What is Design Strategy? A force multiplier for CX efforts.
Karan Thaker
Customer Strategy, Design and Enablement Leader | Newsletter Author | Speaker
Welcome to the Design Strategy newsletter! This first edition (~45-60 min read) is a deep dive into the ‘Why’ and ‘What’ of Design Strategy as a business practice, combining tactics from the Customer Experience and Design fields to guide work toward positive consumer and business outcomes. The target audience for this is anyone looking to improve their organizational agility in sensing and responding to change faster.
In recent years, many businesses have been introducing or experimenting with specific roles or teams in their CX or Design function that have a more generalist focus (often titled Strategist, CX Lead, CX Designer, Journey Manager, Service Designer, Journey Designer, Strategic Designer, etc.) with the express intent to clarify and create urgency around opportunities, rally others around common goals, and still be a hands-on builder of experiences across a wide spectrum of fidelities. Rather than focus only on digital products or digital experiences, such roles influence both product development and end-to-end journey development across multiple channels on a large scale, and notably, such roles co-create strategy with cross-functional (XFN) partners and link that strategy to execution and measurement. These roles tend to be a close partner with Product and extended business functions to proactively clarify the why behind change and possible paths forward, instead of only getting involved downstream once the roadmap is already set and being executed. But, creating a headcount is different than actually having such roles or such work fit productively in the broader organization. They can be confusing and even outright polarizing for many in the business, even within CX or Design functions where they often sit. Until this confusion is addressed, even Product partners find such roles confusing. There tends to be ambiguity around the exact nature of their work, what kind of outcomes this work drives, what do tangible outputs look like, what observable behaviors are part of this work, whether this work touches near-term execution or long-term strategy or both, where the roles sit on the org chart, how we handle accountability, how we measure progress, etc.
The very creation of such roles and teams is in response to two fundamental shifts: 1) there is a growing awareness within our CX community that tapping into customer advocacy at executive tables with insights and recommendations alone is not enough to sustain CX efforts, and we can demonstrate tangible impact by treating the development and management of experiences/journeys with the same rigor as the development and management of products, and 2) there is a growing awareness within our Design community that a key to a brighter future is cultivating partnerships across all business functions as opposed to only focus on reactive execution work and to treat the design of journeys/experiences across the business with the same rigor as the design of digital products. The problem is, in many businesses, CX and Design teams operate in isolation or succession instead of in tandem. In 2024, most businesses have a function for managing products and product strategy (like Product Management) but no function for managing experiences and experience strategy (like Journey Management or Experience Management). Also, the prevailing association of Design for most people is largely with digital user experience (UX), consequently underestimating the value Design can bring at the wider stage on which CX operates (experiences across all channels, not just digital). When we consider these two shifts against the backdrop of unsettled economies, rapid technological advancement, and regulatory pressures, it is easy to see that both fields have at least one shared aspiration:
To improve people’s lives in ways that also make business sense.
Design can benefit from zooming out and nurturing?stronger?business acumen to win XFN stakeholder confidence. CX?can benefit from zooming in and nurturing?stronger?design acumen to demonstrate a more tangible impact and win executive confidence. And both fields can benefit from nurturing stronger financial acumen to demonstrate measurable impact on the top line and bottom line of the business. This middle ground is a place where people recognize that there is no difference between design and business problem-solving. My objective with this newsletter is:
To bridge CX and Design and spark a community to help strengthen that bridge.
The content here is for those working in or pursuing a generalist end-to-end capacity (Strategists, CX Leads, Journey Managers, Journey Owners, Journey Designers, Service Designers, Strategic Designers, etc.) It may resonate with a wide range of thought leaders and people leaders within customer experience, experience management, design strategy, research, CX strategy, service design, product design, CX operations, design operations, product management, journey management, journey design, marketing, and service – and especially so if you are working in mid to large publicly traded matrixed organizations with disparate business units and a low tolerance for risk/change, as opposed to a high growth startup where the risk/change tolerance is notably higher, and decisions may be made more on founder-intuition than data. For consistency, I’ll use the term ‘we’ throughout this newsletter to collectively refer to all the roles I mentioned above as just one collective group – all of us together.?Different organizations?may title them differently with varying degrees of responsibility but they all?roll up to?the above common aspiration, and Design Strategy is the common denominator that helps achieve that aspiration.?To understand what Design Strategy is, we need to break down what strategy is, what design is, what CX is, and the current business landscape. Below is what we’ll cover in this 1st edition:
1.???? What is strategy?
2.???? What is design?
3.???? Business need to sense and respond to change faster (what is CX?)
4.???? Business capabilities that fill the need for speed
5.???? Design Strategy 101
6.???? Closing
1. What is strategy?
The term ‘strategy’ has military origins. It is a path to advance our current position in a way that will help us win. Simply put, it is a way of working through a challenge.
In business, the challenge is usually dealing with change – others leapfrogging us, ever-changing consumer preferences, ever-changing legislation, shifting labor markets, unexpected supply chain fluctuations, geopolitical impacts, etc. Everyone from executive leaders down to tactical teams does their part in confronting this challenge, both proactively and reactively. Most large businesses have a single cross-cutting strategy, usually called corporate strategy, to deal with change. But most corporate strategies today are intended for endurance and hard to change annually or even every few years, weakening their original intent as the ‘primary way’ to deal with change. And it is well known that change doesn’t come in nicely packaged, annual cycles. So different business functions have episodic variations of the corporate strategy to deal with change faster and link that strategy to action – these episodic variations are often known as marketing strategy, sales strategy, experience strategy, product strategy, operations strategy, data strategy, engineering strategy, etc., and each of those has a specific purpose – to advance the current position of either that particular business function or the business as a whole in the marketplace. All this advancing, all this dealing with change – it is not easy. Why? Because it requires a thorough diagnosis of our strengths (or lack thereof) from both our vantage point and consumers’ vantage point (prospects, customers, employees, etc.) It requires engaging and learning with XFN teams in separate parts of the business and often with conflicting objectives. It requires negotiating trade-offs and clarifying choices among those teams. It requires slowing down to speed up (measure twice, cut once). It requires deep conviction in the notion of co-creation and shared ownership. And sometimes, it requires heightened levels of leadership appetite to absorb short-term losses and rapid pivots in the pursuit of long-term wins, which, as you’ll read further in the newsletter, can be at odds with how most businesses are structured. All these difficult and usually messy efforts help define a strategy that deals with change effectively.
The point of emphasis here is - XFN partnership. True iterative thinking applies not just to solutions but also to problems. We might rapidly test and refine many ideas but often the wins come from reframing the problem itself or focusing our attention elsewhere within the problem space – this requires self-awareness that “we don’t know it all”.?This?is only possible if we spend time understanding the problem space with folks who operate in that space and know nuance and risk far better than?us. Without XFN partnerships, creating a strategy may be way faster, but it is also much riskier. Every time I’ve seen others shortchange strategy work like this or even when I have tried to do that in my career, I’ve seen and learned the hard way that this ‘fire and forget’ model simply does not hit the mark on execution. Though we may even get an executive nod of support in the short term about a strategic pitch, doing this just passes the risk downstream into the execution work. Every time I have co-created strategy more comprehensively with XFN partners and a sense of shared ownership, it has resulted in remarkable?levels of buy-in, from opportunity clarification to opportunity execution and measurement. Granted, that has required me to push back on siloed thinking and often push back laterally as well as vertically, which opens up cans of worms about ownership, turf wars, time horizons, and whatnot. But no one said strategy is an easy discipline. There is a reason why most MBA programs worldwide have an explicit focus on strategy – though not many business schools recognize or teach Customer Experience or Design as a formal business discipline yet (perhaps we can change that together!)
In a nutshell, strategy is a force multiplier. It is a clear path that clarifies the opportunity ahead of us. It is a set of deliberate choices on what we will and will not do – choices that maximize the effectiveness of force or effort exerted by XFN teams so that collectively, we can win in the market and demonstrate that win via measurable outcomes.?This comprehensive path can be paved?via different shovels (i.e.?different problem-solving techniques from?various?disciplines). Why comprehensive? Isn’t strategy supposed to be?simple? You’re thinking of a creative brief (slide deck, video, vision statement, verbal slogan, single poster, single slide, etc.), which is just an articulation of strategy – the elevator pitch, so to speak. We should not make the mistake of thinking our brief is the strategy. An effective strategy is more than crafting a bunch of vision brief slides or creating a plan. A good strategy includes facts, analysis, detail, and choice that very clearly articulates the different moving parts of a challenge, a bunch of data-backed arguments that explain how we will adjust those moving parts, and a bunch of actions across XFN teams to signal progress in the right direction. This work is like?that of?a player-coach trying to get a team to play together toward a single common outcome – constantly. This way of thinking about strategy is rooted in the works of management thinkers like Roger Martin, Richard Rumelt, and Michael Porter. If it resonates with you, check out their?books,?The Design of Business, Playing to Win, Good Strategy?Bad?Strategy, How Leaders Become Strategists, and Competitive Advantage.
I describe strategy this way for this newsletter because it is crucial for anyone in Design or CX not to?conflate strategy with goal-setting or planning and to understand that effective strategy is when we build it together with functional partners across the business. And that brings me to the foundations of Design.
2. What is design?
“Karan, what does Design have to do with strategy?” A whole lot. This section is?particularly?for our CX friends, but Design folks may also find the context helpful if not already familiar. When the general population hears the word ‘Design’,?more often than not, visuals come to mind. Art, illustrations, graphics, drawings, and whatnot. Just like when we hear?the word?‘Finance’,?numbers, graphs, and spreadsheets come to mind. Or when we hear the word ‘Physics’,?complex math equations come to mind. But anyone studying or working in those areas would state with conviction that there is more to it! Finance is about more than numbers. Physics is about more than math. Similarly, Design is about more than visuals and?it is about more than digital user experience (UX).
