A UX Career is a Business Career
Don’t panic! Here’s a mini-curriculum to boost your business savviness.
There’s this venn diagram that I’m sure you’ve seen many times. It’s in just about every article written about UX design because it does a good job summing up the field at a glance. Here’s a version of it:
As you can see by peering into the nexus of the colourful circles, UX lives right at the intersection between technology, user needs and business goals.This seems about right, and it’s a good way to describe the role of a UX designer.
Many designers are attracted to the career due to their empathetic natures. We’re in it because we want to help people and solve problems. It’s natural, then, that understanding user needs is imperative to solving the right problems and designing the best experience. Luckily, there is a breadth of resources out there to help designers boost their research skills — which is crucial, as most UX job descriptions ask for it.
Designers also tend to get really jazzed about technology. As tech advances, so do our possibilities. Years ago, designing an experience tailored to a person’s physical location would have been unthinkable. Today, we’re on the cusp of designing entire virtual worlds. Blink and you’ll miss a new blog post, book or tutorial on designing for VR, augmented reality and automation.
Which takes us to business goals. Hm. Yes, designers recognize the importance of considering business implications, but, well, we aimed for a creative career, and last the last thing we want to do is stare at Gantt charts all day, right? OKR — More like “OK, Whatever”! With expertise in user needs and technology under our belt, we’re in pretty good shape to design solutions for substantial problems, right?
Sure, but you’ll risk selling yourself short. Designers function as an integral part of a business. Every project you work on, every little decision you make — it all has a dollar value attached. It’s in your best interest to have an understanding of not only your end-user’s needs, but also how your decisions influence the business at a higher level.
Market Signals
As Jon Kolko writes, outlining the difference between the designer and product management roles:
“Irrespective of your title, you will be highly successful and extraordinarily employable if you can simultaneously drive specific empathy and broad empathy: if you can gather signals from individuals and from a market, and synthesize those signals into a compelling — and achievable — vision of the future.”
Many designers are naturally attuned to the specific market — the end user — but have less awareness about the broader market — those people out there who will actually pay for your product.
For many designers, business knowledge feels out of their domain, the expertise of those with those with MBAs or entrepreneurs who have cut their teeth as startup founders. It often seems that the most realistic option is to just focus on making the product work and behave beautifully.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Below is a curated list of media that can help you on the path to becoming a more business-savvy designer. This is only the beginning of a much longer journey, one which I’ve only just begun myself. But at least when your colleagues talk about things like “red ocean” or “lifetime customer value”, you won’t be nodding asleep… you’ll be nodding along.
Start Here…
The Personal MBA — Josh Kaufman
Like me, if you’ve never taken a business course in your life, this is a great place to start. Covering topics from value creation and value delivery, through to marketing and human psychology, Kaufman’s business bible will arm you with the fundamental business mental models.
While the book is structured into small, digestible chapters, I actually recommend reading it straight through, as the concepts build on one another. Once you’re done, keep it on your desk as a quick reference, and to make you look smart.
Then Here…
Competing Against Luck — Clayton Christensen
Have you ever heard a product manager say the words “Disruptive Innovation” before scrawling a hockey stick graph on a whiteboard? You can thank Harvard Business Professor Clayton Christensen for that. Within his books the The Innovator’s Solution and Innovator’s Dilemma he illustrates the process by which a business captures the low-end of a market and moves upstream, replacing incumbent competitors. For example, Airbnb competing against cheap hotels at first and then, after a few years, luxury accommodations.
While it’s great to understand how disruption works, and something worth digging into if you have the time, it’s the concept of Jobs to be Done that you should start with, which he covers in detail in his most recent book Competing Against Luck.
In a nutshell, a Job to be Done (JTBD) is the task your customer is motivated to accomplish, and the forces that determine the solution they hire or fire to accomplish it. Christensen’s best example, and one that he uses repeatedly, is the JTBD of customers buying milkshakes at a famous fast-food chain. Through research, he found that the customers were hiring milkshakes not for a sweet sugar spike, but for something easy to eat and hold with one hand during long commutes. Which meant that competing products weren’t other milkshakes, but anything that can fulfill the same need. Like a banana.
Through this framework you’ll start to view your user’s decisions (and your own) in a different light, and think more strategically about who is hiring and firing your product, and why.
UX Strategy — Jaime Levy
Here’s a resource written specifically for designers looking to make the leap into strategy, written by a prominent UX Strategist. It provides a high level introduction to the various frameworks detailed in The Lean Startup, Running Lean and Blue Ocean Strategy, while guiding you through Jamie’s four tenets of good UX Strategy: Business Strategy, Value Innovation, Killer UX and Validated User Research.
While her step-by-step process of researching and validating product ideas is sound and practical, it was the in-depth interviews of “Strategists in the Wild”, that I found the most interesting. The biggest takeaway? You definitely don’t need an MBA to influence strategy.
The Lean Startup – Eric Ries
Ah, the startup bible. If you work at a tech company, chances are that there’s a copy of this book sitting on the bookshelf just over to your left. Go ahead, take a look – it’s there.
