interaction experience, but I can never really think everything through at that granular level the way UX strategists and designers do it. So for me now, as a business owner and business strategist, the UX strategy is the core of everything we do, because in our case, the service is the product. It’s not like we are just a touch point for the customers along their experience with our business. Our product is the digital product. It is the service. It is the business. So we have to get it right, and it has to be delightful, and people will have to want to use it, and not just need to use it. 3. How did you learn about business strategy? I learned most of what I know about business strategy in the first seven years after school just by constantly putting myself in the environment where I actually didn’t know anything about anything and had to learn about it. I had some academic credentials to get into it, but it didn’t mean that I really knew how to do it in a creative agency environment. I had gone to business school and took a lot of challenging courses at a good university, so on paper I seemed qualified for a strategy position. But to be honest, when I first walked into a professional environment, I didn’t really even know how to do the competitive analysis properly at the level required in product thinking. My training was more in finance. When you are fresh out of business school, you want to do things in a very business schooly, academic kind of way. Basically, I had to learn from scratch. It was probably by the time I had done my twentieth business analysis/strategy presentation that I felt like I finally got it. It took some time before I truly understood how to put together a good story that was going to inform both the business goals and the design. But what I learned was not how to think analytically. That I already had. I learned how to tell a story. In a creative business, business strategy has to add up to a simple story about the product opportunity. 4. Do you think it’s helpful for UX designers who are aspiring strategists to get an MBA or have a business degree? No, absolutely not. I think what is required is that they spend time with their colleagues in generative meetings. They really need to learn how to talk to clients and sincerely listen to their business problems. Being a good listener is absolutely essential. So, a degree in psychology might be more helpful than an MBA. I do think it is helpful to take a couple of business classes to learn and