Having spent more than two decades in the services sector, I have gained vital experience as a collaborative product engineering partner, supporting clients at every stage of their product life cycles. This journey has enabled me to engage with a wide range of customer segments, from nascent product ventures to established mid-sized and large enterprises. Each segment presents distinct business objectives and challenges, demanding tailored strategies and solutions.

An important aspect of transforming a product vision into reality involves ensuring that all participants are aware of the “context” at every phase of the SDLC. Regular alignment is necessary to ensure teams refer back to the original business goals. UX designers play a crucial role in maintaining a human-centric focus at every stage. As designers increasingly join forces with business and product owners across strategic areas, it will surely strengthen coordination throughout the process.

Roles of UX Designers across different customer segments

Let’s explore some of the specific roles UX designers play in each customer segment to drive success.

Early-stage product companies often need guidance on market validation, achieving product-market fit, and developing go-to-market strategies. UX designers can help with:

• Ideation
• Branding
• Developing proof-of-concepts
• Creating new product/service concepts
• High-fidelity prototyping for investor pitches
• Crafting strategies for design systems

Mid-sized companies often seek design systems to ensure cohesion among multiple products and to modernize their offerings for scalability. UX designers can help with:

• Heuristic evaluation
• UX research
• Interaction design
• High-fidelity prototyping for user testing
• Crafting design systems

Large enterprises could benefit from the re-evaluation of their legacy products. Achieving standardization across these organizations typically requires comprehensive solutions that address their complex business needs and long-term strategic goals. UX designers can help with:

• Heuristic evaluation
• UX research and overhaul
• High-fidelity prototyping
• Crafting reusable design systems
• Standardization and Optimizations

The DVF framework

IDEO, a design and consulting firm, conceptualized the DVF framework: it represents the intersection between desirability, viability and feasibility. Each aspect raises the following questions:

• Desirability: What are the user’s needs and desires? Is there a demand for a service? Will it effectively address a problem?
• Viability: Is the concept economically viable? What are the associated costs? Is it sustainable in the long term?
• Feasibility: Are the various aspects of the concept technically achievable? Can it functionally scale in the foreseeable future? Will it strengthen the business?

As outlined above, UX designers can significantly influence every phase of the product life cycle. While adhering to standard design processes, principles, and collaborations is essential for creating user-centric products, achieving breakthroughs often necessitates that designers expand their horizons beyond their traditional roles.

By proactively seeking opportunities to contribute to data-driven strategic decision-making and business development, designers can effectively identify and leverage the synergy between product innovation, user needs, and business objectives. It is important to recognize that creativity and strategy are complementary forces, essential for identifying and solving problems in a meaningful and impactful manner.

Leveraging design expertise for strategic advisory

The role I wish to strongly advocate for is that of designers evolving into trusted strategic advisors. This transformation demands involvement throughout the various phases of product development.

Designers can create impactful products by harnessing their strengths in empathy, requirements gathering, visualization and information structuring. By collaborating effectively with product owners and business stakeholders, they can align on product priorities, business goals, shared vision, process optimization, and standardization.

This will ensure that all engineering participants understand the vision created by business and product stakeholders throughout the development cycle. Designers will design with all these aspects in mind, engineers will build it that way, and quality analysts will test and qualify accordingly. It will also prevent missing goals during the implementation phase.

In their role as advisors, designers must keep the 3 characteristics, desirability, viability, and feasibility, at the forefront of discussions with teams. This way participants can make necessary adjustments to traverse the journey from vision to reality. By cultivating strong relationships with decision-makers, demonstrating their expertise and staying up-to-date on industry trends, designers can establish themselves as trusted advisors who offer valuable insights and recommendations that can drive business success.

Organizations must recognize the pivotal role designers play in product development and avoid perceiving them as isolated problem-solvers focused on aesthetics. This recognition necessitates a cultural transformation within the organization, along with a shift in mindset for designers themselves. I truly believe that this shift is imperative in unlocking the full potential of design and drive innovation that truly resonates with users and aligns with business goals.

In the next part of this blog series, we will see how designers can grow into strategic advisory roles as they progress in their careers.