Leveling Up Your UX Strategy with Jamie Levy, Author of “UX Strategy”
This episode is a “Best of” replay of my interview with Jaime Levy, author of the book “UX Strategy.” Her book is still going strong, and these concepts are as important as ever, so we wanted to bring this back up in the feed!
In this episode I talked with Jaime Levy, a UX pioneer, and Author of the book ‘UX Strategy’, about 'moving beyond’ being a designer or researcher in UX, and ‘leveling up’ in your career by moving into UX strategy or digital transformation. We talk about the difference between UX Strategy as a process or workflow vs. UX strategy as a role, and what that takes. Then we talk about Digital Transformation as the next step up in leveling up, from UX Strategy.
There are many different definitions of ux strategy out there, if you google ‘ux strategy’ you’ll get many vague and even conflicting definitions. To set some context in case you haven’t read Jaime's book, she defines as the intersection between business strategy and UX design, with a key component being early and continuous validation of the value proposition with customers. It’s a high-level plan of how your product or feature is going to achieve the business goals.
About Jaime
Jaime Levy is an author, university professor and a user experience strategist. Her best-selling O’Reilly Media book is called UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products that People Want. The book presents a solid framework on the practice, which lies at the intersection of UX design and business strategy. For 30 years, Jaime has been an internationally recognized pioneer in the creation of innovative digital products and services.
Website https://jaimelevy.com/
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaimerlevy/
Medium https://medium.com/@JaimeRLevy
Twitter https://twitter.com/JaimeRLevy
UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products that People Want
By Jaime Levy
“UX strategy is something that is incorporated throughout the process. It's not something that someone has at one point in time, it's actually something that is going to always be going on.”
Moving beyond being a designer
“The first step is basically having control of your UX existence, particularly in the workflow at where you're working where you have a say in the product. And you're not just handed a requirements stack or some brief for an outline that has a feature list on it, and told to basically knock out the sitemap and the wires or whatever deliverables you need to do and just do it on time and on budget. I think while you're learning UX design, it's perfectly okay to be given that and to work on your skills to get really good at interaction design, and learn all the different disciplines just that are encompassed within the discipline of user experience design. But at a certain point, I think depending, how many projects someone gets under their belt, know how many hours they have, if they hit their Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours, they're gonna get bored, they'll have designed every possible layout for a website, or many, many different iPhone apps, or, or whatever it is. And they realized, hey, I want to have a seat at the strategies table to lean on a cliche. But I think a lot of people do want to be involved in the research. And so I wrote the book for initially, I wrote it for people who are more advanced in user experience design. And then it turned out that my largest audience were people who were newbies or mid level, that they really wanted to understand how a product got specked out before it got to them, and that they saw the doing a form of validated user research and a form of competitive research to inform the product strategy was really exciting, because then you're making something that you said that you actually talk to customers and know that they wanted or that you actually saw a gap in the marketplace, as opposed to just being told, hey, just make this. I think that people in most cases want to have control of their reality want to have control of their destiny. And if you're going to be on a three to six months phase of doing product design, to be involved and engaged in the strategy phase, I think is important for product designers at a certain point in their career.”
UX strategy is its own discipline
It’s said that a UX strategist needs to have 10,000 hours of experience building products under their belt, which does seem essential that someone really understands the UX and research and also the business strategy and all the things that we've been doing for over 25 years that it would be very difficult to know after four years of school, but now UX strategy is its own discipline, So can someone new to the world,start making experiences as a UX strategist?
Everyone should have a certain amount of experience. But I do think that you do need to have a good sense of what user experience design is to be a good UX strategist. That said, plenty of entrepreneurs and product owners get the book, and they realize that there's so much overlap between a UX strategist and a product owner, they're just coming to the product design phase from different objectives, one is more focused on making it a good experience for the user. And one is more focused on making sure that the products are going to ultimately make money for the business.
“I think being a really good user experience designer takes time. It just does, you know, and there's no way around it and people talking about just jumping into the bill without any hands on or at least a couple of years of hands on experience and think that they're just going to you know, create deliverables without knowing what it takes. I think that, you know, unless they're like a genius or super lucky that it's just not going to work out so well.”
