UX Strategy Sprints

Ep.45 Today I’m talking about UX Strategy Sprints with Craig Nishizaki. The term UX Strategy gets defined in different ways by experts across our discipline, and some people say that UX strategy doesn’t even exist, that UX strategy is Business strategy. Which conceptually, I get that, but the term and the practice of UX Strategy is actually incredibly useful and necessary to communicate the difference between the bigger picture of a holistic user experience - which is strategic - from the the tactical aspects of designing page flows and wireframes and UI.

I like to define UX Strategy at its highest level as identifying business objectives and user needs and then creating a vision that aligns those two things. And while that might sound simple, getting to that vision for a product or a service is anything but simple. Which is why having a framework like this UX Strategy Sprint can really help to get everyone on the same page. My guest today is Craig Nishizaki, and he’s the Head of Business for UpTop, a User Experience Design and Development agency based in Seattle. What makes Craig’s perspective here so valuable is that he’s coming from the business side of UX. He’s spent the last 12 years honing his understanding of the value of UX and how to convey that value to business leaders, to help them create change, innovation, and impact for their organizations. I know UX practitioners can learn a lot about conveying the value of what we do by learning the language of our business partners, and I’m really grateful to Craig for coming onto the podcast to share his business wisdom with us.

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TRANSCRIPTION

Leigh Arredondo 0:00
UX cake is all about developing the layers you need to be more effective in your work and to be happy and fulfilled in your career. I'm your host Lee Alan arrow Dano, and I'm a UX leader and leadership coach. Hello, and welcome to episode 45 of UX cake. Today I am talking about UX strategy Sprint's with a business leader in UX Craig Nishizaki. Now, the term UX strategy gets defined in many different ways by experts across our discipline. Some people even say that UX strategy doesn't exist, that basically that UX strategy is business strategy, or is product strategy, which, conceptually, I get that. But the term and the practice of UX strategy is actually incredibly useful. And it's an it's necessary to communicate the difference between the big picture of a holistic user experience which is strategic, from the tactical aspects of designing page flows, and wireframes, and UI. Now I like to define UX strategy at its simplest highest level as identifying business objectives. And user needs to create a vision that aligns those two things. And while that might sound simple, actually getting to that vision for a product or service is anything but simple. My guest today is Craig Nishizaki. And he's the head of business for up top, a user experience design and development agency based in Seattle. Now, what makes Craig's perspective here so valuable is that he's coming from the business side of UX. And he spent the last 12 years honing his understanding of the value of UX. And not only that, but how to convey that value to the business leaders who are making the decisions to help them create change, and innovation and impact for their organizations. I know UX practitioners can learn a lot about conveying the value of what we do, by learning the language of our business partners. And I'm really grateful to Craig for coming on to the podcast to share his business wisdom with us.

Hi, Craig. And thank you so much for joining us on UX cake podcast.

Hi Leigh, thanks for inviting me. Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you today about UX strategy.

And I'm especially excited to talk to you with your perspective, because you're in a position where you are often from an agency kind of perspective, you've got to sell these concepts, right, you have to sell UX in general, but then UX strategy, gosh, that's another level of like, getting people on board. And so I think this is going to be a really fantastic conversation for for the audience to learn a lot. So I hope so, Ben? Yeah, I think so. I'm sure, actually, I should say, I am sure it will be. So anyway, like just to kind of before we dive into, you know, doing UX strategy spreads, and yeah, how people can sell those within their organization. I would love to hear from you. I love how you explain this. I've heard it before. So I would love to hear how you define UX strategy.

Craig Nishizaki 3:32
So my perspective is a little different. So my perspective comes from the business side of UX, right?And over I got into the industry in 2009, doing new business development, and coming out of working in high tech sales and sales, leadership, and consulting and all that. And so as I look at strategy, I'm looking at it

a little bit differently than maybe a practitioner of UX would. So this might be helpful. So from the business side, what I've seen is, oftentimes designers are blind to the business implications, the constraints, the politics, the nuances from a business perspective, when they're designing things or on their on their project. And then the business leaders oftentimes don't realize the value of involving UX, in the strategy phase to help them define the product vision and get alignment.

