Figure 10-8. Geoff Katz 1. How did you become a strategist and/or get into doing strategy as part of your work? So, I think the word “strategy” has very different meanings to different people, and you do a great job at boiling it down in the book. For me, helping people cut through the confusion, identify, and prioritize real opportunities is kind of what’s at the heart of the strategy work that I’ve done across a number of different consumer entertainment technology platforms. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to work on what you can call emerging platforms time and time again. There was a moment where the Web and animated GIFs were an emerging platform — that’s where we all started — and if you remember the first websites for McDonald’s or Levi’s from 1995, you’ll know what I mean. The opportunity to try to really figure out what people might like to do, because in a lot of these cases the media hadn’t existed previously, identify the essential components of what a UX could and should be, and then create a blueprint for how a product experience comes to market is what I’ve been focused on over the last 20 years. My background and training studying the history of ideas was a perfect setup to have a strategy role in my professional life in the sense that you’re learning to constantly evaluate very specific primary sources of information and then using that to inform a bigger-picture story that needs to be original, interesting, and engaging for a particular audience. I started my professional career in advertising, and the task at hand with that was communicating clearly and succinctly in 30-second chunks. I was a television-commercial producer before the Internet, so when I moved from the big ad agency world to the unfathomable depths of the Internet at Organic in 1995, I was always working to pull things into focus for our clients and lead the design and engineering teams toward goals that were able to be understood quickly and clearly actionable. 2. What does UX strategy mean to you? Is it a bogus job title? Having worked across a range of direct-to-consumer products and B2B products, UX strategy is really an essential component of product definition. Today, there are entire disciplines that make up parts of what you or I would have normally done on any given day on and interactive media design and development project. For people getting started in UX and product design today, the opportunity to go through academic programs as an undergraduate, postgraduate, or through professional training and get deep experience with every part of the interactive