What is Strategy Design & Why Does It Matter?
Three strategy designers explain what they do, how it benefits teams, and why they love the work
Many of us can define UX design, but it can be a bit trickier when it comes to strategy design. And I say this as someone who has practiced it for over a decade. I’m not the only one. We’ve been quietly working on the thinking behind interfaces and experiences, creating tools as we needed them to solve specific challenges, and honing our practices as a “side job” to the stated design challenge.
So when I was given the opportunity to formalize the strategy design role at Salesforce and in our ecosystem, I did what I always do when something feels ambiguous: I started a conversation about it. Now it’s the topic that’s most likely to show up in all my conversations.
I invited Micah Eberman, a design director at IBM, and Steph Shapiro, an innovation executive at Salesforce, to join me for a chat about how we might define what we do and why it matters.
What is strategy design?
To start, we agreed that strategy design is the practice of helping organizations identify opportunities for human-centered innovation and align behind a vision of what to build.
This depth in both UX and business thinking is the special sauce. There are a lot of other ands that surface as we talk it through: long- and short-range; realistic roadmaps and future vision; desirability, feasibility, and viability; left brain and right brain; what to build and why. Steph talks about breaking down complex problems and framing opportunities.
This reminds me of Angela Conway, who wasn’t present during this chat but who has expertise in design strategy. Angela is a design strategist at PwC UK and often says she’s “solving the right problem and solving the problem right.” I love this idea and how it shows the incredible impact of this role. (Read more about Angela’s story: My Unexpected Journey to Becoming a Salesforce Designer)
Experts in this field have the ability to bridge an organization’s disparate capabilities across innovation, design, and build processes. This helps align efforts and outcomes — even across silos. If you’ve ever experienced a communications breakdown between a marketing team writing product requirements and a development team implementing solutions, then you know how important this role is.
It’s unique in many ways. While strategy design has a lot in common with corporate strategy and UX design — it differs from them as well.
What it’s not
A corporate strategist typically approaches problem solving from the company point of view, and may rely on analytical skills and tools to drive solutions. By contrast, a UX designer typically tends to excel in creative problem solving and may not have a deep understanding of business vocabulary or concepts.
Strategy designers see the entire spectrum. We know when and how to leverage people and organizational capabilities for the best outcomes.
Why it matters
When strategy design is done — and done well — the entire team and all stakeholders are aligned on goals, needs, key insights driving the work, and ultimately a unified vision and roadmap. Then, throughout the design and build process, the handoffs between teams are smoother and the build process is more efficient.
The benefits of strategy design include:
- Mitigated risk for innovation or change, due to collaborative methods
- Less miscommunication within team, and between team and stakeholders
- Less waste of resources since the expense of build resources aren’t wasted on prototypes or hypotheses
- Faster time to identify the right solutions than building and iterating your way there
- The ability to solve big challenges that require a long view and multi-year investment
- Ultimately, better products and services
A veteran systems thinker, Steph credits her success to having time and permission to step back and see things from a broader perspective. “It takes being in an organization that understands the value of making the space for strategic design.”
Indeed, we all do better work when our organizations value it. In the case of strategy design, it can feel like swimming upstream to try to shift the focus from quick iteration to making room for deep thinking work. But in order to solve big, intractable problems or make leaps in innovation, you need to be able to see beyond the next sprint and look at the system as a whole. You need to involve more people in the problem-solving process and work differently. This different approach drives outcomes you can’t otherwise get to.
Common natural strengths
Strategy designers share a rigorous curiosity. We are able to work within ambiguity, know how to gather meaningful insights, and distinguish a signal from the noise. We’re always asking “why?” We may have been labeled stubborn at some point in life but our persistence at problem solving pays off. Let’s just say if you’re in the dark, strategy designers are the people who can lead the way out.
Core to what makes strategy designers successful is our facility with people, and an openness to including others in our work. Like Micah and Steph, others in this role have an instinct for facilitation. There’s a learned instinct about when to diverge and converge within a project. How to fight for their own beliefs and how to amplify others’ personal strengths.
“We value interdisciplinary thinking and often have weird backgrounds because of it,” Steph says. “We carry it all with us and apply it in a new way.”