What do I mean by that? Running a Google search for?“Design Professions”?shows?a big?list, from Product Designers to Interior Designers to Fashion Designers to Service Designers to UX Designers to Industrial Designers to Architectural Designers to Lighting Designers to Design Engineers to many others, stemming from the worlds of architecture to arts to humanities to entertainment to engineering to technology to public administration to many others. Yet, walking down the street, if a random person just met any one of us and we?say?“Hi, my name is _____?and?I work in Design”,?there is a good chance that?person’s?mind conjures up something visual. The common thread between all those professions is a fundamental critical thinking and problem-solving mindset, and each profession has many tools, methods, practices, and procedures to evaluate often unclear challenges and unlock sustainable value, from clarifying opportunities to executing those opportunities. This mindset is deeply rooted in unwavering advocacy for the consumer of whatever it is?we’re?working on, such as a new public service for a marginalized market segment, a new ergonomic chair for an untapped market, a new mobile app / desktop app / responsive web app for a new business idea, a showstopper dress for a supermodel at Fashion Week, the perfect scene lighting for a thriller-loving movie audience, a compelling industry conference agenda for an executive leadership audience, a well-tuned car engine for a Formula 1 racing driver, the sophisticated James Webb Space Telescope mirror for astrophysicists and hobbyists worldwide, the progressive Nvidia AI chips for a rapidly increasing market of human consumers and computing hardware, the hospital emergency service experience for patients, caregivers, nurses, doctors, EMTs, maintenance staff, etc., or so many other examples. This mindset is about intentional bias on consumer needs to the point of pushing the boundaries of what’s possible today, and clarifying the need to build new capabilities. It's about framing challenges out of ambiguity, working visually to gain an inside-out understanding of challenges, breaking down challenges into core assumptions and root causes, guiding our attention away from ours to others’ perspectives, and using that joint brainpower to come up with answers and even new questions.
I describe Design this way (as a mindset) to emphasize the idea of mutual adjustment - constantly iterating, constantly reframing the challenge, constantly trying new solutions via scrappy experiments, constantly learning strengths and weaknesses – this train of thought is very similar to our train of thought earlier about strategy. This ‘tradeoff’ thinking between?many?factors (i.e.?an interconnected system of different moving parts) is fundamental to how business works, not just how?design?works. The bigger the challenge, the more moving parts have to?be considered, and the more differentiation we’re going after, the more precise our adjustments need to be across those moving parts. Over time, many businesses have leaned into this foundational?mindset of?design?in many ways. Consider the?below infamous quote. I’ve paraphrased it, but the point stands.
"We begin with the customer experience and potential benefits for them, and then work backward to the technology - not start with the technology and figure out we will try to fit it. And the hardest thing is, to do this in a way that sells a billion dollars worth of product" – Steve Jobs
This quote is a nod to the foundational mindset of design, where the different moving parts of any given challenge are arranged in such a precise fashion that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, with a strong bias on consumer needs – except in this case of Apple, the passion for consumers?is balanced?with the pragmatism of outcomes (i.e.?revenue growth). Later in this newsletter, we'll touch on how Apple does this. Whether it is the compelling experience Apple customers enjoy with their physical and digital?products,?or the compelling experience Disney guests enjoy with their parks/cruises/Disney+, or the compelling ways in which Trader Joe's employees provide in-store assistance to customers for sampling requests, or the compelling ways in which Northwestern Mutual advisors provide contextual financial advice to consumers by diagnosing their financial health, or the compelling ways in which Pfizer efficiently delivers healthcare from their labs to manufacturers to providers to patients, or the compelling ways in which PepsiCo ensures their products from soda to chips for different segments are distributed worldwide at scale, this foundational mindset of design is at play in varying degrees in all those scenarios – in most cases, it makes the experience desirable for customers and employees, while?in other cases, it also makes the experience efficient for the business.
Over time, many of those professions with the common thread of ‘design as a mindset’ began publishing their nuanced practices, tools, methods, etc.?so?that their profession could advance in the world of free enterprise and drive impact of all sorts. The most widely known mindset for design, called Design Thinking, has been around for 50+ years as a published concept – originating via Design, Architecture, and Engineering and eventually merging with Humanities, Social Sciences, and many others.
One might argue that the Design Thinking concept is simply a skill of critical thinking and problem-solving that should?be taught?at all levels of education. But evidently, the voyage of this concept from humble origins to today’s mainstream discourse went quite differently. In the 1990s, many in the consulting and boutique agency space began to ‘productize’ this concept, turning it from a broad mindset of critical thinking and problem solving into a bunch of repeatable steps and promoting it to businesses with the pitch: “Learn this process, follow this process, and it’ll result in innovation”. The intent was well-meaning, the business model was sound for many years, and there have been many success stories for buyers and sellers of this model. But there were and still are many nuances behind it (i.e., following a process is not a magic pill for innovation, we need to qualify the business sense of ideas, we need to persistently communicate concrete outcomes that may not be immediately obvious in abstract outputs, we should not treat innovation as a siloed thinktank, it doesn’t matter what we think if we don’t also do, we need to balance the spontaneity and uncertainties of emerging ideas with the tradeoffs and certainties of business to implement those ideas, we need organizational readiness and change management to make ideas stick, empathy and expertise are inextricably linked and focusing on one without the other is risky, falling in love with tools and frameworks without organizational context is futile, etc.) During the wave of productized design thinking in the early 2000s, books such as Change by Design by Tim?Brown,?and The Design of Business by Roger Martin emphasized such nuances, recognized that design thinking is unlikely to become an exact science, and underscored that the trick will be to?truly?hold conflicting demands of consumers and business in delicate tension throughout opportunity clarification and opportunity execution work.?Not?an easy trick!
But the thing about nuance is that it can be easily lost in translation, especially in the face of market forces of supply and demand. Over the past 20 years, many things happened:?
These things are simply signals of supply-demand variations in any capital market, and none of them are intrinsically wrong – to some degree, they even make sense. But collectively, they have eclipsed the nuances of design thinking, resulting in an unintended consequence:
a widespread misconception of Design in the wider business community as more reactive opportunity execution, instead of both proactive opportunity clarification and execution.
This consequence is seen in many (certainly not all) businesses where Design is perceived as an execution arm of Product Management, neglecting its critical thinking aspect (example LinkedIn commentary from others who observe the misconception: “Design need not spend time on work which is not already on Product’s radar”, “Design is part of the Product group”, “Product decides what problem to work on, and Design follows”, “Design should report into Product or Engineering”, “Product is the keeper of vision and Design brings it to life and influences it”, “Product and Design may be peers but only for work that Product wants to do”, “you don’t need to think and question, you need to do and deliver”, etc.) Many in the Design, CX, and even Product Management communities recognize this consequence and diligently improve awareness of Design’s expansive role through demonstrated work, collaborative partnerships, and effective communication. But in 2024, this consequence has hit the mainstream conversation for the Design community and increasingly in the CX community. Why?
When the economy is great and a ton of money is poured into UX Design hiring (as has been the case over the past decade), we are not as sensitive to these misconceptions. But the economy has shifted in recent years, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. For better or worse, the pandemic shifted the very idea of ‘digital maturity’ from a strong competitive advantage to a mere entry ticket in many industries, especially those with a B2C model instead of B2B. This means there is more pressure now than before on businesses and leaders to qualify and quantify their choices, decisions, investments, and roadmaps – in terms of cost, tradeoffs, time, energy, and resources. This revealed the shortcomings of many bets made on leadership tables all around – bets that were made based on near-term investor attention instead of sustainable consumer value. Inevitably, this has impacted our Design community (i.e. layoffs, high talent density, low job density, etc.), opening up the conversation about the tangible and measurable value of Design and echoing it all over the halls of social media, mainstream journalism, and industry consortiums over these past two years. Given the extensive historical focus on UX Design, other areas such as Service Design or even Organizational Design have not received as much mainstream awareness or attention. Even having these roles within businesses is the exception instead of the norm, especially in North America. But given the broader evolution of the entire Design community over these past few years, there is collective optimism to build a brighter future for Design, together. A future where all Design happens within a holistic ecosystem of physical and digital channels instead of only digital channels, a future where product design and service design are two easily recognized sides of the same coin, a future where thoughtful organizational design is an active agenda item for teams other than Design, a future where Design work is not only creative but also pragmatic.
I share all this to illuminate the layers of complexity within the Design community and to emphasize that while Design is typically associated with digital product development, it extends into all areas of the business, focusing on incremental change just as much as radical change. Sales can use design to tackle friction points in the purchase experience to increase qualified leads and reduce customer effort. Marketing can use design to improve campaigns and engagement to boost brand awareness and loyalty. HR can use design to tackle trends in workplace experiences and design new policies for improved onboarding, improved explanation of benefit packages, etc. to drive retention and attract new talent. Some notable real-world examples include profitable expansion of product lines (PepsiCo introducing smaller soda cans and reducing sugar levels to tap deeper into the health-centric segment), new services for previously untapped segments (Scotiabank introducing Day-1 Banking products targeted for new immigrants), physical experiences to drive demand (CapitalOne Cafes that also happen to be financial advice centers). Design plays ‘a part’ in these, but it’s not a silver bullet – all these successes are a result of many different capabilities combined. We’ll unpack them below.