How has UX Strategy evolved?
UX Strategy definitely takes a lot of understanding and as a user strategist is kind of like the undiscovered unicorn really, you have to know all this stuff.
Why do so many digital products and services fail? Often they fail because they fail to have product market fit another cliche now, but why does that have to happen?
“Now, hopefully, in most cases, enterprises, and agencies and startups know that you don't need to go the whole waterfall route of product design, and that you can reduce iterations, you can get feedback sooner. And so to me, the big turning point, and this happened, I had to rethink my entire proposal for the book with O'Reilly, because originally, it was based on the traditional discovery phase. And then I read lean startup in 2011, or 2012, perhaps, and I realized, Oh, God, this is product strategy. This is the way it should be done. This is so obvious, I can't believe I didn't think of it. And really started integrating the Lean Startup principles into my methodology, which ultimately became the book.”
Digital Transformation
Digital transformation is basically up leveling of UX strategy. It's a similar framework, but applied at a much higher level. It's not just making a product, it's touching the whole company.
“I call it user experience strategy on acid”
With digital transformation you're creating the customer experience. So the user experience design and UX strategy is folded into the customer experience, or they're very much interwoven, and then the internal processes of the company, when you're talking about digital transformation, you're talking about people processes and technologies. It's much more complicated than doing user experience strategy.
Resources:
Website https://jaimelevy.com/
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaimerlevy/
Medium https://medium.com/@JaimeRLevy
Twitter https://twitter.com/JaimeRLevy
UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products that People Want BY Jamie Levy
TRANSCRIPTION
Leigh Arredondo 0:00
A 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 Allen aridol No, and I'm a UX leader and leadership coach.
Hey there. Today, I am happy to share with you one of our listeners favorite episode from season two. Actually, it's one of my favorites as well. But I had a great conversation with Jamie Levy. She's author of the book titled UX strategy. So we talked about, of course, UX strategy, how you can create better outcomes for your users and for your business, and how you act strategy can help you level up in your career. Now, since this episode first came out at the end of 2019, Jamie's book has been translated into multiple languages. And I think I just saw even an audio version. And Jamie is also doing UX strategy workshops, both online and in person, with one coming up in October of 22. And you can find out more about her and her workshops and her book at Jamie levy.com. I also want to let you know about a workshop that I'm doing that's coming up soon, at the end of July. And it's free. I love doing this workshop on career journey mapping using the framework of creating a journey map on ourselves. And this is for anyone at any stage of your career journey. So whether you're just starting out or mid career, or later in your career, whether you're wondering about what's next for you, or you just want to better articulate your value, maybe for promotion, or you're doing job interviews, or if you're just interested in furthering your development in your career, this is a really great way to gain clarity about what's important to you your strengths. And what motivates you. This is a two hour workshop. It's very hands on and interactive. So the time just flies by, you can learn more and sign up on my site at Lee era dondo.com/workshops. And I really hope that I see you there. All right. Let's hear from Jamie.
Thank you, Jamie, so much for joining me on UX cake today.
Jamie Levy 2:28
Thank you for having me. So nice to meet you late.
Leigh Arredondo 2:31
You as well. One of the problems with talking with someone who is so well known is you have hundreds of interviews already available with just a click online. So it's tricky to come up with a conversation that you haven't had 100 times before.
Jamie Levy 2:45
I know I'm I'm scared now because I have to like come up with smart answers for your audience.
Leigh Arredondo 2:53
I'm pretty sure none of these are super difficult for you. So I think you'll be alright. But I did want to start actually with a distinction that you've made, because I think it's often misunderstood that the UX strategy isn't the same as a designer or researcher being strategic in their work. And I think that's a really good, important distinction, especially for the listeners of this podcast. So tell us a little bit more about that.
