Aurelius Podcast: Episode 3 with Fred Beecher on Design Strategy

Episode 3 highlights:

  • What is design strategy? What is product strategy?
  • Effective design strategy methods and approach
  • Where business strategy ends and design strategy begins and the difference between the two
  • Where design fits into business strategy
  • How design can help you monetize failure
  • Ways that design and product strategy can drive business strategy
  • Practical ways design can help fulfill your company mission

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Aurelius Podcast: Episode 6 with Peter Merholz on Product & Design Strategy

Episode 6 highlights:

  • Some history of Adaptive Path and how they got into design and product strategy
  • Pitfalls to avoid when making a product and design strategy
  • How to be more than a UX design “stylist” or “executionist”
  • The role of UX and design in business strategy
  • Differences between UX and product management
  • Design like a lawyer and get everyone on board with your decisions and recommendations

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Aurelius Podcast: Episode 2 with Jared Spool

Episode 2 highlights:

  • the importance of framing the problem in UX and product strategy
  • how to tell if you’re designing and building the right features or products
  • measuring the impact and success of UX design and product strategy
  • balancing an understanding of the business strategy to make better design and product recommendations
  • Jared’s most effective way of getting your company to prioritize UX and product strategy
  • who owns the user experience?

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I Found a Remarkable Way to Kill Politics in my Design and Product Strategy

Can I get a show of hands from how many people have ever had an awesome idea shot down due to politics or flimsy opinions?

Yep, I’ll bet you’ve been in client or stakeholder meetings finding yourself hit with a bunch of questions and critique about the decisions or recommendations you’ve made. Heck, you might even have a great story to tell and well thought out reasons for why you did what you did. Yet, there you sit, watching all that great work get flushed down the drain right before your very eyes by the highest paid, or the loudest (or both!) person in the room. Often, the discussion turns to things about the product or service that fly in the face of customer needs or even our own company objectives. Watching well crafted ideas get argued away in a single meeting is like squabbling over what to have for dinner while the house burns down around you.

Here’s the good news: killing politics and emotions in your design or product strategy doesn’t have to be an impossible task. By setting clear, well defined goals for your strategy, you can easily sell great ideas, decisions and recommendations without banging your head against the wall.

Download the free 4 point product strategy goal checklist, and we’ll walk through how to use it right here in this post. When we’re done, you’ll be on your way to building a brilliant design and product strategy that solves the right problems for your company and its customers.

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Aurelius Podcast: Episode 7 with Jeff Gothelf on Product & Design Strategy

Episode 7 highlights:

  • Jeff’s definition of product strategy
  • Bringing clarity to the process of building a product strategy
  • The difference between brand and product strategy, and how they work together
  • The single biggest factor that holds most companies back from having a great product strategy
  • Building a product roadmap and strategy that actually works
  • How to empower your teams to solve problems instead of only building features
  • Who owns the product strategy? Product managers or UX Designers?

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Are Product Roadmaps a Waste of Time?

Have you ever found yourself having worked very long and very hard on a product roadmap presentation for your senior management only to find that it didn’t have the impact you’d hoped?

How could this be? We had every resource, milestone, deadline and feature detailed to the letter. Yet, that meeting didn’t go the way we wanted, and we sure as hell don’t feel any more confident in the direction our product is going.

A product roadmap was supposed to fix our strategic problems and get all the stakeholders aligned. After the meeting, we go and make new updates to the roadmap and get ready for the next meeting. Several months go by and we realize, we’ve spent nearly all our time updating the roadmap or plan, but haven’t actually made any progress. Worse yet, someone eventually asks “did we talk with customers about this?” and that’s when it hits you… we may have a flawless plan to go and solve the wrong problems.

Product roadmaps give you “what” but not the “why”

I’d bet good money that if you have spent any significant time building product roadmaps, you eventually came to a point where you realized “this isn’t working”. You’re trying your best to get people on board with the design and product recommendations you’re making, but the roadmap just isn’t doing the trick. You make edit after edit and still, the senior management and design/development teams feel no more confident that we’re doing the right things. That’s because a product roadmap is a plan not a strategy.

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How to Build an Awesome Product & Design Strategy

How do you know you’re building the right products and features? Is there anything more frustrating than planning design and development efforts with no real understanding of our customers or how we’re helping our business?​

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Aurelius Podcast: Episode 4 with Josh Brewer on UX Design & Product Strategy

Episode 4 highlights:

  • How we know we’re building the right products and features
  • Using the “jobs to be done” framework in design and product management
  • How Twitter used UX design critiques to determine they were solving the right problems
  • Presenting design decisions to your team vs. presenting to stakeholders
  • “Having a seat at the table” and what that looks like as a UX designer
  • Helping your company value UX design at the highest executive level
  • Measuring the success of UX design and product management

read more… “Aurelius Podcast: Episode 4 with Josh Brewer on UX Design & Product Strategy”