Doing More With Less: The power of a strategic mindset

If you're in UX, you've likely heard the question, "How can we do more with less?" during an economic downturn. Many companies are cutting back on resources and downsizing teams, while still expecting the same results. Some common approaches are to argue the value of UX, or simply say "no" to requests due to lack of resources. But there’s another way, one that can increase the value of your work and foster cross-team relationships. It is looking for ways to be more strategic in the work that you do.

In UX, being more strategic means producing bigger outcomes instead of bigger output. It requires understanding the big picture, aligning with stakeholders, and prioritizing work based on impact.

Join me as I describe a framework to help you approach your work more strategically, in a way that achieves more for the business and users’ goals.

Links from this episode

Secondary research portal - Baymard Institute

Develop strategic UX leadership skills - StrategicUXLeader.com

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Transcript

Welcome to UX Cake, and another episode of UX cake pops.

So right now, a lot of companies are reducing their resources. You may have heard of it, it's all over the headlines. There are companies that are hiring. And it's not all gloom and doom. It's not all layoffs happening. So I don't want to focus on that in this episode. But I do want to talk about something that comes up often when we are in something like an economic downturn, which is what they're calling what we're in. Now. I've been through two major recessions and multiple economic downturns in my career. So I am very familiar with the challenges that come up. 

Teams are often asked to tighten their belts, resources get reduced, companies are downsized. But have you noticed that company objectives often don't decrease? So maybe you're hearing some variation of how can we do more with less? 

I'll share with you my response when I was earlier in my UX career, maybe after a poorly concealed eyeroll, I might turn that question around. Clearly the business doesn't value UX. So the better question I thought might be, how do we educate the business on the value of UX. And I hear this from people in UX really often.

But that approach isn't usually too effective. It's well intentioned. And it could very well be true. But this approach isn't effective. Because in reality, the business has different priorities and constraints. And what they value most is different from what UX values, most businesses focused on business outcomes, UX tends to focus on user experience outcomes. So we're speaking in the language of our own values, instead of in the language of business value.

Another response might be to say, Well, if we have less, we just have to do less. And again, that's not wrong, we, we do need to protect our boundaries. So we can't just work longer hours, that hurts the company, both in the short term and the long term. And it also isn't actually very productive. So saying no to requests due to a lack of resources is, is necessary at times. And doing this in a way that doesn't alienate our boss or stakeholders is an art form. However, taking this Just Say No approach is also not solving the problem that the business has brought to us, which is how do we meet company objectives with limited resources?

So what's a better approach? How could we answer the question? How can you x do more with less while also deepening our relationships across teams and maintaining a high quality bar and staying motivated in our UX teams? Because that's also very important, especially in times like this?

So my response to that question today would be, let's figure out where we can be more strategic in what we're doing. I mean, I guess, in a way, it's a variation of doing less, but 

we're focusing on producing bigger outcomes, versus producing more outputs, which is being more strategic, what's going to have the biggest impact on the goals that the business has, and putting our energy there. 

So outcomes refers to the end results of the work that we do, we're measuring the benefits or the impact to the users and to the business goals. Whereas outputs are the work itself, outcomes are more focused on the impact while outputs focus on deliverables.

And what I see happen way too frequently is that in times of pressure, especially, teams get focused on churning out lots of deliverables to show how valuable they are, instead of reframing this focus on what the biggest outcomes could be. Being strategic means that everything we're doing makes an impact and moves us toward our objectives. And we're clear on why those objectives matter in the big picture.

So if you're looking to be more strategic about what you're doing, the first step is to get clear on what the big picture is, it's, for example, if you're working on a section of a puzzle, you've got one section on a big puzzle, it's gonna take a lot longer if you don't know what that whole puzzle is supposed to look like, and also where that section you're working on fits in. So for example, what is the company's vision? What is your team's vision, then you have to get really clear on what your objectives are, and why they matter in the big picture.

In your work in UX, this might mean driving alignment across teams on what the most important objectives are, and why they're important. UX always has multiple stakeholders, we've got product and development and sales and marketing and customer support, and every type of executive coming to make requests of UX. And we have to always be aligning those requests to the goals and objectives of the company. 