Jamie Levy 3:21
Well, I mean, truth be told people interpret terminology different. And it's kind of a waste of time to get into a semantical debate about, you know, like the differences between interaction design and user experience design, I get asked that a lot. However, when they're used by people to determine a certain job role, then it does really matter that people know what that job role entails and so forth. And so when I first wrote the book, UX strategy, it was more new then. And at that time, there was it was only being used by a few people. And so I basically decided, well, this is the best definition UX strategy. It's the intersection between UX design and business strategy, and then said, Okay, well how it's different from, let's say, product strategy is that it always involves a user interface, or at least some digital interface, whereas product strategy, you could do that for a piece of furniture. They're very similar, but user experience strategy I thought was different. And then I also saw it being used and still do very much as our UX strategy is blah, blah, blah. And they're not talking about a value proposition. They're not talking about a specific product or service or platform and what the business model is and the revenue streams and what cuts more segments they're targeting and all of these really important things to me that the user experience designer should be aware of and design for. They're talking about a process like this is Chris Dziedzic way to tackle the user experience design, let's say a large organization,
Leigh Arredondo 5:20
right. And that North Star of what the vision is going to be right,
Jamie Levy 5:25
that term hopefully has gone away, I kind of put the hatchet in that one, because the North Stars out there. It's ridiculous at this point to say, when you're doing strategy, that this is our North Star, and you're there at the very beginning of seeing of initial value proposition, but you really haven't done any customer interviews, you really haven't done a competitive research. So how do you know because what if you say our North Star is to do Tinder for dogs, and then all of a sudden you're making like what you think is the best version of a Tinder for dogs dating app, and then you realize there are already 10 swiping dating apps for dogs. So therefore, our North Star needs to be something that we look toward, but that we're open to pivoting in different directions. And being agile and having an open mindset to experiments and potentially be wrong about what we say is the you know, straight line toward that Northstar.
Leigh Arredondo 6:27
What I've gotten from a lot of what you have to say is that UX strategy is something that is incorporated throughout the process. It's not something that someone has at one point in time, it's actually something that is going to always be going on. Right? It's
Jamie Levy 6:47
very similar, I think, to the build measure, learn feedback loop from Eric Ries is lean startup book. Because to me that, like that feedback loop looks like a product strategy feedback loop, you build a little something that that manifests the value proposition of your product, your digital product, let's say and then you put it out there. And it's enough, that certain customer segment can get the idea of it without having to imagine too hard. And then you get feedback on it in the form of data and you learn, and then you iterate. So I think it's, for me very similar to that. And I guess if people are going to talk about UX strategy as a process did i do i have a Google search saved? So anytime anybody in the whole world says UX strategy, I see it, and I've been watching it for eight years. And so well, that's why you're suffering. And I look at it, and I'm always most of the time, I'm just like, oh, boy, this is so ridiculous, but whatever. But basically, I see a lot, a lot of the time it comes back where someone from the VP of UX is saying our UX strategy in our department is to do this, that and the other. And so I guess that sentence makes sense. But it's more of a small s and the term UX strategy, when I'm using it UX strategy, it's the big S because we're really talking about what's the strategy for the user experience. And it's something going back to what you said earlier, is, you start out with validating the initial value prop and and get to the point of, or not even validating, ideally, defining it and doing all the research and then rapid prototyping something to get feedback on. And there is design in that prototype. But the design phase really shouldn't happen. And we're talking about a serious UX design phase until after there's been validation on the prototype. And then even once the product is released, as you pointed out, the strategy phase should continue.
Leigh Arredondo 8:57
That's a great transition point. Now, I think, to our topic of moving beyond being a designer, which came from a statement that you made in a presentation recently about digital transformation, I'm not 100% sure that digital transformation, per se, is is the most important piece here. It's the moving beyond being a designer piece, which was put as a question, are you ready to move beyond being a product designer? And I think there are many designers and researchers out there who would jump up and say Yes, I'm ready to move beyond but I would like to clarify what do you mean by moving beyond?
