Earn your “seat at the table” by providing top-grade user and customer insights.

It’s frustrating to know that your organization could deliver better user experiences. Everything you’ve tried has failed to make the executive stakeholders understand how UX benefits your organization’s success.

We start the week on the most important: Expanding your UX research strategy to win critical influence with your executives and your organization. They’ll now see you as a true UX leader.

• Turn your user research into an essential function that stakeholders won’t arbitrarily cut out of every project.

• Drive organizational success by establishing outcome-driven objectives.

• Build your stakeholders’ expertise and understanding of your users and customers by increasing their exposure.

• Expand the UX research maturity of your organization by upgrading your methods and approaches.

The roadmap is the pivotal place to show the value of Strategic UX Research.

All significant strategic decisions originate in your organization’s product roadmap. The roadmap determines the direction of your products and services, which determines your organization's direction. As a UX leader, the roadmap is your opportunity to have the most influence over user experiences.

Your Strategic UX Research will shape significant product decisions when you anticipate what those decisions will be. The roadmap is your essential fortune-telling device, predicting the future of every team’s work. As a result, your entire organization becomes more knowledgeable about what your users need when you read the roadmap and discern what it subtly is telling you.

• Move beyond starting each project from scratch and instead begin with an in-depth knowledge of what your users and customers need.

• Change your organization’s mindset from “we have to build a thing” to “we have to solve a customer’s problem.”

• Construct your long-term research agenda from the UX outcomes of each item currently on the roadmap.

• Add market-leading innovations to the roadmap that come directly from gaps you’ve uncovered in your users’ experiences.

Spark a holistic shared understanding of your users' experiences.

So much of today’s user research efforts are about squeezing what you learn into refining a close-to-done feature or capability. That changes with Strategic UX Research. Now, you’ll uncover the holistic experiences of your users and customers.

Continuous research shifts everyone away from the project-by-project piecemeal nature of conventional tactical approaches. Your new strategy will drive continuous learning, making everyone more knowledgeable as your team grows its comprehension of the problems and challenges your users and customers regularly face.

• Turn every decision-maker into the world’s expert on your users and their challenges.

• Identify the inventive solutions customers will love you for.

• Be brought into the project much earlier when your stakeholders will consider the most significant and critical decisions.

• Become a trusted senior advisor that tackles the organization’s top priorities.

You can’t do this alone. You’ll need more capability across your organization.

Strategic UX Research is more than a skill or a tool to master. It’s a mindset that drives curiosity and shared understanding about your users, customers, and their needs.

You’ll infuse your organization with that mindset (and the skills and tools to make it work) and drive dramatic change. That change will speed the delivery of better-designed products and services to your customers.

• Prioritize increasing your organization's exposure to customers and users.

• Eliminate the lack of confidence caused by stakeholders not genuinely understanding your users.

• Speed up critical business decisions by having solid user research at every decision-maker’s fingertips.

• Empower those in the organization who interact with users and customers to become better researchers.

Connect your research directly to the organization’s highest priorities.

You shouldn’t spend any more time explaining why research is essential. It’s time for action. Produce insightful results that demonstrate the rich value that Strategic UX Research brings.

You need a direct mapping between your excellent research and your executives’ critical priorities. Get the attention of key stakeholders and executives. Supply them with irrefutable, compelling reasons to sponsor your work and champion your outcomes.

• Move beyond the frustration of “nobody gets UX” when everyone sees its great value.

• Match UX outcomes directly to the language executives use, making their achievement an organizational top priority.

• Translate the key frustrations of users and customers into something executives understand: money.

• Uncover the (often massive) financial implications of delivering poor UX design.

To continue guiding you in success, we’ve created our Strategic UX Research Leadership Planning Workbook. This is a workbook designed to give you the step-by-step process you need to lead your team after the Intensive is over.

The Facilitation Planning Workbook guides you in conducting workshops with your team to establish your team’s strategic UX Research approach.

We’ve divided this workbook into four parts. Each part contains a set of questions that you can pose to your team. These questions work through a process for developing your team’s strategic UX Research approach.