Strategy basics

• Mission – why we exist
• Values – what we believe in and how we will behave
• Vision – what we want to be
• Strategy – what our competitive game plan will be
• Objective – the ends we will achieve
• Scope – the domain in which we operate
• Advantage – the means by which we will compete
• Balanced scorecard – how we will monitor and implement that plan
• Tactics – the specific actions we will take to achieve our objectives
• Metrics – the specific metrics we will use to monitor our progress

Technology Win/Loss Heuristic

• Worthwhile – does something worthwhile for those who are paying for it (not necessarily the end users)
• Affordable – monetarily, educationally, etc.
• Non-disruptive – must be minimally (i.e. not) disruptive to the current environment (i.e. it may disrupt the incumbent technology but it needs to fit my business or my life)

Values I wish for

• Deliver WOW through attention to solving real customer problems
• Experiment with new ideas
• Prototype everything
• Mine conflict to discover alignment
• Inform decisions with observation and real data
• Make your teammates better
• Learn big skills
• Be vocal, open, and clear
• Speak to your audience
• Care for the details
• Good ideas come from everywhere
• Work at making it easy
• Demonstrate excellence to each other
• By people, for people
• Put humanity into every product, communication, and deliverable

“To have an effective mission you have to work out an exacting match of your opportunities, competence and commitment. Every good mission statement reflects all three. Look first at the outside environment. The organization that starts from the inside and then tries to find places to put its resources is going to fritter itself away.” – Peter F. Drucker

“Do one thing well.” – Rory Sutherland (Fishbach goal dilution: https://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/ayelet.fishbach/research/dilution.pdf)

“There’s a natural bias against the creative and emotional that serves us poorly — the rational should also be subject to emotional/psychological evaluation, because logic is not sufficient.” – Rory Sutherland

“Successful businesses consider three things: economic solutions, emotional/psychological solutions, and technical solutions.” – Rory Sutherland

Don’t “pick a door” — design for the situation.

• Easy = fast + obvious
• Performance = credible + reliable
• Exciting = delightful + surprise

UX drives loyalty and revenue.

A successful UX is a string of good performances at moments of truth. A slip makes it hard to catch up.

Something must be delightful, pleasantly surprising.

Features as capabilities: experience strategy map

The intersection of “people want to X” and “company wants people to Y” is where you need capabilities/features.

A capability is a channel, a form, an interface, an indicator, etc.

For each capability, list:

• User tasks
• Company needs
• Force-rank them

For each task, list:

• Emotional dimensions and considerations
• High-level approach
• Success criteria (how do you know when it is good?)

In-idiom vs. out-of-idiom: Operating systems (Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, OS X, iOS, Android, etc.) come with their own conventions. Following these conventions enhances user familiarity (things work the way the user has been trained to expect). But we should feel free to improve on the conventions when doing so would markedly improve the central experience of the product, and we should judiciously alter what we safely can to create a unified and branded experience across platforms.

Technical/experience ideality

• Magical
• Natural
• Natural + technical
• Technical
• Needlessly technical
• Obtuse
• Externally-focused
• Needs-based
• Evidence-based
• Innovative
• Elegant
• Anthropomorphic
• Convenient
• Practical
• Functional
• Context awareness
• Natural interaction
• Continuity
• Multi-user

Consistency and persistence
“They came out of nowhere” is really “they started working on this a long time ago” — it takes a long time to produce an overnight success.

• Does it complement our strategic direction?
• Does it have a strong business case?
• Is it blessed by someone above? Can we get that?