The second decade of the 21st century was a buoyant one for the UX Design discipline. Thanks to the work of organizations such as IDEO and dynamic academics such as Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur—authors of the famous Business Model Canvas—the UX design profession and its design-thinking approach became strongly associated with the fields of innovation and business strategy.
While the newfound prominence of UX design was not without merit, it also led to some misconceptions about the limitations of UX design professionals and their academic backgrounds in dealing with the intricacies of competitive and corporate strategy—and more broadly, the practical workings of enterprises.
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Can UX Designers Be Strategists?
The answer is: it depends. It is important to be specific about what we are referring to when we use the word strategy.
The most common notion is that of business strategy, the series of tactical decisions that business unit managers make to create value for stakeholders and customers and to achieve competitive advantage within a specific market.
Business strategy differs from corporate strategy, which determines where an organization chooses to compete and involves things such as mergers, acquisitions, resource allocations between different business units, and divestitures.
Beneath these two strategic activities proliferate a variety of different subdomains such as information-technology (IT) strategy, marketing and sales strategy, and product strategy—which is perhaps most relevant for UX design professionals—along with UX strategy, which the eponymous book by Jamie Levy has popularized. Within the realm of strategy, some exceptions are specific to a particular industry sector. For example, a design strategy might make little sense for a mining company.
All of these strategic subdomains serve the strategic pursuits of the overarching business strategy. (For the sake of simplicity, I’ll use the terms business strategy and enterprise strategy interchangeably in this article. However, in other contexts, these terms hold slightly different nuances.)
What Exactly Is Business Strategy and How Do UX Designers Play a Role in It?
In essence, business strategy is the sum of strategic initiatives that a company pursues to create value for the organization and its stakeholders and gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. [1] The concept of value creation is key in strategy—referring to the realization of benefits for stakeholders, while simultaneously optimizing costs and minimizing risks.
A common way of visualizing value is as the difference between a customer’s willingness to pay (WTP) for a product and the price of that product. Value also lies in the difference between a supplier’s willingness to sell to a company and the costs that the company must pay for the goods it needs to make or deliver its product. Figure 1 represents this dynamic well as a value stick.
Figure 1—The value stick and design
To generate more profits and, thus, capture more business value, a company should ideally try either to increase the customer’s WTP or find ways to decrease the cost of goods sold (COGS).
The emphasis many place on design within the context of business strategy lies mostly in the fact that good design interventions have the potential to increase customers’ willingness to pay. Plus, in some cases, good design also contributes to cost optimization. When a product improves in ways that make its perceived value higher or that allow a company to minimize the resources necessary to produce and operationalize it, that creates more value for the company. Furthermore, the use of design thinking and user-centric design practices in several innovation processes have resulted in the creation of entirely novel products and businesses. Thus, design has been widely recognized as an important innovation enabler—particularly within the context of the Blue Ocean strategy framework. [2]
All this is a testament to how UX design can be an important strategic initiative for an enterprise. However, a business strategy must typically address a broader set of goals than product or portfolio development or merely increasing customer satisfaction.
Figure 2 shows a snippet from COBIT 5, a well-known framework for enterprise governance, [3] which provides a comprehensive list of common business goals that, in turn, cascade from specific stakeholders’ needs. Each of these enterprise goals falls into one of the four areas of the Balance Scorecard, a popular strategic-management tool.
Figure 2—COBIT 5 enterprise goals
The job of the business strategist is to assess and prioritize these goals, often negotiating among stakeholders’ conflicting needs to come up with ideas on how to address the most urgent needs. This is a complex task that usually calls for competencies that go beyond the typical designer’s skillset—such as having a deep understanding of and experience with market and industry dynamics such as pricing, supply chains, risk management, internal and external policies, and IT management. However, these elements of strategy have little, if anything, to do with design.
Where UX designers’ skills and practices really become transformative are within the context of individual areas such as the following:
helping to expand a company’s business portfolio by creating innovative, new products
helping to design a customer-oriented service culture
helping the IT function to design solutions that allow easier access to data and information to support better decision making
helping design processes to foster learning and growth or mechanisms for retaining value and talent.
There are so many ways in which whoever is responsible for business strategy can utilize design, infusing it in strategic initiatives whose aim is addressing prioritized business goals.