And then on the engineering and technology side, I've seen them, in many cases, look at design, it's just making things pretty, or looking at the UI and not really thinking about the impact of the UX design strategy on, you know, workflows, back end systems and data and what needs to be interacted with to actually make that experience come to life. And because of that, I think that's really How how I've looked at strategy for UX being, if it was a Venn diagram with each of those groups as one of the circles, where UX strategy, UX, leadership, and in value all are right at the center where those three circles overlap. And the more that you could pull those three together, the larger impact the higher value in the, the more impactful strategy that you can create, keeping the end user the customer in mind, right. And so that's my perspective on what your strategy is. And the value of it is really sitting at the center of those three disciplines or organizations or however you want to look at them within a business, and helping them to frame the problem. Keeping the customer the end user that could be an employee, a buyer, a customer, a partner, a member, whatever you define, framing the problem properly, from that context, aligning on the vision, getting executive buy in, and then creating a roadmap with participation as an outcome, or an output for that.

Leigh Arredondo 6:08
Yeah, I think you spoke to this a little bit, but kind of a little bit more specifically, tell me a little bit more about who your audiences who are you speaking to when you're talking about, you know, this is something that could really benefit your organization, who are those people

Craig Nishizaki 6:26
I look at our ideal customer is a senior leader, that's typically change agent are visionary. They have an idea they think will have a material impact on their business. And through this process, we help them articulate that vision and bring it to life. And in if you think about it, in terms of what does that look like, or who is that person, it could be an executive level, person on the business side that has come into an organization sees some opportunities for for improvement, or see some friction points in the journey sees some potential for innovation. And they're trying to get a vision cast, and need to get executives on board. It could be somebody that's on the product, or on the research side, that's been tasked with trying to try to move the needle this year, or trying to improve an experience this year. And they don't have a team necessarily attached to them. And they need some horsepower, some some additional expertise to be brought in. And in some cases, it could be even a leader on the IT side or on the technology side that has seen projects come to a grinding halt. And they're trying to get them unblocked. And part of the reason for them being blocked is they've either had projects that have gone over budget or over over time and schedule, and the interest has died off on them, or the commitment to them has died off. But they're still important. And so they need to kind of level set and restart. And by bringing in an outside in perspective, to help with that, and then really crystallizing the vision again, or crystallizing the vision for the first time. In some cases, you're able to help get things unblocked and moving. All of those sound really familiar situations to me.

Leigh Arredondo 8:24
I mean, you know, when you're in when you're building products, or you're in organizations for any amount of time, I think you see these sort of themes happen over and over again, patterns. Yeah, exactly. And we will I definitely want to get a little bit later, I want to get to, you know, how can, because I think you have great insights on this too. But selling this from within, you know, it's one thing to come in as a consultant and or be hired as a consultant. Right? To sell this, but like, how do you do that from within. But before we get there, I want to talk just a little bit more about, you know, kind of the purpose for it. Let's say I am X business leader. And I've got one of you know, I'm in one of these buckets, you just sort of mentioned how is a this might end up leading to having to, you know, well, we'll talk about what it is but how is having a UX strategy, and then kind of like, how is this UX strategy sprint, really going to help me meet my business objectives? Like, and, you know, isn't that just like, I need a business strategy, right? Like, why why do I need a UX strategy?

Craig Nishizaki 9:35
Yeah, I think if you think about all the organizations that you've been a part of, in most cases, the business strategy is defined and brought to bear and then everything. Everyone runs toward that direction. Now, the business strategy, you know, talks about the market, the opportunity, the need, the problem space that you're working within, and then how you're going to go about going after it. And from there to what you have, there's a gap where your current state, and where you want to get to the desired future state, there's a gap, what the UX strategy, sprint and UX strategy helps with is providing tangibility of how to get from where you are, to that desired future state with your digital experience, whether that's, you know, an internal enterprise tool, whether that's a solution, whether that's a, you know, a portal in the healthcare space, a mobile app, etc.

So, you know, how you're going to get to the end goal with your business strategy is going to be some interaction with your customer. Right? It's whether it's an employee, consumer, a business, decision maker, etc. And that's where I feel like the UX strategy helps provide, provide them with a tangible plan, or roadmap to get there. And there's a bunch of different things within that. But that's how I would, how I would say the UX strategy plays an important part from a business perspective.