Jamie Levy 9:36
Well, this first step is basically having control of your existence, particularly in the workflow at where you're working, where you have a say in the product, and you're not just handed a requirements deck or some brief for an outline And then have the feature list on it. And told to basically knock out the same map and the wires or whatever deliverables you need to do and just do it on time and on budget. I think while you're learning UX design, it's perfectly okay to be given that and to work on your skills to get really good at interaction design, and learn all the different disciplines just that are encompassed within the discipline of user experience design. But at a certain point, I think depending on, you know, how many projects someone gets under their belt, or how many hours they have, if they hit their Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours, they're gonna get bored, they'll have designed every possible layout for a website, or many, many different iPhone apps, or, or whatever it is, and they realize, hey, I want to have a seat at the strategies table to lean on a cliche. But I think a lot of people do want to be involved in the research. And so I wrote the book for initially, I wrote it for people who are more advanced in user experience design. And then it turned out that my largest audience were people who were newbies or mid level, that they really wanted to understand how a product got specked out before it got to them, and that they saw the doing a form of validated user research and a form of competitive research to inform the product strategy was really exciting, because then you're making something that you said that you actually talk to customers and know that they wanted or that you actually saw a gap in the marketplace, as opposed to just being told, hey, just make this. I think that people in most cases want to have control of their reality want to have control of their destiny. And if you're going to be on a three to six month phase of doing product design, to be involved and engaged in the strategy phase, I think is important for product designers at a certain point in their career.
Leigh Arredondo 12:07
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that you said that about the 10,000 hours, because that was actually my next question, where I have heard you say that UX strategist needs to have 10,000 hours of experience building products under their belt. And I've always agreed with that sentiment, it does seem essential that someone really understands the UX and research and also the business strategy and all the things that we've been doing for over 25 years that it would be very difficult to know after four years of school, but now UX strategy is its own discipline. And we should be happy about that we have it's taught in schools. Yes. You In fact, teach it. So can someone new to the world, and I know that people do new to the world of making experiences come in as a UX strategist? Or do you see this really as an add on career?
Jamie Levy 13:05
I think it'd be like, can somebody come in and be the lead UX designer without having had been a mid level UX designer? Like, how are they going to direct people to do stuff when they don't know how long it should really take to do it and what goes into it. So even though I don't want to be accused as being ageist or biased, because I have years of experience, so I'm going blah, blah, blah, everyone should have a certain amount of experience. But I do think you know, that you do need to have a good sense of what user experience design is to be a good UX strategist that said, plenty of entrepreneurs and product owners get the book. And they realize that there's so much overlap between a UX strategist and a product owner, they're just coming to the product design phase from different objects, one is more focused on making it a good experience for the user. And one is more focused on making sure that the products gonna ultimately make money for the business. And so it's interesting. But in short, I think design just being a really good user experience designer takes time there, it just, it just does, you know, and there's no way around it. And people talking about just jumping into the bill without any hands on, or at least a couple of years of hands on experience and think that they're just going to, you know, create deliverables without knowing what it takes. I think that you know, unless they're like a genius or super lucky that it's just not going to work out so well.
Leigh Arredondo 14:52
Well, I think you put it really well actually, that made sense to me as well, which is using the term UX strategist as more of a leader, that's more of a leadership role, although, as it's developing, and organizations and businesses are now incorporating a UX strategy throughout the process, there probably is a place for a UX strategist in a junior level, perhaps in that set kind of a setup.
Jamie Levy 15:27
Probably so yeah. Because I think, you know, contradicting what I just said, everybody. You know, even people that don't do user experience design can have a pretty strong opinion, if a product has good user experience design or not, right? Like my dad can say, you know, this product sucks. And this product is great, because it's easy to use, and he would know, right?
Leigh Arredondo 15:48
Well, and a lot of user researchers are excellent at understanding usability and don't design exactly good
Jamie Levy 15:55
point. So I don't think necessarily being you know, a sketch Rockstar is going to guarantee that you're going to be a good strategist, any more than having an MBA is going to guarantee that I think, though, what it takes is having some perspective, and looking back and on what has worked and what hasn't worked. So going back to this idea of, you know, our age, we have gone through the.com period, and saw, you know, what happened in that time and how the web was then. And then we went through, you know, the second wave when it came back, and then all of a sudden, mobile and broadband was introduced, and that disrupted everything. And now we're at, you know, in in a new place, and innovation changes so much, and why user experience design continues to be exciting is that, because of all these technological innovations, we constantly have to be on our toes, if we really want to be doing good design. And for the strategy to inform the good design, we need to be aware of like what's happening with machine learning and artificial intelligence and virtual reality and augmented reality and all these different things. And so someone coming in new to the field, how are they going to learn all of that stuff on top of how to use the tools on top of the discipline of user research or user experience design, it's better to kind of get focused, get really good at one craft, and then broaden your skill set as you go. So I feel like if someone wants to be a junior level UX strategist, probably it would be good if they have had an MBA, so at least they're coming in knowing all the business strategy. They're coming in, with the business strategy side locked down. And so then they're just doing the intersection of it with user experience design, and then the user experience designer. They're coming in really understanding the user experience design process, and what makes good user experience design. And then they're just really trying to learn to be more strategic and what business strategy Intel's.
