Figure 10-3. Peter Merholz 1. How did you become a strategist and/or get into doing strategy as part of your work? I taught myself multimedia design in the ‘90s. My first formal role in software design was as a web developer, and then I transitioned from a web developer to being an interaction designer, and then from an interaction designer to a UX designer. Along the way, I realized that I needed answers to strategic questions, and that I needed to augment my “UX toolkit” to allow for more strategic thinking. I truly became a “strategist” sometime around 2001 when I was at Adaptive Path. Adaptive Path was a very straightforward, very user-experience, design- oriented company. We were doing interaction design, information architecture, user research, and usability testing. However, to do the best design work that we could for our clients, we did more: we would ask them questions, so we understood the context in which the design work took place. We didn’t want to make a design for the sake of designing. We wanted to make the design deliver on some common interest, goal, or objective. And what we found was often our clients didn’t know the answers to our questions. They had never bothered to ask the questions themselves, and they didn’t understand how important those answers were to the shared design vision. So, we found ourselves moving upstream, doing what is essentially strategy work, to answer those questions. That’s how I became a strategist; to simply find the answers to the questions that I needed in order to do the best design work. 2. What does UX strategy mean to you? Is it a bogus job title? You know, it’s funny. I just wrote a blog post about how there’s no such thing as UX design. And my point in that post was the design part of what we call UX design is typically just interaction design or information architecture. And the rest of what we call UX design is really just strategy and product management. However, at Adaptive Path, we talked a lot about defining what experience strategy and/or UX strategy was, so I think there’s validity to this concept. There is such a thing as UX strategy because product strategy and business strategy have failed in the prior decades to account for the user needs and awareness. To make sure that the user and the user experience was appropriately beneficial, we had to develop this thing called UX strategy.