Leigh Arredondo 11:17
Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Like, I love how you describe it. One of the things we talked about in when we were talking about this before was how important it is for for those of us in UX to really kind of use the language of our business partners and product partners and the people that we are, you know, speaking to, and and trying to champion, you know, we're championing UX to like, we need to use adopt the business language. That is kind of the majority of the organization, right. Yeah. So that sort of gave a little bit of an overview of what a UX strategy, like what the end state might be, should we talk about what a UX strategy sprint is?

Craig Nishizaki 12:02
Yeah, we can, I can tell you the origin of it. And then what it is, and it's really nothing new in the sense that UX strategy sprint, that is what we call it is based on a design thinking framework. And it's really our approach to solving complex business problems within an organization, using a structured approach to discovery and research, with the output being a tangible concept prototype with some recommendations and roadmap kind of high level. And how we we came to this is, you know, we started applying design thinking and Lean UX methods, probably around 2015 or so as an organization. And when Michael Wu joined our team, and then became elevated into the director of UX role, he really was looking at how do we create more consistent outcomes, with our customers with our clients that helped them achieve their goals. And what we found was, as we were looking at our client base, you had big wins, and you had big misses sometimes. And it really depended on the organization, you were working with the individual that was the product owner or the project owner. On the client side, there was a number of variables. And what our goal was, was really to figure out a way to find right fit clients and right fit projects to work on. If you think about it from a Simon Sinek. You know, start with Why type perspective, if you can find the clients that believe your why, and why you're doing things and have that same mindset, then your likelihood of being successful goes up, your likelihood of your team enjoying that work goes up. You know, there's lots of positives there. And so, what we were finding is, um, you know, there was clients pushing back on Discovery and research.

Leigh Arredondo 13:53
Okay, yeah, that also sounds really familiar.

Craig Nishizaki 13:57
Yeah, internal teams, as well as agency teams are, you'll see that they have a budget, they have a timeline, and ultimately, the beginning of the project, all the work up front to get to the statement of work to an agreement squeezes into that, because the timeline seems to never move. And the budget seems to always shrink, you know, it's just one of those things. And that push back kind of sounds like, I gave you the Brd and I can answer all the questions that you just asked me, or it could be we know all the prop, we know what the problem is. We just need someone to help us figure out how to fix it, or we know what our customers want. So we really don't really need to have you talk with them. They may not say this, but the underlying bias is, you know, research will take too long, it'll cost too much and it'll only validate what we already know. So we don't really need to do anything. Or you hear good we did research couple years ago and we have all that information will provide that to you before takeoff. Right? So

That's a common theme that we were hearing. And then the other thing that we are running into is that clients want a fixed bid for the design and build of the solution. So whether it's a mobile app or enterprise tool or a portal, whatever it was, they want to have all up bid for all the design and all the development work. But logically, you can't do a fixed budget with loose requirements, right, you need to know what the requirements are. And so ultimately, what they're asking for is predictability and a plan. Right, and if you take on a project like that, without having the ability to define the requirements, and understand that the end user or do some research, all the risk is on you, as the team, whether your internal or external, because you're committing to a budget, you're committing to a timeline, and you're committing to an expectation of what that thing is going to be. And that expectation can be wildly different than what you're able to do. Right? They may be expecting dinner at the Canlis and you're only able to afford, you know, Chipotle, you know, it's it's kind of two totally different ends of the spectrum. The other thing that we started seeing out there as the buzz word, you know, digital transformation became more and more popular, and also the the actual work of digital transformation became more more popular is that design thinking efforts and digital transformation efforts were failing, because they were trying to boil the ocean. And the reason they fail, I think is you're unable to create velocity and quick wins, if you can't identify what those quick wins are, which takes a little bit of research and definition. Um, and then in leadership at the organization that you're working with. Either you have no champion, or no executive sponsorship for the leadership changes midstream, and then the funding goes away. Right. So those are just some observations that we had. So we took those observations, and then we thought about what our beliefs are about how to how to have a successful UX project, whether your internal or external, and the beliefs that we have our you know, research is important for successful UX project, you know, when you do research, ideation becomes obvious, you find the real problem, so solutions become more evident. And the ideation phase actually becomes smaller, because the problems identified early in the process, right. So research then becomes a scoping exercise. Because you actually are able to be more focused and reduce features to have a higher impact. The other belief that we have is that as a UX leader, whether your internal or external, the thing that you're there to do is create value, not deliver artifact, deliverables and artifacts, right when I first got in the industry, and you've been in the industry longer than me, but I remember we would create these humongous books of wireframes. And deliver that to the customer as part of the proof, right? And but really, if you think about it, what you're there to do is help provide actionable insights that they haven't been able to tease out themselves, help them get a better understanding of their customer, in user, organization, technical constraints, etc. Provide that perspective you're brought in to provide innovation or innovative solutions

