Strategy: Business Strategy

This is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of Jim Kalbach’s new book The Jobs to Be Done Playbook: Align Your Markets, Organization, and Strategy Around Customer Needs. ©2020, Rosenfeld Media.

Chapter 4: Defining Value

In this chapter, you will learn about these plays:

• How to find unmet needs
• How to create goal-based personas
• A new way to compare competing solutions
• How to define a value proposition

The product marketing manager at a company I once worked for stood up in a meeting to present his strategy. He proceeded to describe the top customer needs that we should support with our solutions. I was thrilled to see him align to a customer-centric model. Read More

Design matters for all businesses. In fact, eight in ten people are willing to pay more for a better customer experience. But, in many organizations, designers don’t have a seat in the C-Suite or any say in making larger business decisions. Often, designers and their business stakeholders don’t even speak the same language.

Time and time again, I see designers underselling their work internally because they don’t know how to show its connection to business strategy. As a consequence, companies fail to fund design work that could be very effective in helping them to tackle competitive threats. Read More

This month in Ask UXmatters, our expert panel discusses how objectives and key results (OKRs) can inform UX design. The panel explores how the use of OKRs differs from traditional requirements gathering. Our panelists then discuss the relationship between OKRs and product strategy and common pitfalls of using OKRs.

We also recommend a couple of books that could help you apply OKRs in your work. Finally, I discuss the importance of keeping business needs in mind. Read More