Leigh Arredondo 18:02
Yeah, it's funny, something that you said, made me think about a question. I was ruminating in my head earlier today, which is, how has UX strategy been changing since it sort of became a thing. However, many years ago, that was eight, maybe something like that. And you've always described it very well, which is the intersection of business strategy, and user experience, design. And now we've got this extra layer. And always you need to understand the technology that's going to be driving creating the products. But now we have not just one extra layer, but many, which is the new technologies and emerging technologies. And like you said, machine learning, which is another sort of deeper piece. So it definitely takes a lot of understanding to actually, this user strategist is kind of the unicorn really, they have to know all this stuff. Yeah, I
Jamie Levy 19:04
think they're the undiscovered unicorn. Or I hope that perhaps because I think I mean, why do so many digital products and services fail? Often they fail because they fail to have product market fit another cliche now. But why does that have to happen? We aren't in the movie industry where we're making a film and everybody has to spend money on pre production and then it goes shoot it. And they can't really test market the film until they really have some of its shot or most of its shot and edited. This is not a film where right we actually have the opportunity, especially now to even knockout Mbps using prototyping with sketch so easily and get validation or even test two or three different versions. So to me, getting back to what you said How is your strategy evolved? I can easily answer that. Because when I first got to do it, first of all, they called it the discovery phase. And the way that we did, it didn't involve any sort of value proposition testing, maybe we would do some user research, sometimes we would rely on the client to provide us analytics or their marketing data. But often we were doing a really non empirical or non systematic form of competitive research. And we are basically saying, Okay, here's what it is. Here's our North Star client. You know, our, here's our Northstar stakeholders. And now, hopefully, in most cases, enterprises, and agencies and startups know that you don't need to go, you know, the whole waterfall route of product design, and that you can do iterations, you can get feedback sooner. And so to me, the big turning point, and this happened, I had to rethink my entire proposal for the book with O'Reilly, because originally, it was based on the discovery phase and the traditional discovery phase. And then I read lean startup in 2011, or 2012, perhaps, and I realized, Oh, God, this is product strategy. This is the way it should be done. This is so obvious, I can't believe I didn't think of it. And really started integrating the Lean Startup principles into my methodology, which ultimately became the bar.
Leigh Arredondo 21:31
You know, it's interesting that you mentioned that because when I read your book, one of the first things I thought to myself was, Well, excellent book. But at the time, what I thought was, well, this is what I'm doing. So how could this be you strategy? What I didn't understand was that the very important piece that value proposition and the aligning to business strategy is something that not a lot of UX teams or UX, senior designers are have an opportunity to do and that those are the key pieces right there took me a little while to figure out that i Yes, you're right. I am a UX strategist. I just didn't, I thought that I needed like some special silver medal or something to, like, put on to say UX strategy gives
Jamie Levy 22:24
you a gold star.
Leigh Arredondo 22:26
Oh, that'd be awesome.
Jamie Levy 22:29
Are you I have my UX strategist badge. When you take my master class, I'll just give you 109. Yeah. All right. Yeah, podcast.