you're brought in to help them prioritize, you know, doing an impact versus effort exercise, it's always seems to be an aha moment when you have a cross functional team in a workshop, and they have all these features and function, things that they want to do. And you start putting some dots to it in terms of impact versus effort to help prioritize, then all of a sudden, the marketing folks realize, Wow, that thing we're asking for from technology, no wonder they're pushing back. For the technology, people say this thing that they think is low on their priority, because it's not the core system that they were working on. But then they all of a sudden realize that the customers really want that. And that will really move the needle for them. It helps them to prioritize, and being in UX, and you're sitting in the middle, you're the liaison and the translator, and the mediator, if if you're playing a strategic role, and then ultimately, in UX, you're your biggest value is creating business outcomes or helping with the business outcomes. You know, because ultimately, that's you're designing a product or solution that's gonna help the business achieve their goals and help your customers achieve their goals mutually, right hopefully, so that all that all saying how we got to doing the UX strategy sprint was a or defining or developing our approach as a UX strategy sprint is, we were doing a lot of discovering and envisioning projects, but we realized that there was a need to do concept validation as part of that envisioning. And. And so adding in that concept validation is how we got to what we call a UX strategy sprint. So we look at it as a way to solve more complex problems. If you're looking at testing a hypothesis, or testing a feature, you can do a design sprint, you know, something that's more along the lines of the Google Ventures, five days sprint, as agency doing it from the outside, it's a little harder to do it, it takes us we never say it's a five day sprint, because you have the intake and all those things that you do, it leads up to a five day sprint. And I think that that's one thing that the title misguide you on a little bit that you're going to get everything done in five days.

Leigh Arredondo 20:54
Well, then you still have to design the thing afterwards.

Craig Nishizaki 20:57
Correct? Yeah, you're just getting validation on your hypothesis. Right. So that's, that's kind of the evolution, how we got to formalize and what we call your strategy sprint. And I can tell you a little bit about what one is, um,

Leigh Arredondo 21:09
yeah, let's do that. But just want to I want to kind of circle back or just kind of underline a couple of things that you said, the thing that you were talking about with the deliverables, right, deliverables versus value. And the deliverables are still like, critically important in UX and for, for whether you're a consultant or internal, but one of the things I want to point out there is that is kind of like a step level from a UX tactical practitioner to someone who is really, leader. Right? And, yeah, that might, that person might also be, you know, in the end delivering all the the stack of wireframes, or mocks or whatever. But, but that point of that, just that understanding of we need to have the the larger kind of not just vision, but we need to deliver to the business, the value that they're looking for. And they don't necessarily know from all sides, which is kind of what you UX is representing the business and the user. Anyway, I just kind of wanted to point that out. Because a lot of what I talk about on this podcast is about how do you move from being that tactical to the strategic so so what you were saying just leads right into that. So let's go ahead and move forward with let's find out from you a little bit more about how someone would go about conducting one of these UX sprints and, and also how the sprint itself, like differs from a design sprint, that's also pretty interesting to me.

