Design Strategy: Aligning Business Strategy and User Needs

Dear Reader,

Today is a micro-lesson in business strategy. Why is business strategy important?

You can use it to prioritize which users need to focus on.

I talk a lot about UX strategy, but design-specific strategies always defer to the business strategy. You want to start your design strategy project by understanding the business strategy.

A business strategy can be a designer's most important guiding artifact. Still, I bet you think about your company's PowerPoint template more than you think about the business strategy.

The business strategy at your company is essential to knowing if you're moving in the right direction.

Business strategy is the strategic initiatives a company pursues to create value for the organization and its stakeholders and gain a competitive advantage in the market. This strategy is crucial to a company's success and is needed before any goods or services are produced or delivered. -Harvard Business School

Business strategy is all about competitive advantage in the market, meaning you create value for customers in a way nobody else can.

Align to the business strategy; you should always be on the right decision-making side. But sometimes, it can feel like the user's needs and expectations contradict the business strategy.

3 Levels of Strategy

Did you know that there are three possible levels of strategy?

• Corporate Strategy: Corporate strategy guides multiple businesses, but not every organization needs one. Corporate strategies deal with things like diversification, mergers/acquisitions, and resource allocation for a portfolio of businesses.
• Business Strategy: One level below corporate strategy, we have business strategy, the most talked about level of strategy. The business strategy is all about the company's unique value proposition and focuses on finding that special competitive edge in the market. Why be the best when you can be the most unique? Business strategy concerns positioning, user persona, competition, pricing, marketing, and operations.
• Functional Strategy: At the bottom of the pyramid lies the team-specific strategies. These are function or department-specific strategies that translate and align with the business strategy. This is where you will find the UX strategy, product strategy, brand strategy, and marketing strategy.

The Overlap a.k.a. Design Strategy

A crucial role of design is to stay in touch with user needs and expectations. If you're doing that, you'll probably hear things from users that don't align with the business strategy.

Perhaps your strategy is to be a two-sided marketplace between homeowners and tourists like Airbnb. So what if users tell you they'd like to save their favorite host and message them outside the app?

There are some user desires you can't grant because they contradict your business strategy.

So you have to say no to the user needs that align with the business strategy and yes to the ones that strengthen the business strategy.

That overlap is your design strategy.

It helps you say no to the things that won't improve on the business's strengths.

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