Building on the concepts in UX Strategy, Eric Ries lays out the framework from which to build products that people need, and will pay for. It’s a punchy, readable overview to a typical startup product development process. You’ll learn how to formulate a hypothesis and experiment on your way to an MVP. And then, crucially, how to follow through by measuring success and determining whether to pivot, or persevere.
Full Steam Ahead…
Running Lean — Ash Maurya
Ash Maurya uses Lean Startup as the foundation to explore the creation of more effective, and lean, business models using a document called the ‘lean canvas’. Rather than pouring your soul into a detailed business plan, Ash recommends quickly dashing out all your assumptions – from your early adopters to your value proposition to your prospective revenue streams – into the nine sections of the canvas, with an emphasis on experimentation and flexibility, and then interviewing prospective customers to validate or invalidate your assumptions. When a business model is created in ten minutes, it’s far less precious – and more amenable to change when needed. And it’s not just a business plan, Maurya explains, it’s actually your product – at a glance.
While the focus is on the usefulness of the Lean Canvas for a brand new startup, we actually use it at FreshBooks as a way to kick off projects, especially for net-new features. It’s a document that is frequently returned to, revised and shared across the organization.
Product Management (Udemy Course)
Ever wonder what your product manager colleagues are doing while away from their desks, which is about 90% of the time? Spoiler alert: they’re not just drawing hockey stick graphs on a white-board (but sure, sometimes they are). The role of a product manager is multi-disciplinary, the domain of the true generalist, often requiring a tacit understanding of everything from technical stacks to marketing to design.
But it’s a deep understanding of business that is a fundamental skill, as product managers hold substantial influence over what gets built, and what succeeds. Which is why some companies prefer to hire Product Managers with MBAs.
Created by a serial entrepreneur and a product manager at Square, this Udemy course lays the groundwork for aspiring PMs who want to work in the field, but are unsure what the role requires. As a designer, this is a fantastic overview of the business, technical and communication requirements that make up the role of PM at a tech company, and the perfect way to demystify the process of uncovering and shepherding great product ideas across the finish line as part of a larger team.
Udemy – Become a Product Manager
Blue Ocean Strategy — W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne
Here’s a question for you: would you enjoy working on a product that’s stuck in a ‘red ocean’, battling it with competitors in a bloodbath for market share? Or, would you rather be sailing off into the ‘blue ocean’ of an uncontested market space? Yeah, me too.
Kim and Mauborgne have written a business book that’s surprisingly readable and jargon-free, as you’re introduced to the concept of the ‘blue ocean’, and given the frameworks to achieve it. In a nutshell: a ‘blue ocean’ is created when ‘value innovation’ is achieved, which happens when costs are decreased and customer value is increased. A way to increase customer value is to create value that is different than what your competitors are offering. This means looking outside the immediate market to understand what consumers are ‘hiring’ to accomplish their goals, which aligns nicely with the Jobs To Be Done theory mentioned above.
Here’s an example: In the 90s, high-end wine companies were all competing against eachother on the values of flavour complexity, prestige and aging quality. Because of this there was little distinction between products and the market had become a ‘red ocean’ with no clear leader.
Then [yellow tail] came along. Instead of competing against what everyone else was, they looked to those who preferred beer and spirits to see what they valued: casual fun and adventure at a relatively low cost. By emphasizing these values, rather than traditional values like prestige, [yellow tail] un-tapped a huge market of new customers and became an instant leader in an entirely new category of wine made for young, casual drinkers.
Blue Ocean strategy will help you understand why some products break out as leaders in a market while others seem to be gasping for air. Pairs nicely with the Jobs to Be Done theory from Competing Against Luck.
Extra Curricular
Stratechery — Ben Thompson
Ben Thompson, a former Googler, is probably one of the most prolific bloggers out there and a favourite among the product managers I know. Not only does he post about five times a week, but he’s incredibly smart and his articles are extremely well written and deep. His blog features one free post a week, but for $10 a month you’ll get his weekly journal that includes a wider range of analysis.
Do you drive to work and prefer something to listen to? Check out his podcast Exponent which is just as informative, but presented as a casual, opinionated conversation.
And there you have it! A mini-curriculum to work through and expand your business acumen and mental models. In time you may find an opportunity to introduce a lean canvas to start a brand new project, launch a smoke-test to validate a market opportunity, or strategize new values on which to differentiate your product from others.
Even if you don’t get these opportunties, hopefully you’ll find business a little less mysterious and intimidating. And, instead of blindly being swept up in the current of executive-level decisions, you’ll have more clarity on where it’s all going and the reasons behind it.
(Or, as our VP of Product points out, you can learn alot about business from comics! It’s true. Simply turn to a copy of Understanding Comics if your eyes start to bleed.)
Looking for more? Keep your eyes peeled for the next part in this series: UX is a Communication Career.
Have you already started this journey? What books and resources do you recommend?