Craig Nishizaki 22:53
Yeah, it's based on the design thinking framework. And so we took learnings from IDEO from Stanford d school, we took some learnings from that Google Ventures, five day sprint process, and other inputs, as well as lean UX methods. And then, in doing these things, we had some a lot of learnings as well, of what was effective and what could be more effective, and in where, where we had missed the mark. And so when you look at it, it's gonna follow kind of that double diamond model in terms of divergent thinking and convergent thinking, flaring and focus. And so typically, a UX strategy, sprint is going to take about somewhere between eight to 10 weeks, depending on the size and scale of the problem you're trying to solve. It could be done faster, and it could be it could take longer. And it's really, again, dependent on the size and scale. So when you think of a sprint, you could think of the 100 yard dash, you could think of a 1500 meter, you could think of a 5k, there's, there's still a sprint that happens. And there's just the races are longer, right. So it's a different kind of training that happens for those athletes. But if you think about just the process itself, there's the steps. There's intaking research, there's a workshop. There's ideation and design, there's prototyping and testing, and then the Northstar vision. And in the UX strategy, sprint process that that we've defined for our own team, the intake and research is critical for our team to get accelerated, ramped up and accelerated on the problem space. So it's really gathering all the information from the customer that they have about their end users about the problem that they're having about the systems that are in place, etc. Looking at it again, with those three circles in mind, right, the business design and technology as well as the end user. And then our team prepares for the workshop. And so prior to COVID we were doing these workshops in person Obviously, during COVID, we will find our ability to do remote workshops and have found that they're actually as effective or more effective. In terms of the work that gets done. The part that's less effective in a remote workshop is a lot of the break time. conversations that you would typically have fewer in person, right. And so thinking about the, you know, having coffee and there was a, you read, you read the room, and there's a skeptic in the room, and you get a chance to go talk to them during to start building that rapport, or there's someone that said something that was really important. But they were more of a quiet personality. And so you're trying to tease that out. And so you have to, there's some nuance to doing it remotely. Or you, you have to set up some off offline conversations and things like that. But typically, a workshop is going to be two to three days, again, depending on the size and scale of problem. And in the workshops. You know, you're going through activities, you know, some examples would be like expert talks, or long term goals, how might we statements, sprint questions, journey mapping, review, lightning, demos, some solution sketches and voting, and then impact versus effort. And, you know, obviously, every workshop is going to be a little different depending on the problem that you're trying to solve and the audience that you're working with. Typically, we'd like to have the audience be about eight cross functional stakeholders, key stakeholders, and then we pull in experts for those expert talks. So you don't have to have 25 people in the whole workshop, you really need the core team. And, and then you pull in those other subject matter experts. And the outcome from that is some decisions around framing the problem aligning on the vision and what the Northstar vision could be. And then you move into doing the ideation and design and for us, what we're trying to get to is a concept prototype that walks through a happy path, if you will, for that primary problem statement, to get to the Northstar vision or to the desired future state. And the idea behind this whole thing is that we're trying to get to a high level concept prototype that provides their executive team and their broader team with

tangibility. Right. So if you think about design thinking, one of the biggest, highest value outcomes you can create as tangibility it's seeing touching and feeling what it could be. And that concept prototype allows us to do that. And then we take that and do some right testing or lightweight usability testing, with actual users that would use this product tool, or app, whatever it is that we're helping them concept. And then iterating, the design incorporating their feedback, if it's relevant and impactful, and then providing to them an output. And so the outputs from this process are a lightweight interactive concept prototype, or it could be more built out if if necessary. We oftentimes provide a narrated video walkthrough of the concept prototype. And the reason for that is the executive sponsor or the champion of the project may not be comfortable presenting the concept prototype. Later on, they may want us to do that, and we may not be available. So we found that having a narrated video of that concept prototype helps them to spread the vision, to socialize it without us having to be in every single meeting, if we're not available to if we are available to we'd love to do that. Because being face to face is oftentimes really valuable for us. And then the other output is a UX summary report with research findings, workshop outcomes, a prioritized UX roadmap and recommendations for next steps. And that again, checks the box for them of having a plan and then being able to then scope out the feature design work that needs to be done and the development work sizing and scoping. And so this ultimately allows them to have more predictability, and allows us to have a better way to help them scope out the project.

Leigh Arredondo 29:46
Yeah, and in many ways, it's very much like a design sprint, but larger, it's gonna you're gonna end up with kind of a phased approach. And I do want to mention that you have you have a couple of kind of downloads that we're gonna make available to listeners of the podcast. And those actually are great explanation of how you do this and how you explain the difference between the UX strategy strategies sprint and design sprint, which I found super helpful, because that was great. My first questions when I, when we talked about it, but I, you know, before we completely wrap up, I just want to hear, I think it'd be really helpful to hear a little bit about the what are the challenges that that you've faced either, like I'm interested in, in challenges you've faced with selling us and and then challenges you've faced, kind of during this process, because it sounds like a longer process. So it might have some challenges that are different from a design sprint,