There have been many headlines lately about the ‘supposed’ death of design thinking, and many actively dissuade it, lamenting that it is not scientific enough. When in fact, businesses that recognize the nuances and know that design thinking by itself is just an academic notion, tend to combine this mindset with other capabilities to enable more scientific rigor. They connect aspirational thinking with the realities of business in a perpetual cycle, combining technique with tradeoffs, converging craft with culture, balancing process with politics, balancing outcomes with outputs, and constantly evaluating the economics of experiences. Doing this is not easy! For instance, here is a recent conversation by Erik Roth from McKinsey with Mauro Porcini on building PepsiCo’s Chief Design Office. Our CX peers will find this perspective very similar to a lot of the work done within the Chief CX Office. Below are 2 snippets that stand out for me from Erik and Mauro’s conversation:
“The way we have been building design at PepsiCo…. have a good balance between working on incremental value and incremental innovation…. we’re looking to create value in a cross-functional team. That is the very nature of design thinking. It’s design, it’s marketing, it’s R&D, strategies, insights. Creating value in all the dimensions…. from something very basic like bringing the idea of limited-edition packaging, or building unexpected experiences in the world of licensing, changing the way we build brands” – Mauro Porcini
“[Designers need to] … balance the ability to dream with the ability to make things happen, with the pragmatism, with the ability to make compromises and trade-offs, and with the understanding that those compromises and trade-offs are not something negative, they’re just a step toward the dream” – Mauro Porcini
The Research community has undergone a very similar trajectory as Design, and there has been a lot more conversation lately?to expand?their efforts from largely UX-only research that supports Product roadmaps to macro exploratory research that guides broader business measurement and decisions,?and?not just Design or Product efforts. The difference is subtle yet distinct. One is?largely?a reactive supporting role, and the other is?largely?a proactive peer role. Judd Antin, a research leader, shared a compelling perspective about this here,?and also on Lenny Rachitsky's podcast. In the CX community, this expansive role of Research is often discussed under the ‘Insights & Measurements’ area.
In a nutshell, design is not only how products work, but also how business works. It is the messy analysis and precise engineering of fit among different moving parts of any challenge. As the Design community continues to evolve, there is an all-encompassing international standard called Human-Centered Design, covering all types of experiences (digital and physical product, process, service, journey, brand, business, etc.) Design is more than some repeatable process or checklist. While it is certainly about making products easier to use, it is also just as much about making the organization easier to do business with (i.e. difference between UX design and CX design, or more specifically, between product design and service design). It is a mindset of approaching change – by constantly anchoring on consumer need, constantly pressure testing with knowledgeable and diverse perspectives, constantly calling BS on assumptions and identifying underlying root causes, constantly iterating on ideas, choices, and tradeoffs via scrappy prototypes in the quest for compelling solutions, constantly clarifying and mitigating risk – all this constant critical thinking and constant problem solving is in response to or in anticipation of change. Just like our train of thought earlier on strategy, this mindset is most effective when applied with XFN collaboration to both clarify opportunities and execute opportunities.
Now that I’ve painted some parallel points-of-view for both Strategy and Design, let’s zoom out to the business landscape as of late.
3. Business need to sense and respond to change faster
As the world becomes more digitally connected, human connection is becoming ever more meaningful, and consumer choice has exploded, from 12 different types of apples at the grocery store to 6 different brands on Amazon offering identical products to having subscriptions for everything to easily being able to switch services from one brand to another. To stand out in this ocean of choice and change, businesses worldwide are in a perpetual race to become better, faster, cheaper, easier, etc. and there are many milestones (like new customers, new value propositions, new business models, new IP, new differentiators) in this race. They want to hit those milestones because, without compelling offerings for the customer, they won’t be in business, and without commercial viability of those offerings, they won’t be in business for very long. This raises the constant question at all vantage points of any organization, starting from the executive leadership down to tactical teams – how can we sense and respond to change faster?
“Organizations need to be agile in sensing and responding to change, and any capability that introduces this agility piques the interest of executive leaders in any business” - Bruce Temkin
This is where our field of Customer Experience (CX), also called Experience Management (XM), comes in. Like Design, this field has also evolved a lot over the years. In some businesses, customer obsession is an inherent part of culture and decision-making. While in others, customer obsession is slowly being recognized and nurtured by introducing an executive CX function, or CX teams within operating functions such as Marketing, Service, etc.
The key goals of our CX community, or the Customer Experience Office (CXO) in any business, are to unite actions across the organization at both executive and tactical levels, provide evidence that we are committed to improving customers’ lives, and measurably drive united prioritization and action. This means deeply understanding customers’ lives, our role in their lives and our journeys with them, issues that require focus, and emerging opportunities that can potentially attract new customers and convince existing customers to stay, buy more, or recommend us. Understanding all of this and then springing into action so that we “walk the talk” is hard work – it requires growing a wide range of capabilities and an even wider range of XFN partnerships outside the CXO, with individual business functions (like Sales, Service, Product, Marketing, etc.) and control functions (like Finance, Legal, Compliance, HR, etc.)
4. Capabilities that fill the need for speed
Over time, business has gotten smarter, faster, better, cheaper, etc. Consider the below examples of contributions to business (though there are many more).
We can keep going with other areas like Finance, Economics, Marketing, etc., but I’m sure you can see the pattern here. All these ways of problem-solving are ‘capabilities’ that help organizations sense and respond to change faster. They’re tools in a toolkit. And crucially, any single one does not supersede the other – rather, they overlap, and borrow from one another. Over time, these capabilities and many more have matured into vast professions in their own right (for instance, Process Engineering, Industrial Design, Product Design, Service Design, Behavioral Economics, Systems Engineering, Agile Project Management, DevOps, the list goes on). And as one would expect, there are skills, methods, mindsets, processes, and expertise in all these professions that people often spend entire careers acquiring.
There is a ‘part art, part science’ mentality within every one of these capabilities. Different businesses use combinations of these capabilities to increase their effectiveness, and customer-centric agendas in CX and Design particularly benefit from such capabilities.
A Customer Experience Office (CXO) may include teams focusing on areas such as Experience Strategy, Insights & Measurement, Culture, Governance, etc. In some businesses where digital maturity is top of mind, digital partners (like Digital Product Management, UX Design, UX Research, UX Content, Engineering, etc.) also roll up to the CXO. Collectively, all these teams focus on different time horizons (short-term, long-term, both) and different types of XFN partnerships (with digital partners, with extended business partners, with external partners, etc.) to advance the maturity of cross-channel experiences (products, services, journeys) across the entire customer lifecycle and realize the customer-centric agenda of the business.
Crucially, this means that some roles need to bring deep subject matter expertise within a given area, while some need to be a glue between different teams and be a force multiplier (think specialist group vs. generalist group) – and without a healthy balance of both, the CX function risks becoming ‘yet another silo’ in the business. This is where the ambiguity I mentioned in the introduction sharply spikes up to an 11, because of inevitable confusion about which roles are effective in the first group and which ones are effective in the second. The roles I mentioned in the introduction (“we”) all have a common denominator – being a force multiplier, operating with a continuous sense of shared ownership and shared accountability of goals. For instance, a Strategist may not necessarily ‘own’ the accountability for any part of execution but we are a force multiplier for XFN parties who own the execution of changes to different moving parts that power the journey across multiple channels. Similarly, a Journey Manager or Service Designer may not ‘own’ the rolling out of a journey/service like a Product Manager might own the shipping of compelling product features but we are a force multiplier for various XFN parties (Product and beyond) who own the execution of moving parts that power up the journey across multiple channels. And to make things more interesting, these force multiplier roles are in fact ‘doers’ as well because of the many hands-on practices and outputs to help us become that force multiplier. These practices span both worlds of CX and Design and even borrow from many other disciplines, but there isn’t a widely recognized way for us to articulate what they are.
Enter Design Strategy.
5. Design Strategy 101
Design Strategy is a business practice rooted in the foundations of human-centered problem solving, financial acumen, product & service design, organizational design, systems thinking, design thinking, process optimization, agile governance (speed of decisions, not speed of releases), change management and behavioral psychology to co-create desirable customer experiences that are also viable for commercial scale.
Why do I emphasize that last bit about commercial viability? Because by itself, Design typically over-indexes on consumer bias and the art of the possible. Empathy, consumer advocacy, and tradeoff-style visual thinking are extremely useful, but we need to balance those with other capabilities that help us stay pragmatic. It’s great to create desirable customer experiences with bold ideas that take people outside their comfort zone. But arguably, do you know what’s greater? Creating desirable customer experiences with bold ideas that also improve margins. In the first scenario, we push our partners (stakeholders, leaders, etc.) outside their comfort zones. In the second scenario, we also push ourselves outside our comfort zone. Again, the PepsiCo-McKinsey conversation I referenced earlier touches on this.
Design Strategy drives outcomes across 3 areas, and links strategy with execution:
In many organizations, the CX function adopts Design Strategy practices to build and execute experience strategies in collaborative, actionable, and measurable ways (via roles like CX Lead, Strategist, Service Designer, Journey Manager, Journey Owner, etc.) While in other organizations, CX may not be expansive yet, and the Design function may adopt Design Strategy practices to effectively partner with broader XFN stakeholders (also via roles like Strategist, Service Designer, Strategic Designer, etc.) The ambiguity I mentioned in the introduction of this newsletter exists in both these environments. Many skills, methods, mindsets, processes, and tools show up in the Design Strategy practice. The topics are wide-ranging, from journey management & prioritization, to finance & accounting acumen, to systems thinking & design thinking, to experience design (product & service), to organizational design & matrixed accountabilities, to UX & CX research, to heightened focus in uncovering/negotiating/communicating tradeoffs both laterally and vertically in the organization.
