So What the Hell Is UX Strategy? UX strategy is the process that should be started first, before the design or development of a digital product begins. It’s the vision of a solution that needs to be validated with real potential customers to prove that it’s desired in the marketplace. Although UX design encompasses numerous details such as visual design, content messaging, and how easy it is for a user to accomplish a task, UX strategy is the “Big Picture.” It is the high-level plan to achieve one or more business goals under conditions of uncertainty. The purpose of any strategy is to create a game plan that looks at your current position and then helps you get to where you actually want to be. Your strategy should play to your strengths and be mindful of your weaknesses. It should rely on empirical, lightweight tactics that quickly move you and your team (because let’s face it, you’re probably not doing this alone) toward your desired destination. A solid strategy is the difference between success and failure. In the digital-product world, chaos — time delays, increased costs, and bad user experiences — get exacerbated when there is no shared product vision among team members. Like any good general, you need to develop that strategy. That’s why we convinced the beleaguered startup of our software engineer to step back and reformulate their game plan. Here’s what our hands-on UX strategy achieved for them in about a month: We questioned all the current research and found a lot of it was based on business assumptions rather than factual user data. This is why the client allowed my team to put the redesign on pause. We conducted guerrilla user research using a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) prototype with the clients sitting at the table. By hearing firsthand from their presumed customer, the clients acknowledged that their customer segment actually wasn’t “everybody” who was getting ripped off by bad treatment centers. Instead, they had built a business model that needed a direct marketing channel targeted at an affluent customer segment. We experimented on new value propositions by testing customer acquisition with landing pages. This helped open the clients’ minds to other possible business models, such as a business-to-business (B2B) solution. Sure, many of the findings were super depressing for the clients. They had spent a lot of time and money building a product that didn’t work. Initially they blamed their site’s “user experience.” But by looking at the big picture, we