Design Team Strategy #1

The strategy house: how to define a design team’s mission

TL;DR: This article focuses on an introduction to the “Strategy House Model”—a visual representation of a team’s strategy, with the mission as its roof, the most important topics as its pillars, and the values as itsfoundation. It goes into detail on how our digital product design team at BestSecret developed their team mission by brainstorming “stories of value”; extracting actors, actions, and outcomes; and finally compiling the overall mission statement from those.

This is the first in a series of articles dealing with the development of a comprehensive strategy for a design team:

1. ☞ The strategy house: how to define a design team’s mission
2. Pillars, objectives, and OGSMs: how to define a design team’s most important topics
3. Team values: the foundation of any strategy
4. Designing together: the importance of shared principles for design teams
5. Crafting a vision that inspires

As lead of the digital product design team in BestSecret’s e-commerce department, I know how important it is for design teams to have a clear strategy in place. Just like a business, a team needs a plan to achieve its goals and objectives within the context of the larger organization. Businesses and design teams need strategies (Porter, 1996), as they provide a roadmap for achieving their goals and ensure that everyone is working towards a common objective. Having a strategy helps to align resources, prioritize actions and make informed decisions to reach the desired outcomes.

In developing a comprehensive strategy, one tool that has proven particularly helpful for our team is the Strategy House model. The Strategy House is a visual representation of a company’s or team’s strategy, with the mission as the roof, the pillars as the most important topics, and the values as the foundation (StratNavApp, n.d.). In a series of articles, we will explore the different parts of the Strategy House model in more detail and share the process our team went through to develop our mission, vision, topics, objectives, values, and design principles.

The Strategy House

The Strategy House model is composed of three layers: mission, topics, and values. The mission is the roof of the Strategy House and represents the overall purpose of the team…