How to Move from Tactical Design Execution to Strategic Design

I've spoken with hundreds of designers and researchers in many countries who want to help determine the strategy and direction of their products, teams and companies. Working in tactical UI/UX roles is not a bad thing and I don't want to cast any shade on it, particularly if you love designing screens and prototypes with new iterative improvements every couple of weeks, or if you are just starting out in your UI/UX career. However, many people want to move upstream from tactical design execution to strategic design, and unfortunately this is not a simple transition. It takes the development of specialized skills that go far beyond typography, content, layout, visual design, and all the other basic UX-centric skills that are popularly taught in bootcamps and online courses.

Over the years, the UX STRAT conference has had speakers from Spotify, Amazon, Instagram, Google, Airbnb, Uber, Zoom, Expedia, and many other top companies teach sessions about how to move your career, your team and your company from execution focused incremental design approaches to strategic design, with case studies, frameworks and workshops. My team and I have pored over all these resources to create the UX Strategy Workshop, which I will be facilitating at host companies throughout the USA, Europe and Asia this year.

For this post I wanted to list the 10 main steps that seem to be the most commonly cited among all the speakers we've had over the past 18 UX STRAT conferences. The UX Strategy Workshop goes into the details of each step, but the10 steps can be summarized as follows:

1. Align design activities to business strategy by creating Design KPI's (Key Performance Indicators)

2. Develop data literacy in qualitative and quantitative design research methods, and plan a data-guided design approach

3. Develop a data-driven behavioral segmentation of your customers

4. Map most valuable customer experiences, identify pain points and opportunities

5. Understand the industry, trends, competition

6. Conduct structured ideation workshops instead of team brainstorming

7. Develop a structured prioritization approach that goes beyond simply voting or HiPPO (Highest Paid Person in the Office)

8. Develop a strong strategic point of view (POV)

9. Gather evidence to substantiate your POV

10. Build influence internally so that your strategy survives intact into production

Each of these steps is too involved for a single post, so I will be posting more about the individual steps here on LinkedIn, and also in the UX Strategy community on Slack (https://bit.ly/3sfg9DQ ). And I will be explaining these steps in a lot more depth in the UX Strategy Workshop, which will be coming to major product design hub cities this year. If your company is located centrally in a UX hub city (SF, LA, Austin, Boston, NYC, Berlin, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Paris, Tokyo, Singapore, Shanghai, etc.) and you want to host local design and product professionals in-house for the workshop, reach out for more details about hosting: https://bit.ly/2Qpgd3E

Strategic design work is not everyone's career objective, but if it's yours, the steps to achieve it are within reach. You only need to commit to learning them at a pace that makes sense to you in your work context.