product design and development process is important. That broad background is what differentiates a UX designer from a UX strategist. Strategists needs to have a higher-level perspective and a certain confidence about where the world is headed in order to be successful. I think it really takes will to help people, to pull emerging opportunities into focus and to define them in a way that is actionable by a team of engineers. I’ve heard time and time again over my career from engineers that they “just” want to be told what to build. That doesn’t mean that they’re not creative people. It’s that for them, without an extremely detailed level of specificity, software doesn’t just “happen.” Making the strategic effort to really tease out that detail and lead teams to where the world will be in 6 or 8 or 12 months and deliver a product that fits with a market at that time, is the fundamental work of a UX strategist. I don’t think the title is bogus. It is a new title that recognizes that there needs to be someone at every company focused like a laser on supporting the business objectives of the company from the point of view of design. By identifying product opportunities based on the evolution of technology and user behavior and driving innovation through product design you can effectively deliver a product that is fundamentally better than anything they’ve seen or used before and achieve product/market fit that will help your business scale. UX strategy spans across a number of previously siloed disciplines. In fact, there’s evidence that leads me to believe that it’s growing as a new discipline. There was a moment where UX design in general was seen as a BS title. Clients at some of the interactive design agencies I’ve worked for just wanted to see pixels on a page, and the way that design behaved, the way that design made an experience easier or harder for a user, and how that contributed to brand, really was an afterthought. As the world became a little more sophisticated about the UX of interacting with screens and put the user at the center of the product design process, UX as a distinct discipline emerged and has become a fundamental part of interactive product development. I think that the UX strategist is now emerging as an important role because it bridges what could be seen as really disparate and distinct silos, design, experience, and business, and that’s why I don’t think it’s BS. I think it’s incredibly important. 3. How did you learn about business strategy? On the streets. I don’t have a master’s or bachelor’s degree in design or business. When I was doing my formal liberal arts education, most of my classmates were aspiring to be lawyers, not MBAs. Art and design were something you did as personal expression, not as business, and the state-of-the-art technology was