Below are 5 highlight areas or what I call ‘competencies’ of the Design Strategy practice. They do not represent any specific methodology, process, framework, or order. They help us identify strengths and risk tolerance within the business, co-create compelling possibilities that constantly test the boundaries of that risk tolerance, and identify key actions and tradeoffs to make and measure in the near term to get us closer to a compelling vision for the long term. You may be a service designer with a Design Strategist title in the Marketing function of a furniture company. Or you may be at a grocery chain working as a Journey Manager within the CX function and trying to figure out how to best collaborate with your Product Manager. Or you may be a UX Designer in the UX Design team of a B2B software company and doing service design work that covers the entire ecosystem of the experience instead of just the digital channel. Or you may have a Consultant / Manager/ Director/ VP / CDO / CXO title with a transformation agenda and wide portfolio covering experience strategy, voice of the customer, and governance work altogether in a single group. Leaders and individual contributors who have been doing or are aspiring to do this type of work will instantly recognize it, whether they have the job title for it or not. So, for this 1st edition, I’ll focus on the work and not on who owns what.
Nurturing XFN Partnerships
This is our “know thy business” competency. It’s all about observing and understanding where we sit on the organizational chart, how we are funded (are we operational like say, Corporate Strategy, are we part of a broader continuously funded body of work or are we a shared service team that drums up our business from other teams?), which is the most influential group within the organization (product, engineering, sales, finance, operations, specific verticals, etc.), how are teams perceiving and differentiating CX/design/journey work (if at all), what is the journey of a decision and it’s accountability within the organization (centralized or decentralized or mixed?), what is the core business model powering the organization, what is the influential currency in different parts of the organization, what is the scope of product management roles (digital footprint only or the entire value chain like pricing, marketing, packaging, distribution, etc.), is there some elephant in the room keeping the company from modernizing, etc. The more we understand all that, the more effective we can be at building bridges and motivating constructive behaviors, whether working on a vertical project with tactical teams or a horizontal project with executive and operational leaders.
When clarifying or solving challenges, connecting different brains within our business (Finance, Marketing, Distribution, Product, Digital Product, Product Design, Legal, Service, Engineering, Tech, etc.) and in our market (customers, prospects, partners, etc.) enables us to uncover hidden opportunities. But connecting them isn’t easy. A common boulder for CX teams, or even many Design teams is alignment – talking about the same work from different vantage points. CX may talk about work in terms like Experiences and Customer Journeys, UX Design may talk about work in terms like Flows and User Journeys, CX and UX may both talk about journeys with Jobs-To-Be-Done but using different job labels, Digital Product may talk about work in terms like Epics and Features and Planning Intervals (PIs), while other business functions may talk about it in terms like Business Processes and Tech Enablers. We can recognize that this differing view, this tension, is an inherent part of creativity and that instead of getting stakeholders to see it ‘our way’, we can find or build common ground on which we can co-exist. In the CX/Design/Product communities, this common ground has been increasingly talked about within the context of journey management, with a lot of tried-and-tested practices in recent years. One effective best practice is to create a language of journeys, experiences, processes, etc. covering the entire customer lifecycle and then map the language to different areas of the business – this helps focus our efforts (“identify priority journeys”) and invite collaboration, as opposed to trying to boil the ocean (“let’s build a company-wide experience strategy and identify wow moments across the experience”). I’ll share more about these practices in the context of my own experience in future newsletters. When we create this common ground collaboratively with XFN partners, we earn their engagement with our work, because it reveals the connective tissue between different parts of the business and the impact they have on consumers. This engagement may take many forms - accepting that intro coffee chat invitation, enthusiastically confirming attendance to a workshop, allocating resources to work with us on XYZ, or if we’re an in-house shared service, proactively seeking out and funding our partnership to solve interesting challenges together.
Whether in Design or CX, we cannot thrive without XFN partnerships. Investing in relationships has been and continues to be my top priority and top tip in making this work successful. These partnerships directly impact how we size and solve challenges, how we perceive and discuss scope, how we build deliverables, how we size solutions and outcomes, and even how we talk about our work with different folks. Building these partnerships is simply the start of a long road of doing hard things together that ultimately nurture trust. By involving the stakeholders and taking into account their culture, resources, routines, needs, and agendas, we introduce sustainability in our solutions.
Personifying Insights
This is our “walk a mile with consumers” competency. When dealing with complex ecosystems of multiple products, multiple services, multiple channels, and the dimension of time, a big challenge for our work is helping others (like XFN stakeholders and senior executives) see the end-to-end and surface-to-core nature of our organization’s experiences/journeys, and tap into both their empathy and their business sense to motivate change. Since we spend so much time with research and insights (either by conducting it ourselves or if we’re lucky, by working with a Research team), we may find it second nature to empathize with the consumer. But for our stakeholders, there are inevitable blind spots. For instance, in a large matrixed organization, digital teams building the website and mobile app may have little idea about the 5 different paper forms and workarounds that Customer Service teams might use to complete certain customer requests. Similarly, Sales teams may be unaware of the 8 clever things put in place by UX Design, Engineering, and Data Science to make it look like we have a single unified registration form online to shield customers from confusion during onboarding. Some friction in the experience may be intentional, while some may be unintentional. The tough part is discovering which is which. Getting these teams to collectively acknowledge the complexity is a big challenge in and of itself, let alone getting them to make decisions about changing things that might require them to shift their POV. Toto Wolff recently said on the Netflix show, Drive to Survive, “Data don’t make decisions – people do.” It is naive to assume that showing a bunch of insights to people will guarantee changing their minds. So, we ought to take things a step further.
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When it comes to data, most organizations are richer than they know. However, documenting the essence of all that and increasing stakeholder awareness is extremely challenging. Identifying and internalizing the friction points and opportunities within any given experience is no easy feat. This is why inviting stakeholders to meet or hear the consumer directly via workshops, walkthroughs, and listening sessions is so popular and effective. But we know that practice is not always practical. This is where the idea of personifying the consumer and their experience comes in, and doing so not just end-to-end, but also surface-to-core, understanding what is powering the experience behind the scenes within the business (people, process, platforms, data, etc.) One might suggest capturing detailed insights in reports and sharing the deliverables with partners (hoping they’ll read them). But just like anything, we should consider the purpose and audience context. Comprehensive 100+ page insight reports with theme summaries are helpful as appendix content, but you know what's more effective? An easier way to consume those insights quickly for senior leaders operating at a higher vantage point or functional stakeholders and SMEs in a workshop with short breakout sessions - in other words, tools such as journey maps, storyboards, service blueprints, etc. I often joke with my Research peers to think of journey maps or service blueprints as nothing more than personified research with a hero arc which doesn’t always go the way we expect, and just like it makes little sense to conduct research without nailing down scope, it makes little sense to map journeys without nailing down scope (i.e. there could be X number of journeys for Sales, Y number of journeys for Servicing, Z number of journeys for Marketing, or another way to think about it, there could be X number of journeys for one segment, Y number of journeys for another segment, etc.) This is why defining a common language of journeys before doing any sort of mapping is important. And while assets like journey maps can be visually engaging, they are not intended to be a one-off deliverable or pretty posters that we hand off to other teams - rather, they’re meant to be tools to uncover the nature and performance of the current experience from the perspective of our customers and employees, to spark curiosity, to invite dialogue between XFN partners, to reframe the problem space, and to expose the organizational change/risk appetite to not just XFN leaders but also to executive leaders, because sometimes there is a gap between their perception and reality. Data dashboards became popular because they offer bite-sized views into business performance. Process maps became popular because they provide insight into efficiency opportunities. Why not do the same for Research insights about consumers? Think about tangible assets like segments, personas, storyboards, journey maps, and service blueprints as perpetually evolving views of consumers’ journeys with us and our business performance throughout those journeys, anchoring the story in consumer needs, especially the latent and tacit ones. When truly used as "input" in workshops instead of some type of endgame deliverable, such assets can be very effective at introducing focus, discovering the why behind opportunities, uncovering friction points in surprising places, asking questions that challenge the status quo of disparate teams, and uniting XFN partners toward prioritization and action.
Simply put, this competency is about synthesizing insights via close partnerships with many stakeholders, ranging from operating functions like Marketing, Service, etc. to enabling functions like Research, Finance, Data, Analytics, Process, etc. This partnership involves us bringing strong hands-on skills to co-create and use (not just individually build and hand off) tools like segments, personas, journeys, storyboards, blueprints, etc. with the intent to humanize how the consumer experiences our organization and how we power that experience, reveal XFN tradeoffs, and guide XFN decision-making in group sessions. I’ll expand on co-creation further below. Not only does all this help XFN teams benefit from a singular view of consumer insights layered on top of operational process performance, but it also encourages future collaboration from partners focused on Business Process Modeling and Data Analytics, bringing teams closer together and making stronger cases for change – not to mention greater familiarity of CX and Design work within the organization.
Continuous Impact Sizing
This is our “size it” competency. It is one thing to have insights and ideas, and it’s another to link those to business performance. Put in plain language, this is about demonstrating our logic when describing a problem or a solution. I realize this is a highly charged topic in both the CX and Design communities these days, so to contextualize this, consider this clip from The Martian – the team discovers something and Jeff Daniels says “prove it to me”. He’s not asking the team to justify their value. Rather, he’s asking them to explain the reasoning behind what they’re saying. Big difference! Similarly, as challenging as it is sometimes, any of us within Design and CX should not take ‘prove it’ questions from anyone personally or as a deterrent to thinking big or perceiving some abstract notion of “us versus them”. Rather, let's take them as an invitation to demonstrate our rationale, an opportunity to focus our communication, an opportunity to push ourselves a bit into unfamiliar territory. This and this clip may help make my point. I’ll share 3 specific perspectives to frame this competency.