It’s this unusual mixture of knowledge that helps us create inventive solutions to problems. We connect dots in new ways or borrow ideas from one context, and change them to suit another. Our work represents the team’s lived experiences, in addition to solving a business need.
What strategy designers deliver
I often get the question: “Do strategy designers ship anything?” While we’re not the ones creating assets for production, we also aren’t just thinking. Strategy designers deliver value by directing the design of systems-level solutions in order to drive specific outcomes for businesses and users. This is why we often focus on the earlier phases where organizations are deciding what to build. At times, this work can feel invisible, which plays into why the role hasn’t been formalized on so many teams.
Among other things, our contributions include:
- challenge framing
- team building
- aligning groups on how to think about challenges or ideas
- crafting experience visions and the stories that communicate them
- creating roadmaps that help ensure that each iteration contains meaningful steps toward achieving the vision
Frameworks are among the most valuable artifacts that strategy designers deliver. They’re a way to make abstract concepts visible. Frameworks help people — creative teams, developers, and business stakeholders alike — understand how we want them to think about a challenge.
Here are some examples:
- Internal ecosystem map — This documents who the players, influencers, and decision makers are within an organization. We can use this to consider how each is feeling about work through the product lifecycle. This framework helps teams understand where to focus energy on sticking points for the organization and informs how they present creative work to stakeholders.
- External ecosystem map — There’s an outer lens here. Steph often does two of these — one to show how a business thinks it fits in the market today and another for how we reimagine it to fit in the future. This framework helps us think through market-level opportunities and align our organization on what opportunities to pursue.
- Venn diagram — We laugh about how almost every program ends up needing a venn diagram. These interlocking circles show the relationships between two or more things, and we think a lot about those kinds of relationships.
- Journey map — It’s helpful to visually show how customers move through a system. What is the user thinking? Feeling? Doing? Are there any hang-ups or friction points? Micah prefers this tool for finding opportunities to improve a customer experience.
Frameworks are also an effective way to bring people together.
If a diverse set of people can all agree on a way to look at a challenge or idea via a framework, you can use that alignment as a starting point for design and problem solving. When we unify different people (as opposed to dictating to them), teams come out having a different feeling about their company, and the importance of their role within it. They feel more agency to identify and solve problems. And that strengthens the company and the experience you’re designing.
Alignment as a strategic craft
Even the best product idea won’t get to market without buy-in from the team and key stakeholders. That’s where strategy designers come in. Micah agrees: “When people are part of a solution, they are more willing to fight for it. The more advocates you have, the more likely it is to actually get done.”
Alignment starts with the question: Who are the people who need to be on board for this work to be successful?
It might surprise you to learn that a common mistake in innovation and Salesforce implementation is failing to consider this carefully. Steph reflects that on many of her projects, stakeholders say, “Oh this is so great. Actually, we’ve never been in the same room to talk about this together before.” Or, “We’ve never met before but we really should be collaborating.”
It’s important to have different populations represented. Together, they can tease out the discrepancies between perspectives, and uncover a common understanding together in real time. When you get everyone in a room like that nodding, then you know you have a unified vision.
Customers can feel the coordinated effort and sense of brand continuity that comes from internal stakeholder alignment, and they can also feel the disjointedness of an organization that hasn’t taken the time to align. Customers already expect that all systems within a company and brand are connected. However, the truth is that most companies are madly trying to catch up with that expectation.
Traditionally, design hasn’t always concerned itself with alignment. We have a long history of human-centered design that focuses on the end user alone. Strategy designers also turn that toolkit inward. We focus it on stakeholders and teams as well as customers and users. We recognize that alignment is a design craft — we’re designing the collaboration experience as a means to achieve our business and customer goals. Strategy designers also know it’s a powerful way to make experience design work successful.
Sound like you?
Often, the people who play this role don’t have a formal Strategy Designer or Design Strategist title. Steph’s title focuses on innovation. Micah has had titles including production director, creative director and growth director. Whether the role is formal or not, somebody needs to play it if a team wants to experience its extensive benefits.
After all, the most important part of design is the thinking behind the experience. Strategy designers know this best.
Feeling ready to skill up? Explore the Learn Strategy Design trail on Trailhead and discover the Salesforce Strategy Designer certification today.
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