspire and motivate innovative products and services.

For UX, the future must be strategic

Today’s tactical UX approach is not working. It’s not working for the UX profession, nor is it working for the organizations that employ those professionals.

We need to make a shift in how we design and deliver products. That shift requires we start emphasizing outcomes over outputs, experiences over products, proactive UX work over reactive UX work, and building expertise over validating insights.

Our organization needs solid strategic UX metrics to show the value of UX. It must have strategic UX research that informs critical decisions at all levels. A strategic UX vision is needed to inspire greatness from our teams.

To make solid contributions to our organization as it works to tackle the significant challenges that lie ahead, we’ll need to take a different approach than what has gotten us to this moment. The future must be strategic for our UX efforts.

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