Leigh Arredondo 22:42
Well, UX strategy, in your talk, you were talking about digital transformation. So to segue into that quickly, UX strategy is kind of an up leveling of UX design or UX research. But you were talking about digital transformation. And I loved how you describe digital transformation is basically Well, I call it an up leveling of UX strategy. But it's a similar framework, but applied at a much higher level. It's not just making a product, it's touching the whole company. Do I have that? Right? Actually,
Jamie Levy 23:18
you do, you're going in the right direction. So it's talking about, I call it user experience strategy on acid, right? Because it's like, it's taking it up way up a level because you're baking in basically the customer experience. So the user experience design and UX strategies folded into the customer experience, or they're very much interwoven, and then the internal processes of the company, when you're talking about digital transformation, you're talking about people processes and technologies. And so just because you come up with a really great, let's say, you're a big company, like a sales force, and you basically have this massive platform, and you're constantly doing your strategy, digital strategy, all the different types of strategy for all your different types of customers. And the company that supports it needs to be optimized, right. And so how that is, is that the processes in terms of how people work need to be touched, and maybe the job roles need to be transformed. Now, when we're talking about a digital native company, like Salesforce, that's not the best example of a digital transformation as compared to let's say, Princess Cruises. That's one of my favorite case studies because now we're talking about a slow moving ship. And that went through a digital transformation where they distributed the most important part was they distributed their content that everybody needed, which is the Princess Patter, which was this like new He's letter, probably on,
Leigh Arredondo 25:03
that's a clever name,
Jamie Levy 25:05
probably on like yellow parchment paper, I made it sound. So
Leigh Arredondo 25:08
in brush school, really
Jamie Levy 25:10
Bradshaw and but you had to get it every day perhaps it was on a scroll and it told you you know what time Ping Pong was and when all the different buffets would be served. And then the way that the crew, they had to basically probably work very late into the night or a different group of them would be focused on the meals and the planning of all the events. And it was all very clunky. And basically, let's say, You made friends on the cruise to know that, hey, let's all meet at this particular event or this particular buffet was really hard to coordinate. And when they made, you know, the app that you get when you go on these cruises that basically was dynamic and was updated constantly, and you could share your itinerary with your friends. And then if something was too crowded, or something was empty, the people running it could let everybody know. And so imagine that the people who were working on the ship, their jobs had to change what they did every day. And so the digital transformation really affects the people in terms of are they going to be threatened when you go to them and say, Hey, we're going to have a digital transformation and your job is going to change. Most people who work nine to five are like, Fu, I'm not going to do it, I'm happy that way. My thing is, I don't want to learn computers, you know, whatever it is, they have to not be put into a threatened position. Instead, they have to learn like, well, we need to evolve to stay in business. So you have a job for another 10 years. And we're going to teach you the skills and make sure that you understand them and how they're going to make everything better for everybody that works here as well as our customers. And so it's really much more complicated than doing user experience strategy. And because now I've done UX strategy for 10 years, I'm looking for the next new thing. And so when I got that digital transformation project a couple of years back, then I had to embark on retraining myself and and that's when I really realized this is an opportunity for me to really change how a company operates. And I got very, very excited about it.
Leigh Arredondo 27:23
That is really exciting that it also sounds incredibly complex, especially with the whole company, culture and people aspect of it. So this is for someone who's maybe 20 years into their career.
Jamie Levy 27:38
Yeah, or at least they gotta have at least I think 10. But I don't know, I met I don't think he was millennial. I don't know, I met someone who looked very young, who told me he was a digital transformation consultant in LA, you know, like, I was like, Oh, wow, there's two of us. That's amazing. I'm having a party. Like, that's amazing, you know, New York or San Francisco, there could be dozens. So I think it's another new thing that's definitely on the horizon that is particularly interesting to do for brick and mortar companies, because they're the ones that need the most change. And so those are the ones that I'm most excited about, hopefully working for.
Leigh Arredondo 28:20
That does sound exciting. It also sounds like it's at a higher level. And does it still feel like you're doing hands on work? No.
Jamie Levy 28:31
Yeah, it's like my whole career, I've been doing everything to completely remove myself from the production phase of design, it feels like you are totally upstream with the stakeholders when you're doing digital transformation. Because if you don't have their buy in, then you've gotten nothing, this is not going to be like a ground up, you know, take are with the company needs to be both top down and bottom up. But most, if the sea level aren't bought into it, then it's not going to work at all. So I think for people like us who have kind of seen it all and been there and really want to put yourself into a frustrating position where in most cases, nothing is going to come of it. Digital Transformation is the thing to do.
