As I read through a new Jared M. Spool article on creating an Experience Vision for a Self-Fulfilling UX Strategy, I began thinking about what it means to be innovative as well as what a business needs to admit to itself in order to cultivate and lead innovation from the top-down. I came to realise that before anyone starts designing this experience vision and timeline, we should know what the business and brand realistically stands for today, where they collectively believe they want to go, and what they’re willing to endure. The following workshop-like questions came to mind:
How ambitious do we feel today? How ambitious do we truly want to be? If not for the larger organisation’s goals, then what of the individual business units?
Are we accepting of a long-term approach that'll surely bring budget and schedule struggles for years to come or do we actually only care about releasing something as soon as possible and then stepping back and moving onto other projects?
I say this because there's a stark difference in the goals, "We want to build a better X" vs "We want to one day go beyond our improvements on X and lead the nation as the first Y", and these aren't always clearly spoken to and agreed on. Stakeholders and teams need to know what they’re working towards.
Improving X would be relatively easy then in comparison, but do we want it to just end there?
Again, how far do we really want to go and are we willing to continually work towards it? Or, like many others, is our business model and budget only focused on improving X for tomorrow before breaking up the team and then in all reality sitting and waiting for another improvement push a few years down the road as X begins to stagnate? [Note, I’ve also recently finished reading The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson and the cross-themes between personal and business goals are starting to come to light for me).
I've been questioning experience visions a lot recently as my current client and I work on refining our programme backlog which contains everything from realistic, short-term needs to years-down-the-road stories from our original ideation workshops. My lingering, nagging question is around whether or not to scrap these futuristic goals which we’re definitely incapable of completing today, but that which we could use as our 10 year vision for where to take this service and defiantly lead the market.
I can’t make this decision alone and neither can you; it takes the business as a whole to set and agree on their expectations, the stories we’d all tell, and what we’d all do to get there step by step, be it for 1 year or 23.