More Than Design

No business has ever succeeded without connecting, in a deep and meaningful way, with its customers.

We would never say that an Engineering Director’s role is to deliver code. That job is about planning for flexibility, stability, and extensibility. It’s about eliminating any problems that the company may face with the technology that they’re building. Likewise, a CFO’s value is in having a long-term understanding of the business landscape and the ability to think proactively about building the most stable runway for the business. Critical jobs look at long-term problems and priorities. They are strategic.

While businesses must focus on many things, no business has ever succeeded without connecting, in a deep and meaningful way, with its customers. The most important thing I’ve learned in my career is that User Experience is not simply about designing for customers, but thinking strategically about customer behaviors, passions, and desires. User Experience provides an intellectual entry point, a framework that can give corporate leaders another perspective for making decisions and solving problems for customers. The UX skillset encompasses more than just design skills. It provides the foundation of a company’s customer strategy. And yet, most UX job descriptions continue to focus on execution, translation, and implementation.

UX professionals have far greater potential than our usual roles allow us to fulfill. Our jobs can involve much more than just designing, simplifying, and researching. User Experience is much more than a subset of Product Management. UX Strategists have the skills and the experience to contribute much more to the organizations for whom we work, and we are capable of owning our work to a much fuller degree.

Embrace True Ownership

If UX professionals are to embrace strategic roles and contribute to core decisions about customers that guide a company’s future, we must be willing to step up and embrace true ownership of User Experience for the products we’re designing.

If UX professionals are to embrace strategic roles and contribute to core decisions about customers that guide a company’s future, we must be willing to step up and embrace true ownership of User Experience for the products we’re designing. What do I mean by true ownership? I mean working alongside Product Managers, not for them. I mean being accountable, sharing the burden for the success or failure of our product decisions. UX Strategists should be making the final calls on difficult trade-offs for the business. They should have C-level accountability for their decisions. Having a critical role means having critical accountability.

Any full-time UX role that I would ever consider would have to have this kind of ownership of the final product-design decisions. After all, ownership is the reason I started my UX consultancy, SUBTXT, where my role is both critical and broad. I conduct user research. I help pitch to investors. I evaluate and manage the risk of taking various paths, define the minimum and required feature set, and often measure—and get measured by—profit and loss for the projects I am working on. I have planned the Scrum cycles for Engineering, worked with Marketing, creatives, and executives at all levels. I weigh in on the implications of impending business-development deals and API integrations for existing users who need to migrate from point A to point B.

I’m not saying that all of these activities are UX work, but it is all strategic work that I know how to do and want to do. The reason that I am a consultant is because I see my UX contribution as being critical to the key decisions that drive a product’s success or failure. I don’t need direction from Product Management. I want collaboration with my Product Management peers who have different areas of expertise. I want to work somewhere where I truly have the ability to make strategic calls that are in the best interests of the user.

Unfortunately, this is not how many leaders are used to thinking about User Experience—especially in corporate settings. As UX Strategists, we need to change the conversation about who we are and what we can contribute to companies. Indeed, we need to shift our job descriptions and our roles and responsibilities within our organizations, as shown in Table 2.

Table 2 —Contrasting the way many leaders see User Experience with the way we want them to perceive User Experience Currently, leaders see User Experience as… → Leaders should see User Experience as… The role responsible for the execution of product requirements that product strategy guides → The role responsible for the strategy that guides the execution of a product’s design A role responsible for product design and implementation → A role responsible for product discovery and invention A method—or a set of principles—for optimizing users’ interactions with products → A strategy—an intellectual entry point—like Product Management or Engineering—to solving problems A member of a product team whose overall focus is on the delivery of successful products to an organization’s product pipeline → An autonomous team that is responsible for UX strategy across products—collaborating with various Product Owners and their pipelines A contributor to the vision for an already defined product. User Experience realizes corporate strategy as it takes shape in new products and optimizes those products for user interaction. → A contributor to the corporate strategy that defines product vision. User Experience has an equal voice, representing users in product discussions and challenging business strategy that would be detrimental to users. A role that Product Management controls and checks to ensure the success of the defined business goals → The controls and checks that a product specification represents, ensuring that the product enables users’ goals

An expert contributor to product discussions. Ultimately, User Experience does not have a final say about a product, so User Experience cannot feel truly responsible for a product’s success or failure. → The voice of the user—while Product Management is the voice representing the business and its roadmap. User Experience and Product Management collaborate and share responsibility equally. Both are responsible for product success or failure.

What’s Next? A Broader Role

User Experience is not just about design. It is about the strategic understanding of users and their behavior.

User Experience is not just about design. It is about the strategic understanding of users and their behavior. If we are to contribute strategically, UX professionals must be willing and able to take responsibility for their final decisions and accept the corporate accountability that comes with making critical decisions about customers. We must be willing to go outside our design skillset and embrace all corporate functions, including finance, technology, marketing, and sales.

As long as companies see User Experience as making only a design contribution, they will underutilize the breadth of talents that UX professionals can offer as strategic planners, customer advocates, and innovation drivers. Admittedly, while this article has suggested the value of the UX skillset beyond product design and execution, I have not yet described my new concepts of what those roles might be or how we might go about effecting change for our roles within organizations. Over the next few months, I’ll be back with a series of follow-up articles, suggesting several alternative, new ways of looking at the role of User Experience, including