Yesterday on the Interaction Design Association mailing list, Dan Saffer of Kicker Studio asked, what should interaction designers know about strategy?. I ended up with a long response, because it’s something I’ve thought a lot about.
My history with strategy has been kind of strange. I saw all sorts of people talking about strategic design, strategy, and whatnot, and I thought that I wanted to be strategic too. All the cool kids were.
But the more I learned about strategy, the more I realized I didn’t know.
Fast forward a few years, and I decided to get an MBA. Even after taking three classes in strategy, I still didn’t know what all of the aforementioned “cool kids” were talking about.
After embarking in a study of strategy in various contexts including military, I have finally defined strategy:
Strategy is the plan for how to compete.
I keep it that short in the interests of memorization and brevity. But there are lots of levels of strategy. You have to figure out what “you” is, and what you are competing for. Corporate strategy is deciding what lines of business to be in to compete for investment & market cap; available tactics include mergers, acquisitions, and more.
Business strategy is how to compete for advertising or customer dollars against similar businesses and substitutes for your business services. What services should be offered? What customers should be targeted? What is the core value? Should we enter this new service area with either the same customers or the same process? Differentiation or low cost?
Product strategy, in this framework, is how the product or service is going to compete. Good interaction design? Features? Simplicity? Flow? Beauty? Distribution model? Market segments?
Really, I think of design as tactics employed in product strategy. It seems like execution to me, though that’s certainly arguable.
Each of the above are loosely coupled, with product strategy for different services being tightly coupled with each other. Each “lower” level influences the level “above,” especially since there are are many lines of business that corporations are in, and many services that a business offers. We’ve got examples over on our product strategy services page.
So, what does an interaction designer have to know about strategy?
First, it’s a rare designer who has influence over business strategy. So the designer must generally work with the business strategy, not at cross-purposes. A Wal-Mart product must not be feature rich to the point of being high cost. A discount ISP must not induce customers to believe they can call customer care 10 times per month. An advertising-driven web site must have plenty of quality advertising opportunities.
Second, IxDers can have significant influence over product strategy, though working with others. They must know this, but also be able to communicate in the language of product strategy. They can especially influence direction through user research, which is similar to but distinct from market research. But they can not be the sole source of product strategy.
Third, product design, along with business processes and service design, can be the glue that holds together all of those product strategies. We can work across products, and create a more unified whole. I think this essentially is “strategic design”. And if it doesn’t get planned, it’ll happen on its own.
Fourth, we need to understand strategic marketing or marketing strategy. These folks talk about products and product features to offer to market segments. Each group can teach the other something valuable, and each also looks across the various product strategies.
We need to be able to talk their language, understand how they segment, and articulate differences in research techniques and personas, and why each are valuable. We need to not fight with these folks, but collaborate with them. We need to understand when to invest in their research, when to invest extra in separate design research, and the differences between purchasers and users.
I don’t think that beginning IxDers need to know the above, but I think anyone with 3+ years of experience should understand it.
Cool post, Barbara!
This can be further extended into the argument “what should an individual team member know about team’s strategy”. Your points can be applied to a software developer, a sales guy and so on. Strategy then is something that must clearly be understood by everyone, with an ability to contribute, moderated by a leader. For instance, in military you’d want the general to be firm about the strategy but flexible enough to be able to act on last-minute intelligence reports with strategic implications. Designers are soldiers too =)
“Strategy is the plan for how to compete.” Actually, I think “Strategy is the plan for how to succeed.” I think the subtle difference helps you focus. I can build, enhance, design features all day to match my competitors, in essence I am competing. Depending on my business drivers, I may be completely missing the mark especially if my driver is reducing costs.
Despite that, good post!
Stewart: I think I can buy into the idea of success being a better measure.