Leigh Arredondo 29:23
Oh, excellent. I can't wait to find that opportunity. Yeah. Although I'm also excited to hear how that works out for you. I mean, I don't know if you're gonna write a book on digital transformation. No, because
Jamie Levy 29:39
there's already 20 of them. And in one of my canned one liners in my keynotes this year, was i i showed all the books and then I said, well, there were so many books, I decided to just read the ones with blue covers, you know, like it's like, pick something random, but there were several of them with blue Two covers that were amazing. And so I saw that there was no need for another book on digital transformation. But there was definitely a need for me to add a new chapter in my second edition, which I'm writing now of UX strategy. And so the new 12 Chapter will be on digital transformation. And I'll basically be explaining it just like how I explained UX strategy in the second chapter. But it'll start with first really explaining customer experience. And then strategic design, and then digital transformation, and then explaining at least a couple of frameworks. So people could put it into practice, they'd like,
Leigh Arredondo 30:41
oh, wow, that's exciting. And when is that coming out,
Jamie Levy 30:44
the book is coming out the entire book where you can buy it with, you know, the paper version is coming out in January of 2021. I wanted to give myself a lot of time for this book. So I'm writing basically a chapter a month. And so what I'm doing, I'm now on chapter three, and a Riley, if you're a safari member, then they're republishing three chapters every three months. So we're putting up chapters one through three on December 1 of this year. And then in 2020, we'll put up another three chapters. And yeah, they're kind of raw, unedited, but not quite as raw as my medium posts talking about the behind the scenes of them. But the idea is that I'm going to be putting it out because of this long, you know, I've said that the book is going to have a 40% update, which is insane for a second edition. So to do that, I need to do new writing. And I'd be business cases, I'm writing a good third of it while I'm living in Berlin. And one of the business cases is Volkswagen or innovation units based in Berlin. So I'm interviewing them a lot. And it's super, super fun this time around to write a book that you know, that people want versus one that you think God, am I just writing a book for myself here and the five other people?
Leigh Arredondo 32:03
I can only imagine this like having a second kid, you can relax the second time knowing that you're not going to kill it. Yeah, probably it's,
Jamie Levy 32:11
it's completely different. It's so much better. The first time was really bad. And my editor, when I was done, I said, I, I learned I will never write another book. Again, that was a horrible experience, you know, just sitting alone in the library for so long. And feeling like it was an egotistical endeavor. And then I was lucky that the book was successful or is successful, and that people have have adopted it. But he hit the point where you have 20,000 plus readers, and you're teaching the book, and now it's going to be a to colleges next semester to universities, and you find things wrong with it, you know, because, you know, I've learned stuff, I've now done hundreds and hundreds workshops worldwide and ask some hard questions by people in England and Germany, and oh, my God everywhere and realize, oh, I should have touched on this, or oh, this title, this chapter needs to be slightly changed. And, you know, the example of lying doesn't work anymore, because mine doesn't exist anymore. And so of course, I need to update it. And so my editor was right, I am doing a second book. And I'm trying to make it super fun by writing it in two countries and appealing to a larger audience, and also making it more focused on enterprise instead of on startups like the first one.
Leigh Arredondo 33:30
Well, that sounds really exciting for us when we can read it. And for you to be able to work on something and the second time around, I know that you are really busy with your writing and your speaking and your work. And yet you take time to share your knowledge with the rest of the UX community. And so I really want to thank you for that.
Jamie Levy 33:54
Thank you so much for having me. This was a lot of fun. I was scared but now I'm no longer scared.
Leigh Arredondo 34:02
How can people follow you? What's the best way to follow you?
Jamie Levy 34:06
Please follow me on Twitter at Jamie R Levy. Or connect with me on LinkedIn and or where I'm blogging about my book on medium and sharing updates when I updated on Twitter and LinkedIn and then also on No, just two months, it was my son posted to Instagram because he's in charge of my social media on that. But yeah, those two places are great.
Leigh Arredondo 34:32
Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us, Jamie.
Jamie Levy 34:36
Why everybody.
Leigh Arredondo 34:40
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