First is all about our language. There is untapped value in sizing the impact of the challenges/solutions we tackle and communicating that impact in a language that makes sense to XFN stakeholders. Why does language matter? Because many stakeholders (especially if they’re senior decision-makers) in business are in roles of high consequence, requiring a constant switch of context. Therefore, when making decisions, any sense of certainty offers a mental shortcut (Here is an interesting perspective on how a sense of certainty shapes behavior). What this means for us is turning the abstract into the concrete. The word ‘impact’ is abstract, and business doesn’t work in abstractions. A powerful currency of impact in nearly all businesses is commercial sense – the sense of what makes an idea worth pursuing, the potential cost to pursue it, and sometimes, the potential cost to not pursue it. This sense is typically signaled by a strong understanding of business performance and demonstrating that understanding through communication - through language. Consider these terms: Margins, Revenue, Retention, Churn, Marginal Cost, Willingness to Pay (WTP), Earnings Before Interest and Taxes (EBIT), Marginal Rate of Return (MRR), Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV), Cost to Serve, Unit Costs, Cost of Acquisition (CAC), Total Addressable Market (TAM), Serviceable Available Market (SAM), Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM), Expense Ratios, Fixed Cost, Variable Cost, Capital Expense (CapEx), Operating Expense (OpEx), Depreciation, Amortization, etc. This language from the world of Finance, Accounting, and Economics has traditionally not been in the discourse for our Design field, neither in education nor in our practice. But it is gradually becoming the norm for many of us in the CX field, and it is the norm for most decision-making in any for-profit business, increasingly so as we go higher up the accountability ladder and critically so in uncertain economic times. Understanding such concepts in theory and practice helps us think more analytically, challenge our assumptions and ideas, and contribute to more diverse conversations, ultimately falsifying or tightening up the commercial viability of experience improvement and helping improve decision-making. It allows us to make the abstract more concrete and identify trade-offs easier. Crucially, this not only helps us articulate solutions more effectively, but it also helps us articulate opportunities more effectively.
The second is all about proactive ‘before-after’ comparisons. In the first competency, we talked about creating a common language (of different journeys, experiences, products, processes, etc.). This directly equips us to proactively mine insights from ambiguous spaces, as opposed to only acting when particular journeys/ experiences start to become squeaky wheels and executive leadership becomes loud about it. When beginning new projects, identifying relevant metrics and baselining them is helpful (albeit difficult and likely dependent on other teams). Starting with metrics is just as crucial as starting with consumer needs/goals. This parallel effort sets us up for the future when we benchmark our performance against the standard (i.e. our initial baselines). This exercise of baselining and benchmarking against our business’ prior position is distinct from the typical practice of industry benchmarking, and it forces our business to look inward to our strengths (or lack thereof) instead of only comparing with leaders and laggards in the market. It also further emphasizes the need to instrument our digital products so we can get as much UX telemetry as possible. This practice is a lot more realistic when we have a strong bridge with teams like Research, Data Science, Consumer Marketing Insights, Service Operations, Process Engineering, Software, Engineering, Product Management, etc., when we have strong financial acumen to get creative with impact calculations and estimations, when we understand fundamental differences between causation and correlation, when we continuously correlate the UX telemetry of our digital products with the broader CX telemetry of our end-to-end journeys within which those digital products show up, when we understand how macroeconomic factors influence our business’ strengths and velocity in the market, when we understand how money flows within our business (does funding happen by the work, the team, the business function, the product, or the journey?), and when we understand how the cost is treated for opportunity execution work (i.e. stuff slated on the roadmap) vs. opportunity clarification work (i.e. stuff that will help define the roadmap). There are many more ways to measure the broader CX, such as waiting times, buying behaviors, time to qualify lead, wallet expansion, remedial costs, etc. I’ll expand on those in future newsletters in context of measuring customer outcomes.
The third is all about correlating risk reduction with business agility. What do I mean by that? You have likely heard the old saying, “Measure twice, cut once”. When we look strictly through the lens of business, both CX and Design disciplines are simply risk mitigators. Look at the below image. The white scribble represents the ambiguity and risk associated with any given challenge (product, service, experience, journey, anything) we may work on with XFN partners. Let’s apply this in our context.
Now, here is an interesting callout: Look closely at the above image and think about the scribble; the risk; the work - going from opportunity clarification to opportunity execution. Now imagine an overlay of circles, squares, or diamonds (gasp!) around both these aspects of the work. Do you see it?
Yes! We can layer double diamonds or whichever flavor of the design thinking process any way we like (there are many other variations I’ve missed) onto this simple scribble of risk mitigation, because the endgame for all of them is always the same - anchor on consumer insights, find root causes and patterns, whip up experiments/prototypes for potential solutions, falsify/prove assumptions, and continuously hop between problems and solutions as they become clearer and clearer. In other words, we reduce risk by being iterative and staying rooted in consumer insight to first clarify the opportunity (1st diamond) and then execute the opportunity (2nd diamond). Ask yourself: are you or your teams truly focusing on the 1st diamond or jumping right to the 2nd diamond, prioritizing iterative solution work over iterative problem framing work? Building the organizational muscle to intentionally focus on the 1st diamond and pull back conversations into the problem space is difficult work. But it introduces strategic considerations that we might not consider otherwise.
So, how might we draw attention to this risk reduction as a key impact of our work? We can do so by understanding the Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) within our organization. Most businesses track the progress of work on a monthly/ quarterly/ annual basis and use different mechanisms (such as OKRs, KPIs, MBOs, etc.) to track said progress. These mechanisms, for instance, OKRs, are simply goals that serve a strategy. Sometimes, OKRs roll up to a cross-cutting strategy for the whole business, and other times, they roll up to a particular business function’s strategy with a specific purpose. Each OKR is a goal to help get us closer to the outcomes intended by the OKR’s parent strategy. Where this matters for us within CX and Design (or within the Design Strategy practice) is the time horizon of our work. For instance, when starting a project and figuring out your game plan and timeline, draw out either of the above 2 risk scribbles on a whiteboard (whichever one you think applies to that project) with your relevant peers, pull up your Objectives list, and discuss: “Let’s unpack what we are doing. If we’re working to execute defined OKRs from some pre-defined strategy, then let’s clearly align on the KRs and find out more about the risks that were tackled earlier during the opportunity clarification effort. Because if we don’t have that clarity, that means our execution work is going to end up needing strategic clarification, aka, rework, aka greater opportunity cost. On the other hand, if we are truly doing exploratory work which will define future OKRs, then let’s all align that we will identify risks and mitigate them with XFN partnership, before getting to the point of defining OKRs and jumping to execution.” In either case, we would have a hands-on build-and-learn approach to see what works best, but one model is more expensive for the organization than the other in terms of time, energy, resources, and constraints.
This seemingly simple conversation, though sometimes difficult, effectively reveals whether we are measuring twice and cutting once, or we are measuring once and cutting over and over. It is also effective at identifying risk within aggressive project timelines and creating clarity out of ambiguous asks coming our way. In addition, it helps distinguish opportunity execution work from opportunity clarification work and shines a bright light on the bridge between the two – a necessary light for anyone in the roles we’re covering in this newsletter. Also, it helps us set and manage expectations about the measurement of our work, laterally and vertically. Furthermore, it helps us understand the perceptions of our peers and leaders about OKRs and measurement. Moreover, since our work is that of a force multiplier, such conversations help us uncover and share opportunities for improved XFN collaboration with relevant governance functions (i.e. the third pillar of the Design Strategy practice).
Those with sufficient experience doing this type of work also understand that certain impacts are not tangible – the trust of XFN partners, executive-level advocacy of connecting dots, brand equity of this work across the business, cultural mindset shifts, new behaviors, etc. These are not goals we can measure impact against – rather, they are outcomes that we earn by performing consistently over time.
This competency of the Design Strategy practice is not about showing direct cause-and-effect every time. We might think in CX and Design that something makes obvious sense to pursue, like moving away from antiquated legacy systems to a modernized solution, and that it should easily be prioritized for funding/ execution. But that move costs something and more likely than not, that move is a ‘choice’ among a sea of other choices continuously coming up within the organization in front of XFN decision-makers. Our work helps them understand the trade-offs between those choices. Consider these additional examples for your work as you think about impact sizing. Rather than centering your message on an improved digital experience, zero in on why digital maturity correlates with higher engagement and try to forecast it (with Sales & Marketing in the conversation). Rather than explicitly focus on plain-language content, pivot to the resulting reduction in cognitive load and forecast the boost in customer efficiency and customer service efficiency (with Service in the conversation). Rather than focus solely on inclusive and accessible imagery, emphasize how it would improve brand perception and broaden our demographic, forecasting potential growth (with Marketing in the conversation). Subtle adjustments like that in our communication are like a snowball – more often than not, they spark helpful dialogue and stretch our thinking. In these examples, we’re not dissuading consumer impact, but we’re deliberately introducing business impact. These are just a few examples, but they turn the narrative from customer outcomes to business outcomes. This is much more effective with XFN partners.
This and this perspective from our friends at the UX Collective also touches on the idea of impact sizing.
