UX Strategy: Different Strokes for different Orgs.

UX Talks Live! Series: Summary of a talk given by Abhimanyu Kulkarni, Studio Director, Philips on Designing for large enterprises

The standout topic for me was his deep dive into the Competing Values Framework as a means for understanding large enterprises and what one can do to adapt and succeed as a UX leader within each of these unique organizations!

image credit: www.toolshero.com

The Competing Values Framework divides organizations into four quadrants. Having said that we need to keep in mind that business units within organizations can operate very differently based on their history and evolution

If there is one thing common about large enterprises is the tremendous complexity that exists in these organizations

Market Oriented, Data-Driven Culture

In market-oriented organizations, there is so much knowledge about customers within the organization. The challenge is to uncover it! Conduct Customer discovery workshops with stakeholders

• Define customer journey maps
• Create Opportunity maps — what is the opportunity in your markets? The size of it
• Where do you see big opportunities and what is the time frame
• Who are their big customers

Get the stakeholders to talk about the chain of pain. See how the pain of one user in the chain affects another user. How does it bubble up and transform as it goes up or down the chain? Experience design would need to address how this can be addressed

Adhocracy — Typically an external focused, nimble organization that wants to do new things rapidly

• Start with value proposition statements so that the desire to make progress rapidly is satisfied
• Slowly start by getting them to consider their stakeholders — who pays? Who uses? What do they need? How do they behave? What makes them click?
• Based on this understanding slowly introduce them to Journey mapping before moving on to Value proposition canvas
• End by prioritizing and validating/testing the high priority solutions

Clannish cultures focus on teams and relationship and can be very dynamic

• Make them feel like they own it. Involve them in Co-creation/ design methods
• Give them partners who can facilitate and help them drive the process
• Extremely lean UX function that is more an enabler with the heavy lifting done by the organization

Hierarchical organizations are process-driven, control focused organizations

• Map as-is flow by doing Primary & Secondary research
• Perform User needs scoring so that we have a measurable goal
• Create envisioned flows that are aligned with business strategy and from that fill the Product backlog/ requirements
• Usage of Style guides & pattern libraries are big in such organization as there is a critical need to deliver consistent experiences across a portfolio of products
• People in these organizations love metrics and gives them the ability to measure and control so define metrics for everything
• Drive some competition among business heads by devising and measuring business units on a design practice maturity scale