a ton from that project and opportunity. That’s a lot of the challenges for a lot of UX strategy work, particularly agency- based, where the impact of the UX strategy work is often unclear. I’ve not seen a lot of real organizational evolution. Since I’ve left the consulting world, one of the things that have been intriguing to me is how little interest Silicon Valley has in the word “strategy.” It’s almost like it’s a bad word, because I think it’s believed to mean a lot of chin stroking and not a lot of shipping, and there’s some truth to that. The Lean Startup movement was responding to the same Silicon Valley mindset that is also kind of minimizing the value of strategy. The companies that practice strategy very seriously, such as Intuit, I don’t know what they have to show for it. So I’m kind of sympathetic to it. I think that there’s a role for strategy to play and explicit strategic efforts to play, in-house and within these tech companies, but there’s a struggle to find a right amount of strategy. You don’t want to feel as if it’s overwhelming, or it’s a waste of time and energy, or it’s too grand for us to realize, or that it’s just “Why did we bother?” Hitting that happy medium is an interesting challenge. 6. What are some challenges of conducting strategy in different work environments (for example, startups versus agencies versus enterprises)? Within an agency context, it depends on the agency. At Adaptive Path, if you came to us, you were going to be embracing strategy. We weren’t the type of design agency that if we were to begin talking strategic concerns to you, you wouldn’t be, “Wait, what? No just push some pixels, will ya?!” Some agencies have those challenges of moving upstream. But, I think for an agency, you have to set yourself up as a strategic provider, and if you attract clients, you’re doing strategy work. That’s relatively easy. Within that agency environment, and because of the way the projects tend to be structured, you can kind of create the safe space for strategy to be done. Now, the challenge for an agency, which I was referring to before, is that strategy can often feel irrelevant, by the time you go deliver it, or months later when you follow up on it, you’re like, “So what are you doing?” “Oh well, we had a reorg or this person left, or that person left, or what it is. We shifted this, that, and the other thing.” So the work you did just kind of doesn’t get used. So that’s the challenge for an agency. The challenges for doing it in-house, at an enterprise, are for strategy to remain relevant. One method is to connect the strategic work to the production work,