Anthropologist Margaret Mead tells us that “What people say, and what people do, and what people say they do are entirely different things.”
If we want to understand what users need—or, more importantly, anticipate what they will need in the future—we must go beyond asking, and instead leverage the power of contextual study, user workflows and journeys, and participant observation to nourish product development.
In this workshop, I will outline and practice the ways in which user experience research and design thinking can nourish product strategy. While many organizations are moving into greater UX maturity—that is to say, engaging UX in more depth throughout the product lifecycle, it is still most often used to refine or validate established product concepts and prototypes.
Increasingly, product managers are partnering with UX strategists at the outset of product development, where understanding users, their workflows, their drives, anxieties, and imaginations is critical to conceptualizing and roadmapping new product.
I will draw from my own experience as a product strategist and core member of the product incubator at a major SaaS enterprise to offer participants the following three methods for establishing UX strategy in the innovation space: Practice; use directed storytelling to build “proto” journey maps for discovery, Process; establishing an innovation strategy that evidences where UX research is essential; and Partnering with engineers, sales, and leaders using informational interviews.