Applied Co-Creation
This is our “be hands-on” competency. I’ve used the word ‘co-create’ a few times so far in this newsletter. Thinking about co-creation sometimes stops with the rigorous focus on consumers. The idea of involving them early and often is certainly worthwhile. But co-creation with stakeholders is just as valuable. In business, co-creation shows up in many ways, bringing the consumer voice into the problem-solving dialogue via focus groups, communities of practice, interviews, surveys, usability testing of prototypes/products, leadership councils with external partners, committees, etc. In the broadest definition, co-creation means collective problem-solving with one or more parties in the conversation. When I mention co-creation in the context of Design Strategy, I refer to our day-to-day work with XFN partners. Collaborating with them doesn’t mean “we keep them in the loop”. Rather, it means “we think together and build together” regularly. When we demonstrate this long enough, we begin to inspire new behaviors, habits, and gradually, a culture shift - of rapid experimentation, of deep XFN partnership, of shared ownership (the toughest part). For instance, consider the below activities we may do often, in no specific order.
See the pattern here? We could add many more things on there, but the common thread is that though ‘we’ produce deliverables after each of these steps, the deliverables are truly co-created with XFN partners, and they get much stronger organizational buy-in because folks see their fingerprints and tradeoffs all over the work – this significantly reduces the risk of work ending up as a bunch of PDFs in some archived SharePoint folder. For instance, no matter how well-intentioned, journey maps are only as good as the questions they raise about the experience and the focus they create among XFN partners, and if they are not co-created with XFN partners, they are at severe risk of being treated as art instead of the decision-making tools that they are. Similarly, we may build scrappy, conceptual UX mockups to demonstrate compelling ideas for the mobile experience, but if Digital Product, Product Design, Engineering, or Architecture partners are not part of the dialogue from the beginning (even if just for thought partnership if not a hands-on collab!), then those ideas are at higher risk of going unnoticed or worse, being reworked. Now, I am not saying we need to involve every XFN partner in all aspects of the work. We need to be tactful about stakeholder management before we get deeper into any specific project. So, ask them! Ask them for every single project. Make them tell you to stop engaging them if they are tired of you engaging them. For the above examples, we might invite folks in the dialogue on day one when we start to scope the work, and we can collectively determine the optimal level of their involvement – Engineering might say that Product will be their proxy, Architecture might join one meeting and then taper off until later, and so on. If an organization has a strong appetite for truly agile XFN work and has the organizational design (shared accountabilities, funding model, team structures, etc.) to support this work, then all this becomes that much easier.
You may also have noticed that I used the words 'session' and 'workshop' interchangeably. When we treat workshops as some special event instead of business as usual, we start to put undue pressure on ourselves and on our partners. Think of workshops as just meetings wherein we bring in a bunch of inputs, collectively react to and manipulate those inputs, and end up with a bunch of outputs. Of course, like anything in life, preparation is key, and effectively facilitating XFN dialogue is paramount and requires strong communication and effort. But those facilitation skills should not be reserved only for workshops - they should be part of how we operate and show up regularly.
Just like a good strategy deals with the edge between the known and unknown, co-creation deals with the edge between thought partnership and hands-on partnership, and we have to play jumprope on that edge. This is most effective when we ourselves have a strong grip on our hands-on craft.
Data-Backed Storytelling
This is our “say more with less” competency. It is well known that stories are the best way to make ideas understandable. The power of emotion and personal connection makes ideas stick. That said, it’s one thing to make ideas stick, while it’s an entirely different thing to motivate constructive behaviors that actually bring those ideas into action within the commercial reality of a mature organization. Take movies or books, for instance. Some stories invite attention, pique curiosity, and inspire reflection, while others go one step beyond and inspire action. Decisions. Change. In our worlds of CX and Design, the difference between product-focused and journey-focused is that a journey truly is a story – the story of a customer’s relationship or an employee's relationship with the business, and how it unfolds over time. We need to communicate this story to various audiences in and sometimes even out of the organization – so the big question for us is, do we want our stories to inspire reflection, or do we want them to go one step further and inspire action?
In the case of the former, Design and CX are both extremely good! We can build compelling vision stories and wax poetic about consumer impact all day, but are they enough to make trade-off decisions in business? Not always. This is particularly important in cost-constrained economic times like these past few years. The result? Storytelling gets a bad rep!
So why is it so hard to get to that next step in storytelling where we can inspire action, not just reflection? Firstly, it’s because change is hard. Like I shared in one of the quotes above, sometimes no amount of data is enough to sway a decision, because that’s just not how the human mind works. This fundamental resistance to change is tied more with psychology and organizational culture and warrants a separate newsletter. But assuming there is a culture of openness in the organization, we come to the second roadblock – that this sort of critical thinking and problem-solving of opportunities generally reveals findings that inherently encourage stepping outside comfort zones and into the territory of uncertainty. This encouragement, this nudge, this push, often creates a boomerang effect where people (i.e. our audience, decision-makers, or anyone in a role of high consequence) start to dig their heels into the idea of certainty and familiarity. To manage this boomerang effect, we can construct our stories with specific considerations, several of which we covered in our earlier competencies:
I’ll dive deeper into specific structures of storytelling for different audiences and different purposes in future newsletters. For most challenges, we can distill our storytelling to 2 deceptively simple questions: 1) why is something desirable for consumers, and 2) why is it a commercially viable option for the business? The ‘something’ could be a product, service, journey, or experience. When we have a comprehensive POV for both of these questions, communicating with confidence and conviction becomes much easier. Question 1 touches on empathy, emotion, beliefs, imagination, and inspiration, while Question 2 touches on certainty, structure, and constraints. For instance, here’s a simple test: if you’re working on a near-term body of work or exploring something that will help define a future body of work, reflect on these 2 questions and ask yourself if you can concisely communicate the answers. That will help us see where things currently stand. If our rationale cannot stand a vigorous attack from stakeholders within our business, how can we expect it to stand against competition in the marketplace?
Recently, Marc Fonteijn's podcast hosted a design leader, Patrizia Bertini, who talked about this topic, “Without data, we’re just telling stories!”. She goes on to share some insightful perspectives on the same.
Most people like being a part of change that builds a better world. Data-backed storytelling in business – stories that leverage design acumen, financial acumen, behavioral psychology, and change management to not just tap into people’s empathy but also their business sense – is a crucial brick in the path toward such change.
So those are the five competencies of Design Strategy. Depending on the environment you study or work in, you might ask, “Karan, are you saying that we (Strategists, CX Practitioners, Journey Managers, Service Designers, etc.) should do all 5 of those things above? It seems like several jobs rolled into one." To that, my response is, “Yes, but not always”. This work is about balance – it helps to be very able to demonstrate all 5 of the above competencies (especially if our organization is new at operationalizing CX, or it perceives Design only as an execution partner, or it doesn’t have an inherently customer-obsessed culture) while also being curious enough to proactively identify and invite partners across the organization to join forces with us, and still being a hands-on partner with them. The hands-on skills of Experience Design (both product & service), while incredibly crucial, are not the hard part. Arguably, they are the easier part. Rather, it's the vulnerability to jump into messy terrain and create focus out of chaos, the constant acts of converging craft with culture, balancing process with politics and balancing outcomes with outputs, the ability to pull in partners from other areas and rally up cross-functional working groups in a highly matrixed environment, the ability to co-create a POV about the economics of a given customer journey (not product, but end-to-end journey) by pulling together often missing data elements, the wide-ranging business acumen to navigate and facilitate conversations with XFN stakeholders, the ability to challenge their status quo with tact and finesse, the ability to sell, the ability to constantly think in terms of tradeoffs and balance the emergence of new ideas with the constraints of business – those are all difficult areas of untapped value. This distinction between the hard and the easy stuff matters because it fundamentally alters how we work with stakeholders and how we show up in conversations with them.
The focus on all 5 of these competencies can also cause factions within both CX and Design. For instance, some may believe it is not our role to worry about organizational design and change management, while others believe it is. Some may believe spending time getting into the economics of Design and CX work impedes unconstrained creativity and customer advocacy, while others may believe there is value in it – a lot of minds are actively exploring how we balance the uncertainties of creativity with the certainties of business. It’s not an easy trick, after all! So remember, I’m not saying we are the ‘doer’ for all of it. Rather, we’re the force multiplier. A Strategist or Journey Manager for instance, may not be an expert in detailed business process modeling. But we need not be an expert – rather, it’s about bringing teams closer together, leveraging collective brainpower, often being a thought partner first and hands-on partner second. Similarly, a Service Designer may not be an expert in change management, but we needn’t be – when possible, partner with them in-house or even get creative and obtain perspectives from industry communities. Also, some organizations’ funding models don’t allow deep XFN work, requiring teams to be lean and fast like a startup – if that is indeed our environment, then that’s precisely where our nonconformist hands-on skills come in handy.
Like any other practice in business, the impact radius of Design Strategy depends on the makeup of the organization, the advocacy from our own reporting leadership chain, and the time horizon we focus on. Sometimes, our work demonstrates a balanced response that is highly desirable by customers while also good for the business. Other times, we may be working on something near-term where the efficiency goal trumps the experience goal, being fundamentally at odds with customer-centricity. This is also a topic of much debate lately. Some might say things like, “Karan, that can be so frustrating, how does efficiency trumping experience make any sense? Aren’t we in Design and CX supposed to champion the voice of the customer? Even in school, we’re taught that this work is all about unequivocal customer advocacy. Yet, business often doesn’t get it. How come the conversation and questions about ROI are never-ending?”