If multiple stakeholders or teams believe the goals are different, then you're working at cross purposes, the work takes longer, and it just doesn't have the intended impact on the outcome. 

Which brings me to impact… 

To know which things are worth our effort, we have to have a way to look at all the potential things that we could be doing, and identify which things are worth our time. And we do that by looking at what will have the most impact on our objectives, which means that we have to have a way to measure impact.

And it has to be a way that our stakeholders can agree with so it needs to be something that's not you know someone's opinion. in product design, we often look at both user impact and business impact.

So for user impact, for example, we we may look at user behavior and sentiment data and for business impact, we could look at company objectives, and the objectives of our stakeholders VP, or SVP for clues on what those objectives are. Often it's in the language of KPIs and OKRs.

So for example, user impact might be how often a problem occurs, or how big of a problem it is, or both of those things. But how big is the problem? Like, is it an annoyance? Or does it keep users from completing a task. So which one do you think would have the bigger impact? Obviously, it's something that's going to keep someone from doing what they are intending to do. So business impact might look at how something affects conversion.

Or if your company is got kind of an overall objective to decrease customer friction, then basing impact on how much the work will reduce known friction points would be a good approach.

Now, if your company doesn't have a great amount of benchmark data to work from, and this, this comes up a lot with people in UX, I don't know what the data is, or how to get it. There are a couple things you can do. There's user research repositories, online that you can use to identify the impact of a lot of common user problems. One example of this is Baymard.com.

You might have to do some legwork to find data to help you measure impact. And the same goes with company data. And this is where having great cross team relationships comes in. These are other aspects of being strategic being able to leverage data and build partnerships.

Being strategic ultimately goes beyond this framework of vision, objectives, impact and alignment that I'm talking about in this episode today. It's also about having the right mindset and attitude increasing our influence. Having more effective communication and strategic relationships. These are all key components of being strategic influence, for example, is about understanding what motivates the people on other teams and being able to use that to be more effective in the work you're doing in UX. It's about being able to get others to buy into your ideas and support them.

Effective communication is key to conveying your ideas and ensuring that everyone is on the same page. And building strategic relationships is about building trust. and understanding with key stakeholders, and that's going to help you achieve your objectives more effectively. And these are all strategic leadership skills that you could build at any point in your career. But for this episode, I'm focusing on using this strategic framework to decide where we spend our time and energy, so that we can do more with less, more impact, less busy work, that doesn't impact our goals.

Now, you can use this framework in your work, as I sort of described, you can also use it in your own career development or anywhere else in your life where you want to see more growth.

So just to recap, first, we see the big picture, what is the overall vision? What are the big goals? Next, we need to be clear on the objectives, what are the steps that will lead us to those goals or that vision. And then we want to identify which of those things which of those objectives, what of that work we could be doing will be most worth our effort. And so to figure that out, we measure the impact. And we assign that impact to all the different things that we could be doing.

Now, of course, this is a bite sized overview of how you can be more strategic in your work. And hopefully, we'll give you some ideas about how you might approach the work you're doing today differently, or some ideas for what your team could be doing differently. I could go on, I love talking about being strategic, because that's really the lens that I look through. And 

I have seen how having a strategic mindset spurs growth and change in some very big ways. 

If you would like to further develop your strategic leadership skills beyond this strategic framework, like increasing influence and driving alignment and having more effective communication, I have group coaching and development programs and workshops that are designed specifically for people like you, UX professionals.

Enrollment is open right now for a strategic UX management program until February 15. And then I'll be running a similar program for individual contributors in March. So if you're an IC, or manager, I've got something for you. These are programs that are designed to help you become the leader that you aspire to be whatever that means to you, in whatever role you're in, and to really create a solid foundation for yourself for the rest of your career, whether that's another 30 years or another 10 years.

I would love to support you in your UX career, because I've been there. And I know that people in UX very often don't get the support or development that they need. That's why I started this podcast. And that's what drives my coaching and my coaching programs as well. So I hope you enjoyed this short and sweet UX cake pop. Join me next week for another full episode with Billy Mandel. We'll be talking about healthy conflict and how it improves creativity and innovation. So be sure to subscribe to the UX cake podcast, so you don't miss a bite.