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Connect design to business with Strategy Maps

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In Today’s Issue 💬

→ Strategy Maps are the bridge you need

→ Hot news across the industry

→ All new courses and dates announced

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Strategy Maps are the bridges to connect organizational objectives and quality perspectives

What is desirable?

This is one of the first questions I ask when I work with a company, consult with design teams, or mentor design leaders.

I have yet to ask this question and get the same answer twice. Within an organization, this lack of consistency puts designers and design teams into difficult situations. Business partners expect to get the same answer to this question from every designer in a company. Why? Because designers are ambassadors of desirability for their organization.

Time and time again, I see designers on the same team or in the same organization give different interpretations of what makes a product or service desirable. This confuses business partners and makes them believe desirability is subjective—and therefore unworthy of trust in decision-making.

How do we fix this situation? In my experience, the tools we use to conduct our analysis and develop insights are too complex to share with business partners. Plus, they don’t really remove the subjectiveness of desirability. Journey Maps and Service Blueprints are incredibly powerful and useful. But they don’t directly show how improving an experience leads to objectives and goals for adoption.

So we have a communication gap. Product teams, stakeholders, and executive leadership struggle to connect the dots between desirability and adoption. Strategy Maps are the bridge we need.

What are Strategy Maps?

Strategy Maps are one of my favorite business visualizations. Simple in structure, a Strategy Map shows the relationships between organizational objectives through underlying quality perspectives.

Strategy Maps were originally popularized in the 1990s as part of a strategic management framework called The Balanced Scorecard. Now they’re a popular tool for describing and visualizing business strategies at companies large and small.

While traditional Strategy Maps connect objectives between separate perspectives of company health, Desirability Strategy Maps connect creates a clear viewpoint on how separate perspectives of desirability influence product success.

Desirability Strategy Maps

In order to keep things simple for my business partners, I use only four perspectives. And I’ve been able to align most desirability objectives within them without any problem.

These perspectives, in order of importance are:

• Credibility: To drive adoption, what are the things that need to be credible for the user?
• Impact: To meet a credibility objective, what are the things that must create impact?
• Usability: To meet an impact objective, what are the things that must be usable?
• Detectability: To meet a usability objective, what are the things that must be detectable?

If you want your organization to prioritize factors like ethics or accessibility, you need to first emphasize these perspectives. I place credibility above all others because, ultimately, factors like trust, accuracy, and good intentions matter more than usability. If a customer doesn’t believe your product or service is credible, they’ll quickly take their business elsewhere.

This setup gives design teams an initial outlook on what desirability is: a detectable, usable, impactful, and credible customer experience.

In the next article, we’ll review how to use Strategy Maps to create desirability OKRs. Read additional articles here.

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🔥 In Other News

• ​Jean Yang, discusses the HUGE gap between what influencers are writing about, versus the daily reality of most developers
• ​CreativeActionLab, has a series of webinars in November dedicated to learning + unlearning
• ​Veni Kunche (she/her), shared a thread of underrepresented friends in tech looking for their next gig.

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All attendees are sponsors

While the January cohorts of Strategic Business Thinking are filling up, we wanted to talk about scholarships. Part of the fee for every course goes towards diversity and inclusion scholarships. Rather than ask for donations or sponsorships from companies, we've built scholarships directly into the costs of each ticket.

Every sixth seat in our courses are reserved for scholarship recipients. When you join SWD, you're not only paying for your tuition, you're enabling others to attend who otherwise might not have been able to. If you’re interested in a scholarship, please get in touch.

Have a good week y'all.
Ryan