To that, I’d say I hear you friend, but I encourage you to be pragmatic and understand that any business backed by public shareholders or private equity will prioritize margins over other wins. It is simple economics of capitalism at play – unless it is a non-profit group or perhaps a mom-and-pop shop down the street, the external pressures to maximize margins and productivity can and frequently do supersede the desire to maximize the customer experience, thus impacting decisions and sometimes despite the explicit recommendations from CX or Design. The only way to somewhat shield decisions from these external financial pressures is if the fundamental organizational structure and decision-making roles hold accountability for longer-term performance as opposed to short-term performance, which is incredibly difficult to do (Check out this insightful report about Apple’s decision-making. It paints a picture of how customer passion doesn’t solely drive commercial success). Many in the CX and Design communities struggle to acknowledge this constraint about decision-making, possibly because many of our beliefs about our work may have deep roots in a place of passion; passion for doing the right thing and passion for leaving a lasting impact on the lives and minds of people, on society, and the planet. The businesses we work with could have a noble mission and even be founded by ourselves or by folks with the same passion for consumers and strikingly high risk tolerance. But even those, at best, try to strike a balance between experience and efficiency because no business can scale without being efficient. Therefore, all our work (in CX or Design) has an underlying business goal, whether it is explicit within our teams or not. There is also much to explore on a different (but still maturing) side of this, wherein we can help build sustainable value propositions, regenerative business models, energy-efficient experiences, carbon-neutral services, etc., ultimately helping build a healthier society.
This dichotomy (or at least this tradeoff) between efficiency and experience is not unique to CX or Design work. In the broadest, oversimplified sense, this also shows up in other professions where different parties constantly negotiate a middle ground by explaining their rationale. Think of product designers and software engineers, or insurance agents and insurance underwriters, or architects and civil engineers, or accountants and auditors, or aerodynamicists and structural engineers - the list goes on. Over the years, I’ve worked in different capacities with and within healthcare, manufacturing, software, academia, retail, philanthropy, consulting, and financial services, and it has always felt like all anyone ever does is communicate the value of their ideas to each other, and find common ground.
There are a few headwinds we should be self-aware of.
1?? Just like over-indexing on consumer bias can be counterproductive, we should also be careful not to over-index on analytical thinking. Consider this question: should we invest in something based on uncertainty and thereafter determine its ROI, or should we try to forecast ROI and have some semblance of certainty before investing in it? This is one of those classic dichotomies of risk in business without an answer. The world of opportunity isn’t always black and white (as evidenced by this earlier perspective from Sam Altman on the commercial viability of AI). CX leader and author, Matt Watkinson, also recently explained this well on Blake Morgan’s podcast:
“Stop trying to always chase a guaranteed upside and instead ask yourself about the downside. If the downside is acceptable, you might as well just go for it” - Matt Watkinson
2?? The historical factions and assumptions around Design Thinking and UX have a lasting impact on our work. For instance, there is little awareness of Service Design for many even within CX and Design, and certainly for many in the wider business community. So we need to be always ready to explain, re-explain, and then re-explain yet again that CX is about end-to-end experiences and not only specific ones within Marketing or Customer Service, that journey/experience management is distinct from product management, that UX design is distinct from CX design (i.e. difference between product design and service design), that there is no shortcut to effective strategy or vision work if we are serious about execution work and measurement, that the ‘Measure Twice, Cut Once’ mentality isn’t only for vertical product development but also for horizontal experience/journey development, and that design thinking is not some magic pill for innovation and to treat it as just one of many tools.
3?? Just like any idea needs nurturing conditions on its journey from the whiteboard to the market, Design Strategy work itself is also an ‘idea’ to introduce within the landscape of any business. The journey of this idea is also most effective with nurturing conditions or cultural signals that exist in the form of leadership appetite, XFN governance of shared ownership, and the organizational currency of change. Let’s unpack them.
In any Design Strategy or Experience Management practice, we co-create experience strategies with XFN partners and measurably drive prioritization and action for consistent customer experiences that balance customer and business outcomes. Product Management has accountability for roadmap decisions (digital product) and operating functions have accountability for additional decisions (marketing, pricing, servicing, etc.) Both these groups along with control functions (Legal, Compliance, Finance, etc.) and other enabling functions (Product Design, Research, Data Science, Process Engineering, etc.) altogether power up different end-to-end experiences. While Design Strategy may not have accountability for the outcomes, we certainly have a responsibility to influence work across that entire ecosystem (multiple operating functions, multiple enabling functions, and multiple control functions), so that collectively, the organization delivers the right experience to the right person at the right time at the right cost. While the accountabilities tend to vary, on every project, we operate as a single XFN team (a CX squad, so to say, not unlike agile squads) with shared accountability of outcomes. When projects start, we establish shared goals as ‘one core team’ and align on horizontal journey-thinking instead of vertical product-thinking, so that the inevitable ownership conversation isn’t siloed. In such a landscape, if senior leadership hasn’t bought-in to the mindset of shared ownership and thought partnership across silos, someone will inevitably ask, “What are we delivering via CX or via Design Strategy work? Product owns visioning, or that XYZ operating function owns visioning.” To such questions, one might respond, “We’re responsible for orchestrating end-to-end outcomes for specific journeys and horizontally aligning all the vertical product teams and disparate business functions toward common goals by co-creating the experience strategy for those journeys and linking that strategy to execution. Tangible outputs such as synthesized insights, ecosystem maps, journey financial models, service blueprints, journey maps, conceptual prototypes, storyboards, aspirational vision narratives, rapid experiments and metric baselines, executive-level journey briefs, etc. are just some examples of our hands-on deliverables, but they are co-created with many partners and continuously support the decision-making at different vantage points of the business. Though that work may sit within the accountability of Product Management and other operating functions, we are the force multiplier behind it to unite actions and cultivate consistency in customer and employee experiences/journeys. (Cue our impact sizing competency in case of additional questions about value and ROI)."
Do you sense the ambiguity in this example? Not only do we need to continuously navigate such ambiguity, but we also need our CX/Design leadership to continuously support, and encourage this navigation. Being a force multiplier for XFN teams inherently requires a perpetual willingness to be curious, challenge norms, demonstrate hands-on building skills, push boundaries in conversation, empower others to do their best work, and grow peers’ thinking along with our own. This involves leading not with the authoritarian sense of ownership but the influential sense of ownership – and top-down advocacy for this brand of leadership and XFN collaboration is crucial for successful experience/journey management work just like it is crucial for product management work. Otherwise, we are at risk of burnout, as this recent Harvard study found. Every function in the business needs to be focusing on improving customer experience and lives, and every function needs to be working together to roll out improvements. If CX/Design leadership team is not aligned and behind this goal, and not encouraging observable behaviors to realize it, it becomes impossible to get the rest of the company to do so.
”It’s not what we say, it’s what we people hear.” – Frank Lutz
Understanding the extent of such nurturing conditions within the business helps us become more targeted and contextual in our efforts to earn trust, influence, and credibility over time. My suggestion to anyone relatively new to this space is, don’t look for a perfect business that is fully mature in CX or Design. Rather, look for open-minded leaders and peers who value leading via influence, who appreciate balancing hands-on partnership with thought partnership, who encourage shared goals and shared ownership across the business, who enjoy pushing boundaries of what’s possible today, who balance consumer passion with the pragmatism of business outcomes, and who value consistency over novelty in CX. I owe my own ever-evolving thought process to many such leaders and peers I’ve worked with over the years.
4?? It is important to be mindful of how success is measured for product development efforts in the organization and open up critical thinking dialogue with those partners, because therein lies a potential path for us to nurture the organizational mindset of outcomes and outputs (not outcomes over outputs). If we know that our product management or engineering partners are evaluated heavily on the velocity with which they ship stuff instead of the customer impact they have, that likely means no matter how much co-creation we might do with them early on, we’ll miss the mark on execution. At best, we will be a distraction for them, and at worst, we will impact their capacity and inadvertently hurt organizational productivity. How so? Think about the term ‘agile’. It is widely used in the context of engineering and product development work. In our CX and Design communities, operating with agility means “the speed with which we assess impact in consumer lives by constantly trying new stuff, not the speed at which we ship said stuff”. But in many organizations, operating with agility has come to mean “ship, ship, ship! We'll make it iteratively usable afterward.” The former measures impact, while the latter measures velocity. This gap frustrates many in the CX/Design/Research communities because the ‘ship before good’ model is fundamentally at odds with the idea of thoughtful and deliberate customer impact, which is all about slowing down to speed up. And it frustrates many in product development because the ‘ship after making it good’ model fundamentally reduces velocity. Product Management is typically in the middle, trying to delicately balance the two models, and often with great effort and challenge. So, as we build XFN partnerships, I encourage all of us to kickstart a dialogue with Product Management and Engineering partners about outcome tracking along with output tracking and empathize with their vantage points and accountabilities within the organization. Measuring velocity is certainly valuable (budgeting, capacity, resource allocation purposes) but it needs to correlate and coexist with outcome metrics. How might we do that? How might we collaborate with those partners early and often, during the opportunity clarification stage for specific customer journeys? Those are key questions to solve together.
That said, we have some tailwinds as well.
1?? Product partners can be a strong ally for Design Strategy and the broader CX work since their role is also largely that of a force multiplier. It is important to understand their scope though so we can partner better. With the rise of software companies where the product itself is the company (like Google, Amazon, Meta, etc., or even way smaller software startups), the Product Management function is often positioned as the ‘voice of the business’, with accountability not just for the digital roadmap but also for coordinating the pricing, packaging, distribution, financials, outcome projections, etc. (balancing people/process tech, so to speak). But this is often not the case at non-software companies where digital channels are simply one of many channels (think Retail, Banks, Insurance, Pharma, Airlines, etc.) that make up an experience/ journey/ service. In such environments, Product work may be spread across three distinct roles - Product Managers, Product Marketing Managers, and Digital Product Managers. Furthermore, Product roles are also a difficult balance between near-term backlog management and long-term visioning, and this can sometimes make it harder for them to proactively cover the entire ecosystem, defaulting to only their corner of the digital roadmap (i.e. they might work vertically on their area of the product, not horizontally across the end-to-end journey). So generally speaking, Product partners welcome our collaboration. And if not, then we know the next spot to build a bridge to. Remember our first competency? Better to know thy business than be unaware.
