The elusive seat at the product strategy table
1 minute summary
To get your rightful seat at the product strategy, UX designers have to add value to various product development stakeholders. Coding knowledge is not must. But good to have. Applies to everything else that goes into shipping a product.
Individual buy-ins are more successful and practical than grand swooping presentations to the entire team or company.
UI is worth 1000 words. But a prototype is worth 1000 UIs. So always show the user journey, user pain point and the overall experience over static screens.
Full story
User experience design is gaining its rightful place in many product companies today. Thanks to the success stories of design led companies such as AirBnB which uses thoughtful user experiences as a business differentiator. In Indian contexts, we have examples such as Cleartrip, that uses clutter free design as a differentiator in a tooth & nail market. Dunzo is another example in last mile delivery space and both big and small companies are catching up with this trend.
While this is already happening and set to grow, in reality many designers and design teams are still struggling to get the design inputs respected within their organisations. Let alone long term product strategy, the challenge lies even in getting alignment within their own product direction for many reasons. While the individual situations may be different, here are some broad principles or practical tips to get the elusive seat at product strategy table in your company.
#1 Make yourself valuable at every stage of the product development
As UX designers we know that UX practice can add value to every stage of the product development. And designers often crib when their work teams bucket them into UI buckets and approach them only when there is a clear cut UI requirement.
But at the same time, I often see designers limiting their own impact space. Designers are not expected to write python code for an actual production release. But knowing what REST APIs are and how a basic python code is written will give you the necessary foothold to make sense in cross functional meetings. Same applies to business side of things and project management. Design thinking at the core is about structured common sense. And in real world complex use cases, getting that structured common sense is very rare and valuable to the product.
So designers out there, add more tools to your design tool kit. Learn basic programming. Get a “hello world” app published in app store and you may appreciate the developer pain points far more than before. And this empathy will soon translate to frameworks and mental models which a designer is fluent with and can add value to the overall product development. Play to your strengths but also expand your bases (constantly).
#2 Individual buy-ins more effective than grand swooping presentations:
Many of us in design are knowingly or unknowingly influenced by the grandeur of Steve jobs’s type product launches. It is the perfect mix of story telling, user connect, and technology explained in such simple terms.
Undoubtedly amazing!
But we overlook the obvious that Jobs was a celebrated maverick in Silicon valley, well before iPhone or iPod or any of those grand launches. Moreover he is talking to an audience who already revers him as a visionary. That context is very different from you and I, when we present an idea to our cross functional partners, inspite of how good a designer we believe ourselves to be. In reality it is very much like this Dilbert comic strip.
For many of us in UX practice, the secret lies in getting small wins.
Small wins such as getting your frontend engineer sensitised enough to make sure that a popup window does-not look borrowed from a different app just for code-reuse.
Break down your grand re-design into smaller chunks. Pitch them to your engineering and PM peers as ‘workgroup sessions’ where they give feedback. Everyone will have their own perspective. But as designers you can abstract that and see where what benefits the user. Center your conversation around the user. Win one person or one functional team (backend engineering, frontend, PMs, Product owners etc ) at a time. And then bring the grand presentation to a joint meeting. Or even better co-present it with someone who has earned some reputation already. At this stage it no more your grand idea. It is something that each of the functional teams feel interested for various small parts. And that my friend is your ticket to get your product idea shipped in a large enterprise company.
#3 UI is worth 1000 words. A prototype is worth 1000 UI mocks.
Show a user-flow and not just a static screen. We talk so much about experience but sometimes fatally forget how much of it applies to presenting our own work. UI mocks are good. Definitely better than a PRD written as a word document. But a prototype is even better. Show the user flow. Show the journey of a user with your product and in the absence of your product. Elaborate the pain experientially. In enterprise products, it is common for a user to have discrete user flows where he uses a dozen tools from different vendors to get one major task done. Show this pain visually. And then propose your solution and see how fast it flies.
Something to note here is not to get lost in details. You don’t have to make a persuasive disney-type movie to explain that a software sucks. Keep it minimal to avoid feedbacks on things that are not the core idea.
These are some of the practical ways in which UX practitioners can get their rightful seat at the product strategy table.
Readers, let me know what other topics in the wide universe of enterprise UX and UX design that you are particularly interested in. Thank you.