business, and who you are as the people within that business so that you can see through to delivery. I can see another company doing the same strategy that would perfectly fit its brand. But I don’t know if it’s what we should be doing, because it doesn’t seem to fit who we are. So, again, this is where I feel UX doesn’t really often embrace enough brand strategy. I think that there’s a reasonable antipathy to brand and branding within UX because I feel often branding is handled poorly. It’s very superficial. But, if you dig, you can appropriate brand strategy, issues of personality, issues of values that the company holds, issues of those characteristics that companies hold dear, and those elements of brand. UX needs to be very informed by that because releasing a product is hard. And if the people within the organization aren’t interested by the product they’re building, aren’t passionate about the product that they’re building, they’re only building something because they think that there’s a market for it, they’re not really going to dig in and do all the hard work needed to get that product to market as best as they could. It’s got to be a product the people that work there want to feel like they would use. 10. What are important skills or mindsets for a strategist to have? Or what makes you good at your job? It is about a kind of mindset that you should possess where you can understand the parts and see how these parts fit within the whole. I became a strategist because I can’t help but think about design in a systems context, a design within a broader context. I have a systems mindset whenever I approach anything. And it was in order to satisfy my systems mindset that I realized I needed to embrace strategy, because I needed to understand how the context of the work that I was doing fit within this broader system. A strategist also needs to be able to be persuasive, so you need to have good storytelling, communication, and presentation skills. You need to be able to bring people along in a story of engagement. Strategy tends to be abstract, so you need to be able to make that concrete so that other people can have a visceral response to it. Strategies that remain abstract tend not to take root, so another skill for a strategist is the ability to tell the story. To shape a narrative; to connect with an audience.