2?? There are many leading voices and published practices for this work across many job titles and various communities. The Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) , Qualtrics XM Institute , Service Design Network , and UX Collective are excellent places to get started. My pro tip: If you’re in the first two, join the other two, and vice versa.
3?? There is easy access to many (often free) online resources to learn the hands-on skills of Experience Design (Product Design and Service Design). The hands-on skills and strong comfort level with tactical tools for rapid prototyping and XFN collaboration like Adobe Creative Cloud, Figma, Sketch, Miro, Mural, etc. are vital for anyone in Design Strategy or the broader CX space. I cannot stress enough that tools like Figma are not for only UX design work – they can be used for CX design too. I’ll expand on this point in future newsletters. Furthermore, it helps to be comfortable with tools like Jira, Airtable, Notion, Coda, etc. for effective Product partnerships. In addition, productivity tools such as Microsoft Office 365 are a staple for most business stakeholders, and we need not underestimate skills in those, especially when analyzing/building financial models for different experiences/journeys (and no, it is not criminal to build slides in PowerPoint, or to have stakeholders sprinkle commentary all over our Mural/Figma boards and prototypes – the fact that they’re engaging in those ways is an excellent sign of collaboration, especially on opportunity clarification work instead of execution work). Furthermore, we mustn’t forget the most underrated tools of them all – marker and whiteboard, or just pen and paper. Some of the most engaging stakeholder conversations I’ve had over the years have been in front of a whiteboard or on paper napkins. And lastly, there is the idea of leveraging AI assistance to boost our productivity – that’s a topic for another day.
4?? We can shore up a lot of value in our work via peripheral partnerships with change management, organizational design, behavioral economics, and process engineering or operational excellence teams. If such partners exist within your organization and you don’t work with them yet, go say hello.
6. Closing
Design Strategy is a business practice about tangibly identifying and demonstrating how we can disrupt ourselves incrementally or radically before the marketplace does, and to keep doing so in commercially viable ways. This disruption could be in response to or in anticipation of change, and it could vary, from making our products better, faster, easier, cheaper, etc., to making our organization easier to do business with, to making our organization run in better ways that enable customer-centric performance.
This practice generally sits within CX or Design groups as an enabling function that maximizes the effectiveness of force exerted by XFN stakeholders. It combines the breadth of Customer Experience with the depth of Experience Design, and it joins forces with other capabilities (such as process engineering, change management, organizational design, etc.) to rally XFN teams toward common goals, co-create comprehensive and actionable experience strategies, support execution, and measurements. Typically, Design Strategy is responsible for aligning XFN stakeholders for ambiguous problem spaces, co-creating a common language of end-to-end journeys across the organization, prioritizing journeys, co-creating experience visions, POV development, insight synthesis, financial modeling, continuous XFN co-creation, rapid prototyping and experimentation, and overseeing the transition of work from vision to experimentation to execution to measurement across different teams. The 5 competencies of Design Strategy help us balance passion for consumer outcomes with pragmatism for business outcomes.
Design Strategy work clarifies, qualifies, and quantifies choices to help our organization win in the marketplace. And just like choices in life don’t please everyone, choices in business also don’t please everyone, so our work also will not please everyone. When we co-create any strategy (in our case, for customer experiences and employee experiences), we essentially suggest prioritizing certain work over other work, optimizing investments in certain areas over others, and focusing more resources on certain experiences/journeys over others. This means concentrating resources instead of spreading them, which is an inherently difficult notion in larger organizations, because the larger the organization, the more inertia we encounter. Dealing with this inertia is a challenge for CX and Design teams – this is why senior leadership advocacy for the fundamental philosophies of co-creation and shared ownership is essential. Apart from that, incentivizing teams to motivate constructive behaviors is also helpful.
The world is changing quickly and CX and Design communities are not immune to change. This means we must adapt to new ways of doing things. More specifically, it means zooming out of the ‘I am shipping ideas to the market’ mindset and into the ‘I am shaping change within the business’ mindset. It means proactively stepping into the ambiguous, messy, and vulnerable work of bringing together XFN partners who have differing priorities, consciously being in a curious frame of mind instead of adversarial frame of mind with stakeholders (it’s not us vs. them, but us and them), conceding some degree of customer advocacy for business advocacy in order to find fertile middle ground, coaching teams to not latch onto absolutes in data but rather directional indicators and estimates, building digital mockups that deliberately go beyond the current design system and are not pixel-perfect yet compelling, doing iterative research with the same agility as product sprints, building and testing prototypes for both digital and physical channels, crafting narratives to demonstrate the journey of customers between different channels without seams, continuously showing up with a strong but loosely-held position on something and backing it up with a clear rationale, getting creative with financial calculations to co-create a POV that shows choices, tradeoffs, and the path forward. All this stuff isn’t just a step-by-step checklist. All this work starts with opportunity clarification and goes all the way to opportunity execution, while gradually guiding different players across the business toward more collaborative ways of doing things. The journey of demonstrating such behaviors can be isolating. All this work can feel like an island, but it is important to stick to this boldness and this will to color outside the lines, even if others don't agree. Keep an open mind and keep your leaders in the loop. As long as you have political air cover to operate this way within the organization and tactical ground cover by building XFN partnerships, keep at it – start small to pursue quick wins and resist the temptation of big swing innovation until there is more momentum, greater leadership appetite, clear signals of shared ownership, and several 'shared success stories' with XFN partners. It is not enough for us to be an imaginative thinker, or a creative builder who hands off deliverables with hopes that they’ll get used, or a framework extraordinaire, or a charismatic evangelist – rather, we need to be a thinker, builder, facilitator, and evangelist all at once, and to adjust our capacity in all 4 areas based on our cultural landscape. So, let’s support, encourage, and demonstrate collaboration between our XFN partners with different skill sets and experiences at multiple vantage points of the organization, especially those who may have been excluded in the past. Let’s do this with agency, good communication, and undented conviction. When we take that leap and show up differently, we begin operating in cross-channel experiences and horizontal collaboration instead of only in individual channels and vertical collaboration. That is the key to a brighter future.
All businesses want to deliver compelling customer experiences and employee experiences in a way that’s viable for commercial scale. Some do this through a compelling product, some do it through a clever business model that cultivates network effects and deters competitive entry, and some do it through a carefully orchestrated ecosystem of products and services. Design Strategy within CX, within Design, or even within specific operating functions such as Marketing, Service, etc. can help businesses maximize the effectiveness of force applied by cross-functional partners to deliver compelling experiences that overwhelm if not knockout targets in today’s hyper-competitive marketplace and accelerate the path to sustained relevance and competitive advantage in the minds and lives of consumers.
Be the enabling tailwind for your XFN partners. Be a force multiplier for your business.
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Thank you for reading! ?? My goal with the 1st edition of this newsletter was to establish clarity on what Design Strategy work is all about, and to establish value for the different roles doing such work within the broader context of CX and Design. If you found this content valuable, subscribe to receive future editions with actionable insights to realize the Design Strategy practice in your work. Please feel free to share your perspectives, reactions and questions via comments below or DMs.
Inspired by the work and thought leadership of: Greg Melia, CAE , Jeanne Bliss , Bruce Temkin , Isabelle Zdatny, CCXP, XMP , Don Norman , Richard Rumelt , Roger Martin , Michael Porter , Tim Brown , Steve Blank , Mauro Porcini , Arin Bhowmick , Erik Roth , Marc Fonteijn , Robert Meza , Mauricio Manhaes, Ph.D. , John Cutler , Judd Antin , Morgan Miller , Erika Flowers , Lenny Rachitsky , Bill Staikos , Matt Watkinson , Dr. Maxie Schmidt ???????????? , Joana de Quintanilha , ?Jochem van der Veer , Patrizia Bertini , Guewen Loussouarn , Darlene Ball , Wes Sauder MScIS, MBA , Kyle Whatley , Lori Ferguson , Kim Summers , Les Meyer , Kenny Sutton , Fabiola Corvera-Stimeling , Chris Avore , Jennifer Bunke , Cheri McCourt , Ed Orozco , Sam Stern , Lisa Baird , Erika Hall , Christine Fitts , Thomas W. , Pascal Potvin , Tom Scott , Jeff Humble , Pavel Samsonov , Iain Langridge , Shauna Maggs , Katie Webb , Robbie Clark , Christian Rohrer , Brian Moelich , Michelle Billinger, PMP, CPP-M, ACXM , Tanya Thomas, CCXP , Marzia Aricò , Jeff Sussna , Dave Seaton , Blake Morgan , Dennis Wakabayashi , Stacy Sherman????? , and Sean ?? Albertson .
???? Hi, I’m Karan! I help CX and Design teams strengthen their strategic voice and become stronger partners with cross-functional stakeholders to sense and respond to change faster.
his newsletter definitely fills a gap in the CX/Design space by focusing on Design Strategy.
Service Design + Strategy + Customer Experience (CX) + Employee Experience (EX) + User Experience (UX) + Organizational Design + Journey Manager + Analyst
6 个月Thanks for the mention. Holy cow - I thought I wrote long articles. This was great and very intensive.
I help founders and leaders translate vision into user experiences that drive growth and unlocks revenue. | Design Principal | MBA | Avid observer
6 个月Honored to have been mentioned in this very insightful piece. Can’t wait to see more ??