Strategy: Product Strategy

When your organization’s goal is to differentiate on the experience, you must start every product-development project by defining the experience that you want people to have with your product or service. Companies that differentiate on the experience do not begin by defining feature sets. They first define a vision for the experience outcome that they intend to deliver to their users and customers. Only once your team fully understands the experience outcomes that you want users to have can you make good decisions about what features and technologies would optimally support that vision.

This is the fourth column in our series about what companies must do if they want to stop producing average user experiences and instead design great experiences. As we have already stated in our previous columns, great UX teams focus on differentiating their companies through design. If that’s your goal, you need to work for a company that shares your aspirations. Read More

In this edition of Discovery, I’ll review Jim Kalbach’s recently published book, The Jobs To Be Done Playbook: Align Your Markets, Organizations, and Strategy Around Customer Needs. If you know nothing or everything about jobs-to-be-done, I’ll provide enough information in this review for you to decide whether this book is right for you.

In addition to authoring two other UX books—Designing Web Navigation and Mapping Experiences—Jim Kalbach is a well-known speaker at UX conferences and workshop moderator. He is also Head of Customer Experience at Mural, a software company that develops digital collaboration tools for organizations. Read More

This month in Ask UXmatters, our expert panel discusses how objectives and key results (OKRs) can inform UX design. The panel explores how the use of OKRs differs from traditional requirements gathering. Our panelists then discuss the relationship between OKRs and product strategy and common pitfalls of using OKRs.

We also recommend a couple of books that could help you apply OKRs in your work. Finally, I discuss the importance of keeping business needs in mind. Read More