Thus, the question of whether UX designers can be strategists makes less sense at a business-strategy level. A better question would instead be: how and where can UX designers help address business-strategy goals?
The Case for UX Design as a Business-Strategy Enabler
Two theoretical frameworks support the idea of infusing design into strategic areas within the enterprise, as follows:
Jaime Levy’s concept of UX strategy emphasizes business strategy as a key tenet that should guide the alignment of design initiatives with broader enterprise goals. This closely reflects the goal “alignment of IT strategy and business strategy,” as predicated in the COBIT 5 framework, which helps a company address the broader enterprise objectives of creating value for stakeholders and supporting a strong product portfolio. [4]
The Boston Consulting Group’s Design-to-Value approach formalizes the translation of top-level strategy into design choices for products and services, as well as the underlying processes along the supply chain. In this way, design can help enterprises deal with the twofold need to deliver value to the customer through products and services, while at the same time, provide the most attractive economics for the entire life cycle. [5] Moreover, according to this consulting group, brainstorming and idea-generation sessions are key to coming up with solutions and offerings that address the diverse needs of different stakeholders.
These two examples illustrate the profound intersection between design initiatives and setting a company’s strategic direction. However, they don’t necessarily entail a UX designer’s responsibility in determining what the business goals are, what the priorities are, and what resources are necessary and available.
In most business scenarios, rather than driving the core business strategy, the role of UX design encompasses the facilitation of strategic decision making and the execution of specific strategic initiatives relating to product development and service or process improvement.
Strategic Thinking in Product Management and UX Design
Interestingly, product development and service or process improvement can, in turn, become subdomains in which strategic thinking is necessary. It is at this level that we are talking about product strategy or UX strategy.
As in business strategy, the process of devising a strategy comprises three broad pieces, as follows:
Understanding needs—The starting point is understanding needs such as the users’ or customers’ needs and the needs of the business and IT stakeholders.
Developing an execution plan—The development of an execution plan to address these needs.
Transforming needs into actionable strategy—This is a series of actions that the enterprise must take to bring a product to life that meets both customers’ needs and stakeholders’ needs, and, thus, enterprise goals.
This level of thinking is necessary in the development of large-scale, complex products and service systems—for example, those that either underpin the business model of an enterprise such as an eshop for an etailer—or that themselves constitute the business model—for example, a platform such as Airbnb.
Less complex projects such as building a simple marketing-and-communications Web site don’t usually require thorough strategic planning—just sufficient understanding of users whose needs must inform UX design execution.
Keeping the Scope of Design Professionals Grounded in Organizational Needs
UX designers who want to achieve greater influence within an organization must understand the role that UX design can effectively play in organizational strategy. This can help them better focus on their strengths and understand their limitations in terms of their skills and background.
While there’s been lots of talk about “putting designers in the boardroom,” this idea could be misleading. Design education, in particular, should draw a clearer line between the discipline of design and the tangent domain of business strategy. Although the first feeds into the latter, design and strategy are not overlapping areas. They require distinct sets of responsibilities and capabilities.
Instead, we’ve seen a slew of academic and professional programmes that have blended the two disciplines, but blurred the boundaries between them, resulting in unclear outcomes. So, while highlighting the connection between the two disciplines is certainly a good thing, the risk is creating hybrid professionals who obviously lack the business skillset to become strategists, but also miss out on the chance to focus on what really matters: applying design tools, methods, and practices to execute on the company’s strategy by devising different initiatives to address specific enterprise goals.
2. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant, Expanded Edition. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, January 20, 2014.
3. ISACA. COBIT 5: A Business Framework for the Governance and Management of Enterprise IT. Schaumberg, IL: ISACA, 2022.
4. Jaime Levy. UX Strategy: Product Strategy Techniques for Devising Innovative Digital Solutions. 2nd ed. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, March 12, 2021.
As a strategic designer and UX specialist at IBM, Silvia helps enterprises pursue human-centered innovation by leveraging new technologis and creating compelling user experiences. Silvia facilitates research, synthesizes product insights, and designs minimum-viable products (MVPs) that capture the potential of our technologies in addressing both user and business needs. Silvia is a passionate, independent UX researcher who focuses on the topics of digital humanism, change management, and service design. Read More
